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Some Wrong Uses of Hickory 



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The most coiniiiou \vron<; uses ot Imkory lu'cur when it is ciiiployccl 

 wliero other less valuable woods lan fill the places as well or better. 

 It has long been a common jiraotice in some places to take the most 

 convenient wood, whether it was good or bad, and whether it was 

 suitable or not, and stick it in anywhere that it would answer. The 

 custom is not so common as it once was because niarkets are better, 

 and people have "more correct ideas on the subject; but hickory still 

 goes into wrong places. 



It should never be made an ordinary timber. It is too valuable for 

 that; has too many special and particular places to fill, which can be 

 filled by no other wood as well. It ranks above all competitors for 

 certain purposes, and it is waste, extravagance, bad management and 

 poor judgment to degrade it to a level with inferior timbers by making 

 it serve in ordinary and common places with them or in their stead. 

 If it were so abimdant that everyone could have all he wanted, it 

 would be different; but that is not the case, and while some are prac- 

 tically throwing hickory away, others are obliged to pay high prices 

 to get what they want, or unwillingly substitute some inferior material 

 for hickory. The business is not balanced properly, or the hickory 

 would go to its proper markets, and cease filling common places which 

 almost any other wood might fill as well. 



A specific bill of some of the particulars will illustrate this better 

 than it can be done by commenting on generalities and formulating a 

 lumberman's "ten commandments of shalt nots, " as g, guide to how 

 not to use hickory. 



Small rural mills in the whole hickory region, which means practi- 

 cally the eastern half of the United States, cut hickory logs at hap- 

 hazard as they find them in the woods, and most of these logs are 

 ripped into lumber and, unless a special inquiry is made, that is the 

 last heard of this lumber. It seems to be "lost in the shiifde. " 



Three years ago Charles F. Hatch, of the United States Forest 

 Service, went to work to find out what was becoming of this lost 

 hickory. The study which he carried out was one of the most thorough 

 investigations of the kind ever made in this country. He visited all 

 of the leading hickory centers of the country, went into the woods 

 from Louisiana to North Carolina, spent much time at small mills, 

 watched the shipments of hickory, followed it to farms, factories, 

 mines, and wherever else it went, and obtained a stock of information 

 of the greatest value in locating the ultimate destination of the coun- 

 try 's hickory output. He studied right uses as well as wrong, and he , 

 presented the most complete statistics ever compiled on the subject. 

 In the first i)lace, he found that the sawmill cut of hickory, as 

 reported by the Bureau of the Census, did not show much more than 

 half of the total annual output. The equivalent of 22,000,000 feet a 

 year is burned to smoke meat. The quantity cut for fuel, aside from 

 what is burned for meat smoking, amounts to hundreds of millions of 

 feet ; but the fuel figures were only estimates based on the best guesses 

 possible after studying the whole field. Nobody measures the hickory 

 that goes into eordwood, mixed with other species, throughout nearly a 

 million square miles of territory; but the total amount is enormous, 

 and the estimate that it equals in quantity the sawmill output of 

 hickory lumber is believed to be very eonservAtive. 



As far as the practice of converting hickory waste .'nto fuel is con- 

 cerned, it is to be commended; it is a correct use. Topii, limbs, knottv 

 logs, and scraps that are good for little else, fulfill their highest des- 

 tiny when used as fuel ; but too often the eordwood cutter cares nothing 

 about anything except his immediate profit, and he splits the finest 

 hickory logs and stacks the billets with limbs, knots, and cuttings of 

 various inferior woods, and the whole rick goes to the woodshed at so 

 much a cord. Little the brick burner cares as he shoves into his kiln 

 the hickory pieces which would make axe handles, buggy poles, sucker 

 rods, or any other high-class procluct for wbich the bcs^t hickory is in 

 so great demand. Good split hickory — none better ever grew — is used 

 as smudge in smokehouses to keep skippers out of meat. Scraps would 

 make as good smudge, and many woods besides hickory will answer. 

