Part 34

During the period from 1860 to 1880 black walnut was in much demand for furniture, and the largest yearly cut was 125,000,000 feet. It was during that period of twenty years that operators pushed into all of the out-of-the-way places in search of the timber. Logs were hauled on wagons long distances to bring them out of remote valleys and slopes where no timber buyer had ever gone before. The walnut buyers made such a thorough canvas of the country that it was generally supposed no merchantable tree from Kansas to Virginia would escape. Many a dooryard giant whose wide branches had shaded the family roof for generations, fell before the ax of the contractor who was willing to pay fifty dollars for a single trunk, though it might be twenty miles from the nearest railroad or navigable stream. In spite of the thoroughness of the search, many a walnut tree was spared. Logs have been going to market ever since, and still they go. They will continue to go for years, generations, and centuries; for walnut trees grow with rapidity.

The trunk’s value increases with age. The dark colored heartwood only is merchantable, and young trees have little heartwood. The thick, white sap constitutes most of the trunk until long after the tree has reached small sawlog size. Then the transformation to the dark, valuable heartwood goes on with fair rapidity, and the outer shell of sapwood becomes thinner as the heart increases, and in time a trunk is produced which is fit for good logs. Value comes only with age. The quarter or half a century which has passed since the country was so diligently ransacked for merchantable walnut, has been sufficient to develop many a tree which was then rejected by the purchasers. Many a tree now a foot in diameter had scarcely sprouted then. In a region of 700,000 square miles, walnut trees do not need to grow very close together to produce a yearly cut of 30,000,000 or 40,000,000 feet.

Black walnut is valuable for its color, figure, and the fine polish it takes. It is stronger than white oak, weight for weight, but it is eight pounds lighter per cubic foot. The figure of the wood is due wholly to the annual rings, as its medullary rays are invisible to the naked eye. The wood is very porous, and the pores are diffused in all parts of the annual rings, except in the thin, pencil-like mark representing the outward boundary of the summerwood. When sapwood changes to heartwood, some of the pores disappear, but those which remain are abundantly sufficient to absorb any stains or fillers which the wood finisher may wish to apply.

The annual sawmill cut of black walnut in the United States is from 35,000,000 to 40,000,000 feet, but much goes to foreign countries in the log, and a considerable quantity goes to veneer mills--about 2,500,000 feet a year--and a quantity finds its way to various factories where it is worked up without any statistical record being made of it.

Black walnut is never used as rough lumber. It all goes to factories of some kind to be converted into finished commodities. It is not possible to say where it all goes, for statistics of manufacture are fragmentary in this country. It may be of interest to know that demand for walnut by factories in the following states was 11,641,137 feet in 1910: Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, North Carolina, and Texas. The wood served so many purposes that a list of them would be monotonous. In Illinois the largest users are the sewing machine and the musical instrument industries; in Michigan the makers of automobiles and of musical instruments; in Kentucky the manufacturers of coffins, furniture, and musical instruments; in Massachusetts, the makers of furniture and of firearms. These uses probably afford a fairly accurate index for the whole country. During the Civil war the largest demand for walnut came from gunstock makers. Doubtless the largest use from 1865 to 1885 was for furniture.

Much of the best black walnut is exported. The logs are flattened on the four sides to make them fit better in ships and cars, and also to be rid of most of the sapwood which is valueless. The ends are painted with red lead or some other substance to lessen liability to check. Sometimes export walnut is sawed in thick planks.

Large quantities of old-time walnut furniture have been resurrected in recent years from granary and garret where it was stored long ago to have it out of the way. Some of the old beds, lounges, cupboards, and chairs were of heavy, solid walnut, the kind not made now. Some of it has been furbished, re-upholstered, and set among the heirlooms; other pieces have been sold to furniture makers who saw the solid wood in veneers, and use it again.

The search for old walnut did not stop with dragging antique furniture from cubbyholes and attics, but two-inch lumber has been pulled from floors of old barns, and mills. Many old fence rails were made into gun stocks during the Civil war. Later, walnut stumps were pulled from field and wayside, and went to veneer mills. Some finely figured wood comes from stumps where roots and trunk join.

An occasional walnut tree develops a large burl which is valued for its figured wood. Sometimes the burl is the form of a door knob, with the tree trunk growing through the center. The burl sometimes has a diameter three or four times as great as the trunk. The origin of such burls is supposed to be a mass of buds which fail to break through the bark.

Black walnut has a compound leaf from one to two feet long, with from fifteen to twenty-three leaflets, each about three inches long and an inch or two wide. The nuts ripen in the fall, and are valuable. They are borne chiefly by trees growing in open ground; forest trees do not bear until old, and then only a few nuts. The walnuts which germinate are usually those buried by squirrels, and forgotten.

