Salvaged Wood: New Life for Your Floors
Salvaged wood flooring offers gorgeous patina and unmatched durability.
July/August 2001
By Lori Tobias
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River-recovered flooring and railings add character and warmth to a room.
Goodwin Heart Pine
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Twenty-six years ago George Goodwin didn’t know much about salvaging old-growth lumber. But he’d seen logs pulled up from the rivers of the South, and he knew they were unlike anything found in lumberyards or hardware stores.
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George’s plan—to sell heart pine pulled from the rivers where it was lost more than 100 years ago in transport to mills—hit a nerve. “People would call us,” his wife, Carol, recalls, “and they were just ecstatic that they had found a source for material of this quality that was last available to their grandparents.”
The Goodwin Heart Pine Company started back in 1976. Today, demand for old-growth wood has never been greater.
Other firms such as Mountain Lumber in Virginia, Conklins in Pennsylvania, and The Joinery in North Carolina salvage wood from old barns and abandoned warehouses. Their customers use the reclaimed lumber for everything from window casings to front doors. A few have been known to construct entire houses from vintage wood, but most people use it for floors that some say will last another lifetime at least, while lending a measure of beauty nearly impossible to recreate.
Old growth
“It’s the wood that built America,” George likes to say.
“It smells good,” Carol adds. “It feels good, and it’s beautiful to look at. And you’re preserving a bit of what was once the largest contiguous forest on the North American continent.” She’s referring to the forests of longleaf pine that once covered some 85 million acres. Today less than 10,000 acres of old-growth stands remain.
One hundred years ago, heart pine was used for everything from ship masts to bridges, warehouses, and wharves—not to mention houses. The wood was so abundant, Carol says, that “people stained it to look like walnut. They tried to make it look like something else. They just got tired of it.”
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