 A bad practice, once firmly fixed, is hard to break up. 



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Tliu sc.-illiTcd condition of hickory timber is responsiljle for much of 

 this wrong use. Men are not generally pirates — using and destroying 

 without caring for the difference. They do not wantonly destroy, but 

 do it without thinking, and often because they cannot conveniently do 

 otherwise. Hickory is scattered. Forests of it do not exist. From 

 200 to 400 feet i)er acre is the limit in large areas. There is not 

 enough to pay the millman to handle it in any way except to let it 

 take its run through the mill with other logs, and go to the same 

 markets with other mill-run stuff. That is why so much hickory goes 

 to the wrong place. Specific instances where it has been found in 

 common use — wrong uses in every case — follow: Bridge floors, barn 

 floors and siding, grain doors, fences, piling, culverts, crossties, car 

 stock, mine i)rops, tramroad rails, cribs and wingwalls in dams in 

 streams, lagging for mines, and derricks for oilwells. 



Hickory is strong but decays quickly when expos-ed to weather. In 

 many of the uses listed above it will not give as long service as the 

 most common and roughest grades of oak, and therefore is not as good 

 as they for those purposes. It is mighty poor policy to make bridge 

 floors of wood good enough for golf clubs, or build bridge piers of 

 stuff suitable for carriage poles or picker sticks. 



Grain doors are the roughest, cheapest kinds of affairs. They are 

 used to set inside of box cars, across the doors, to prevent grain 

 from leaking out in transit. The cheapest lumber that will hang to- 

 gether, sap pine, sap poplar, buckeye or almost anything, will do. 

 Hickory is monstrously out of place in such situaticns. It is like 

 working a race horse in a mud cart where any old plug will do the 

 work as well. 



Building fences of hickory is even poorer business, because when the 

 wood is alternately exposed in its raw state to rain and sun it not 

 only decays quickly but is liable to warp out of shape. Few worse 

 fates could befall hickory than to lay it as crossties. It is one of the 

 poorest woods for such a place, unless treated with preservatives, and 

 it is then no better than beech, maple, and elm. Fortunately the 

 railroads, simply as an act of self defense, discourage the use of 

 hickory for crossties, and doubtless this dislike for it causes some of 

 the wood to find its way into more appropriate places. 



The most noteworthy instances of the employment of hickory as 

 mine timbers are reported among the coal operations in Pennsylvania. 

 Props and lagging are expected to remain in use only a short time and 

 are then abandoned in the worked-out portions of the mines. The 

 hickory rots, crushes, and the mine roof caves in, burying the useless 

 wood forever. Perhaps two or three months in such situations is all 

 the service it gives. Had it been made into single trees and pick 

 handles it would have remained serviceable for years, even in mines. 



In the oilwell regions of Pennsylvania and West Virginia it is no 

 uncommon thing to see derrick floors made of two-inch hickory planks, 

 cut on a neighboring portable sawmill. The largest and best trees 

 go to that unworthy use as readily as scrub oak or knotty pine. The 

 millman rips out the planks, gets his price for them, and he has a 

 clear conscience; the operator pays the price, places the planks as a 

 mud-coated, grease-spattered floor, and his conscience is also clear. 

 Yet, that same operator will send all the way to Arkansas to buy 

 hickory sucker-rods thirty-five feet long, paying for them at the rate 

 of $200 a thousand feet; and at the same time he has better material 

 in his derrick floor for which he paid twenty dollars a thousand, or less. 



Thus, in big business as well as small, hickory is sacrificed to mean 

 purposes. It is too good a wood for that. Every tree is needed by 

 the industries which put the material to its best use. The alarm of 

 scarcity has been sounded a long time, and it has been no false alarm, 

 though the country still has a large supply, but it is widely scattered. 

 The misuse of a tree here, and load there, and a cord somewhere else, 

 amounts to an enormous total. In short, it is not improbable that 

 more than one-half of the hickory cut from year to year is wasted by 

 being wrongly used; and this is the world-famed "indispensable 

 wood." 