Within the past twenty or thirty years plantations have been made in states of the Middle West. Many young planted trees have been cut for fence posts, with disappointing results. It was known that old walnut is durable, and it was supposed young trunks would be, when used for posts; but young trees are nearly all sapwood which rots quickly.

Forest grown walnut trees vary in size from a diameter of two feet and a height of fifty, to a diameter of six or more and a height of 100 or 120. Trunks which grow in the shade are tall, clear, and symmetrical; those in the open are shorter, with more taper.

PALE-LEAF HICKORY (Hicoria villosa) is a small tree but large enough to be useful wherever it exists in sufficient quantity. The largest specimens attain a height of fifty feet and a diameter of eighteen inches. The tree bears nuts when very small, and the kernel is sweet. The bark of this hickory is rough but not shaggy. The range extends from New Jersey to Florida and west to Missouri and Texas. It is most abundant in the lower Appalachian ranges. The wood possesses the common characteristics of the hickories, and it is cut with them wherever it is found, but is seldom or never reported separately in lumber operations.

SMALL PIGNUT HICKORY (Hicoria odorata) is considered a species by some botanists while others regard it as a variety. It is called small pignut in Maryland, and occasionally little shagbark. This last name refers to the roughness of the bark which resembles the bark of elm. The range of the tree extends from Massachusetts to Missouri and south to the Ohio and the Potomac rivers. The wood differs little from that of pignut hickory, and the uses are the same. No distinction is made between them at the shop and factory. This tree is by some botanists believed to be a hybrid between shagbark and pignut. It is sometimes called false shagbark. The nut is edible.

BUTTERNUT

BUTTERNUT

(Juglans Cinerea)

This tree is known as butternut or as white walnut in all parts of its range. Butternut is in reference to the oily kernel of the nuts, and white walnut is the name given by those who would distinguish the tree from black walnut. Persons acquainted with one of the species in its native woods are usually sure to be acquainted with the other, for their ranges are practically co-extensive, except that black walnut extends farther southwest, butternut farther northeast. Butternut grows from New Brunswick to South Dakota, from Delaware to Arkansas, and along the Appalachian highlands to northern Georgia and Alabama.

Butternut resembles black walnut in a good many ways and differs from it in several. They are very closely related botanically--as closely as are brothers in the same household. Black walnut is larger, stronger, better known, and has always dominated and eclipsed the other in usefulness and public esteem; yet butternut is a tree both useful and interesting. No person acquainted with both would ever mistake one for the other, winter or summer. Botanists tell how to distinguish butternut from black walnut by noting minor differences. The person who is not a botanist needs no such help. He knows them at sight, and there is no possibility of mistaking them.

Butternut in the forest may attain a height of eighty or 100 feet, and a diameter of three, but few persons ever see a specimen of that size, and never in open ground. In shade, the butternut does its best to get its crown up to light and sunshine, but it is weak. It often gives up the struggle and remains in the shade of trees which overtop it. In that situation its crown is small, thin, and appears to rest lightly in the form of a small bunch of yellowish-green leaves on the top of a tall, spindling bole, which is seldom straight, but is made up of slight, undulating curves. The pale, yellowish tinge of the bark suggests a plant deprived of sunshine.

When butternut grows in open ground where light falls upon its crown and on all sides, it assumes a different form and presents another figure. The trunk is nearly as short as that of an apple tree. It divides in large branches and limbs, and these spread wide; leaves are healthy, yet the crown of a butternut always looks thin compared with that of the black walnut. Tests show that butternut wood, when thoroughly dry, is somewhat stiffer than black walnut; but it is light and weak. It is about two-thirds as heavy and two-thirds as strong as black walnut. The growing tree betrays the wood’s weakness. Large limbs snap in storms. Trees become lopsided, and a symmetrical, well-proportioned butternut crown is an exception. The broken branches leave openings for the entrance of decay, and butternuts nearly always die of disease rather than of old age.

Leaves are compound, and from fifteen to thirty inches in length. Few trees of this country have larger leaves. There are from eleven to seventeen leaflets. They are hairy and sticky. Hands that handle them are covered with mucilage-like substance. The nuts, which grow in clusters of three or five, are of the same color as the leaves and covered with the same sticky fuzz. The nuts are two inches or more in length, and are borne abundantly when trees stand in open ground. Size rather than age appears to determine the period when trees commence to bear. Those of extra vigor produce when ten or twelve years old. The nuts are salable in the market. They fall with the leaves, immediately after the first sharp frost, and all come down together. A single day frequently suffices to strip the last leaf from a tree, though some of the nuts may hang a little longer. The kernels are very rich, when the nuts are dry, and are apt to cloy the appetite; but they are improved by freezing where they lie on the ground among the leaves; but they must be used quickly after they thaw, or they will spoil. Nuts nearly full-grown but not yet hard are made into pickles, but the fuzz must first be washed off with hot water.

