﻿USES OP COMMERCIAL WOODS. 43 



In the manufacture of farm machinery, however, maple does not 

 go as far outside its geographical range as do some other woods, par- 

 ticularly longleaf and shortleaf pine of the South. The use of maple 

 for that purpose declines rapidly as the distance from the source of 

 supply increases. In North Carolina, Kentucky, Arkansas, Louis- 

 iana, and Missouri sugar maple is not very important in the manu- 

 facture of agricultural machinery. Other woods can be procured at 

 less cost. However, there are no centers in those States where farm 

 machinery is made on a large scale as there are in Wisconsin, Michi- 

 gan, and Illinois, near the maple supply. 



WOODENWARE. 



Sugar maple is widely utilized in the manufacture of woodenware. 

 Some factories making pie, butter, and picnic plates use maple ex- 

 clusively ; .others accept nearly any hardwood that has no pronounced 

 taste or odor. A brief summary, but by no means a complete list, of 

 woodenware into which maple enters would include bread boards, 

 meat boards and the tops of tables where meat is cut, rolling pins, 

 meat mauls for pounding steak for broiling or frying, wooden spoons, 

 butter ladles, molds, printers, bowls, churns, especially the dashers, 

 lemon squeezers, kraut cutters, and potato mashers. In articles of 

 this class it is highly important, for sanitary reasons, that the wood 

 be sufficiently hard to resist bruising and splintering, and it should 

 not check and present open crevices in which organisms or impurities 

 can find lodgment. Sugar maple meets these requirements better than 

 most other woods. Its hardness, nevertheless, is in one way disad- 

 vantageous because of difficulty in working it. 



A class of woodenware made in cooperage factories is used for the 

 shipment of food products, and sugar maple is one of the woods em- 

 ployed. In the making of sardine kegs the hoops and staves are of 

 maple and the heading of white ash. Anchovy kegs frequently have 

 willow hoops, but the heading and staves are maple. Lard tubs, 

 butter tubs, and cheese boxes are often of sugar maple, and it is one 

 of the best woods for faucets. Many kinds of pails are of the same 

 material, especially sap buckets used by sugar makers in the North. 

 Flour barrels and sugar hogsheads belong properly to slack cooper- 

 age, and maple is often employed in their manufacture. In the 

 United States Census reports for 1909 this wood was credited with 

 118,000,000 staves, 13,000,000 sets of heading, and T00,000 hoops. 



The use of sugar maple in certain kinds of woodenware is not due 

 to absence of taste or of staining material in the wood, but to desir- 

 able features, such as hardness, smoothness, agreeable color, and 

 cheapness. Garment hangers are in that class, also display racks and 

 dummies, candle pins, and a pretty complete line of apparatus for the 



