Antique Heart Pine

This is the wood the country was built out of. Longleaf pine once covered ninety million acres from southern Virginia to southeastern Texas, and a tree took five hundred years to mature — an inch of diameter every thirty years in poor frontier soil. By 1900 more than eighty million of those acres had been cut. Two percent of the original forest is left standing.

So we don't cut it. We take it back out of the buildings it went into: textile mills, cotton warehouses, factories and barns that are coming down anyway. The timbers get de-nailed, metal-detected, kiln dried and milled here in Mansura.

What you get is tight, resinous, mineral-streaked heartwood with a grain count you cannot buy from a living tree. Nail holes, bolt holes and checking are part of it — that's the record of the first two hundred years of the board's working life.

Length is the other thing old growth gives you. Three quarters of the boards we send out run twelve to fifteen feet, so a room reads in long, unbroken runs instead of a patchwork of butt joints.