Butternut bark has played a rather important role in the country’s affairs. Doctors in the Revolutionary war made much of their medicine of the roots and bark of this tree. Drugs were unattainable, and physicians were forced to betake themselves to the woods for substitutes, and their pharmacopoeias were enriched by the butternut tree. Housewives dyed cloth a brown color with this bark long before aniline dyes found their way into this country. Whole companies of Confederate soldiers from the mountain regions in the Civil war wore clothes dyed in decoctions of butternut bark, and popularly known as “butternut jeans.”

The annual output of butternut lumber is placed at a little more than 1,000,000 feet a year. It is widely used, but in small amounts. In Maryland it is made into ceiling and flooring; in North Carolina into cabinet work, fixtures for stores and offices, and into furniture; in Michigan its reported uses are boat finish, interior finish for houses, molding, and screen frames. In Illinois it is used for all the purposes listed above and also for church altars and car finish. These uses are doubtless typical, and hold good in all parts of the country where any use is made of butternut.

The wood has figure similar to that of black walnut, but the color is lighter. It is nearer brown than black. The pores are diffused through the annual ring, but are more numerous and of larger size in the inner than in the outer part. The springwood blends gradually with the wood of the latter part of the season, without sharp distinction, but the ring terminates in a black line which is the chief element of contrast in the wood’s figure.

The future value of butternut will be less in the lumber than in the nuts. The tendency in that direction is now apparent. When land is cleared, the trees which would formerly have gone to the sawmill, are now left to bear nuts. The averaged price paid by factories in North Carolina for butternut is $40 a thousand feet. It is cheaper in the Lake States.

MEXICAN WALNUT (Juglans rupestris) will never amount to much as a timber tree, though it is by no means useless. It is known by several names, among them being western walnut, dwarf walnut, little walnut, and California walnut. The last name is applied in Arizona through a misunderstanding of the tree’s identity. It is there confused with the California walnut which is a different species. The Mexican walnut’s range extends from central Texas, through New Mexico to Arizona, and southward into Mexico. It prefers the limestone banks of streams in Texas where it is usually shrubby, seldom attaining a height above thirty feet. It reaches its largest size in canyons among the mountains of New Mexico and Arizona where it reaches a height of sixty feet. Trunks are sometimes five feet in diameter. The wood weighs 40.85 pounds per cubic foot, is dark in color, but the tone is not as regular as that of black walnut; neither is it as strong and stiff. It polishes well, and is said to be durable in contact with the soil. It finds its way in small amounts to local mills, shops, and factories where it is made into various commodities. It is particularly liked for the lathe, and is suited better for turnery than for any other purpose. It is made into gavels, cups, spindles, parts of grills; and it is also worked into picture frames, handles, and small pieces of furniture. It does not appear that lumber sawed from this walnut ever gets into the general market, but the whole output, which is small, is consumed locally. Trees do not occur in pure stands and the whole supply consists of isolated trees or small groups, with few trunks large enough for sawlogs. The nuts are dwarfs. All are not the same size, but none are as large as a hickory nut. Many that grow on the diminutive trees along the water courses in western Texas are not as large, husks and all, as a nutmeg, and the nut itself is about half the size of a nutmeg, and not dissimilar in appearance. The kernels of such a nut are too small to have any commercial value, but they are rare morsels for the native Mexicans and Indians who pick them by pocketfuls. Trees in the stony canyon of Devil’s river, in Texas, are in full bearing when so small that a man can stand on the ground and pick walnuts from their highest branches. The Mexican walnut is occasionally cultivated in the eastern part of the United States and in Europe. It is hardy as far north as Massachusetts.

CALIFORNIA WALNUT (Juglans californica) is a small tree confined to California, and pretty close to the coast, though it grows in Eldorado county. It is most abundant within twenty or thirty miles of tidewater. In the southern part of the state it ascends to an elevation of 4,000 feet. It prefers the banks of streams and the bottoms of canyons where the soil is moist, but it will grow in dry situations. Trees occur singly or in small groups. Their average size is fifteen or twenty feet high, and eight or ten inches in diameter; but trees occasionally are sixty feet high and eighteen inches through. The leaves are small, measuring from six to nine inches in length, with from nine to seventeen leaflets. Nuts are about half the size of eastern black walnuts. The kernel is edible. The wood is heavier than black walnut, and somewhat lighter in color. Otherwise the two woods are much alike, except in strength and stiffness. In these the California wood is inferior. It has not been reported for any use, but it is suitable for a number of purposes, provided logs of sufficient size could be had. The trunk, in addition to being small, is usually short. The tree is intolerant of shade, and is not often found in forests. It grows rapidly and will attain a diameter of fifteen inches in twenty years or less; but it apparently does not live long. Its principal usefulness in California is as a shade tree, and as a stock in nurseries on which to graft English walnut.