River bottom yields heart-pine logs

Century-old wood fished out of Cape Fear for flooring

WILMINGTON -- The hardwood floors that Mike and Ruth Taylor put in their Apex home are new, but they glow with the rustic patina of antique floors. They're old and new.

The heart-pine planks came from trees felled by 19th-century lumberjacks using hand tools and floated down the Cape Fear River to lumber mills. On the journey, many of the thick, ancient logs sank and remained submerged like buried treasure. Now they're being retrieved as the raw material for expensive, but environmentally benign, woodwork.

"We thought it added more value to the floor itself because it did have the history," said Mike Taylor, a pharmacist, who laid the floors himself. "It took us two or three weeks to put furniture back in our dining room, because we liked to look at it."

The rescue of logs from the Cape Fear River is part of a nationwide trend of gleaning old lumber -- whether from a river or a century-old textile mill.

The wood looks good and, from a conservation perspective, is good. Rescuing logs and lumber reduces pressure on hardwood forests. And it keeps wood from demolished old buildings from filling up landfills and releasing greenhouse gases as it rots.

Cape Fear Riverwood, a small Wilmington company with three employees, dredges heart pine and cypress logs from the river and mills them into hand-crafted flooring, paneling, mantles. It's one of a number of companies that salvage old wood, but one of the few that scavenge it from under water.

"It's a wood you can't get out of a living forest anymore," said Jesse Jarrell, owner of Cape Fear Riverwood, as he surveyed more than 500 logs behind his lumber mill. "It is denser than any pine you can cut out of today's forests. It comes from old-growth forests."

Trees with a heart

Forests of longleaf pine once covered up to 60 million acres of coastal plain from the Carolinas to Florida. The thick forest canopies meant the trees competed for sunlight and grew slowly, taking 150 years or more to mature and producing large cores of dense heartwood -- much different than fast-growing yellow pine, a softwood that gets cut into two-by-fours for framing.

"The place was just covered in massive longleaf pines with heart timber," said Robert Outland III, author of "Tapping the Pines: the Naval Stores Industry in the American South." "It was densest in southeastern North Carolina. Travelers going through the region complained about how monotonous it was. There was mile after mile of forest."

The longleafs were prized for their strength and durability. Before the American Revolution, Great Britain boasted the largest navy in the world and exploited the Southern timber to build masts, spars and ship planking. Longleaf pine produced other products, too: tar to coat ship rigging and pitch used to seal ships' hulls to make them watertight.

Almost 2 million board feet of lumber and 1.5 million shingles were exported from the Cape Fear in 1767-68, most of it going to the West Indies and eventually Britain, said Chris Fonvielle, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

Though the era of wooden naval ships passed, lumber mills remained near the Cape Fear into the 20th century, producing wood for houses and beams for many of the tobacco and textile mills. But the longleaf forests were largely cleared by the early 20th century.

River-bottom treasure

So now the hunt for heart pine occurs in the water rather than the woods. It's part industrial salvage operation and part fishing expedition. Don Weber, captain of the tug boat Log Dog, maneuvers a 100-foot former Navy barge with a crane to the western shore of the Cape Fear River. In the distance rise the steeples and roofs of downtown Wilmington.