Greenbuilders Newsletter No. 1:  AMERICAN CHESTNUT I have on my mudroom table at home two chunks of freshly planed American chestnut, flanked by the exterior slices of the log they came from.  As most of you know, the American chestnut fell victim to blight; I have baby chestnut in the woods above my house, but the foresters tell me they will not live above finger size. I live in central Maryland, an area early settled, where there are still a few log cabins, and old barns are often made of chestnut.  Good friends who were lovingly restoring a log cabin farmhouse tossed eight or ten of the logs into a field and when I asked, they gave them to me.  The college kids I hired to move them complained mightily about the weight. During the following year, as my logs collected snow, fallen leaves, and various small creatures, I tried to figure out a practical way to protect and use them.  The only people with portable saw mills in the area seemed to have disappeared, and my logs were full of old nails and other metal, not appealing to a commercial sawmill.   As I got deeper into the world of salvaged wood, I learned some of the difficulties.  Trees fall around me in the woods all the time, but if you don’t pounce on them immediately, they tend to start splitting at the ends and their usefulness and strength diminish rapidly.  Small creatures love “snags” and fallen logs; it’s not clear that removing them is beneficial.  I took a load of salvaged oak bridge timbers to a mill, only to have them sit for months untouched as the mill owner thought it was too much trouble to slice them for me.  After a year, I didn’t seem to have accomplished much except the learning curve. Yesterday, however, I tackled the problem with renewed energy and serendipity took a hand.  James, a highly skilled cabinetmaker/carpenter with a dream of owning a mill came out to check on my chestnut log situation.  He took a chunk of wood from one log home to work on and called later to report with great excitement that it was indeed chestnut, and sound inside the outer layer.  At ten that night we met in a parking lot, he to hand over my two slabs of freshly finished chestnut, I to deliver a stack of internet pages on sturdy but inexpensive mills we could buy together.  We stood in the parking lot discussing the fine points of wood, lumber, sawmill blades and attachments, and potential markets with such intensity that our friends and families laughed at us. I took the wood home.  It smelled of sawdust.  I admired the weight, the close grain as only old wood can show, the marks and imperfections which come from a history of use.  I wondered who built the log cabin, and whether the logs came from their farm or from one of Maryland’s many historic mills.   The phrase “to plough new ground” must be purely American.  My uncle Fletcher is one of the few living Americans who can tell me what it was like to plough behind a team of work horses.  Massive and white, Joe and Star were my first experience of how to ride a horse bareback.  According to my uncle, his mare Star could tell when there was a big rock underground and she would stop stock still and refuse to move, saving the plow tip from striking the rock. Today, it is ploughing new ground to try to save or reuse wood instead of clearing it.  The process sometimes seems to involve more obstacles than good earth.  However I wish to share with you what most of you already know – that in a new field where there is real value to be found, persistence yields the occasional success, and the next furrow is easier.
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