350 AMERICAN FOREST TREES 



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 

 hi 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 com- 

 mence 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 hi the Revolutionary war made much of their medicine 

 of the roots and bark of this tree. Drugs were unattainable, and phy- 

 sicians were forced to betake themselves to the woods for substitutes, 

 and their pharmacopoeias were enriched by the butternut tree. House- 

 wives 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 Mich- 

 igan 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 



