Reclaiming Our Heritage, Part 2

As I mentioned last month, we have made a commitment to using reclaimed building materials as much as possible, and the centrepiece of this strategy is reclaimed Douglas fir beams originally milled in British Columbia. Although now fairly unique, Douglas fir was the structural steel of a century ago when millions of board feet of fir were harvested and milled.

In the 1880s, the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway created a greater demand for B.C. lumber. With the railway’s completion in late 1885, lumber exports to eastern Canada and the world increased as railways were extended right into the logging camps. By 1912, there were 365 kilometres of logging track on the British Columbia coast.



Around 1897, the steam-powered donkey engine, introduced from the U.S., replaced oxen. The steam donkeys increased the speed of work and volume of timber that could be logged, but they also increased the danger to the workers. Another innovation was the “high lead system,” in which a line high over the skids pulled or lifted the logs over obstacles.

Today, the mill buildings themselves provide a primary source of reclaimed wood. Some of these buildings and complexes housed more than a million square feet of floor space and can yield three to five times that amount of board feet of flooring. One of the most famous is the Long-Bell Mill south of B.C. in Washington state.

In 1918, lumber baron Robert A. Long’s southern U.S. timber holdings were nearly depleted. He and a small crew went on a horseback exploration of the virgin forests in the Cascade Mountains in southwestern Washington, where it is estimated that the trees averaged nine feet in diameter and 150 feet in height. It must have been breathtaking, even for a man who had spent a lifetime logging ancient forests.

The Long-Bell Lumber Company purchased 70,000 acres that held about 3.8 billion board feet of lumber. Construction of the 72-acre mill complex and the town that would support 14,000 mill workers began in 1922. The mill reached full capacity in 1926, milling two million board feet of lumber a day.

The mill fell silent in 1956 because of the move to cheaper, less permanent construction, but left itself as a legacy: 30 mill buildings that averaged 700 feet in length, constructed with large, old-growth timbers of clear, straight-grained fir.

When it was decided to dismantle the buildings, word quickly spread among timber framers, but Bill Gates bought seven million board feet, quickly pricing the timbers beyond their reach. But even Gates couldn’t use it all, and over the next few years five million board feet became available to timber framers across the continent, further fueling the timber frame revival.

While our timbers are among the biggest I’ve ever seen, they are babies compared to what was harvested and milled from the west coast of North America. The Long-Bell Mill produced the incredible lumber cants in the photo below in the early 1900s, but it was the salvaged timbers from the dismantled mill itself that contributed to many modern timber frame homes.

Photo courtesy Longview Public Library, Longview Room Collection.



We sourced our beams privately so I cannot recommend any reclaimed lumber dealers. However, below are some places to start if you are looking for reclaimed lumber.

•Century Wood Products Offers reclaimed wood building supplies and provides custom cutting and milling services.
•Logs End Inc. Recovers and mills heritage Canadian old-growth wood to produce dimensional lumber, flooring, paneling, beams and more.
•Nostalgic Wood, Inc. Produces kiln dried custom milled flooring, trim and doors from reclaimed lumber.
•Timeless Material Company Offers salvaged lumber and timber, flooring, antiques and more.
•West Lincoln Barnboard & Beams Ltd. Offers aged antique wood flooring, panelling, and door and window trim recycled from old barn woods by barn salvage specialists.

Reclaimed wood is not only beautiful, it's environmentally conscious as well. It is estimated that over three trillion board feet of lumber have been produced since the early 1900s, and much of that lumber is still in old buildings.

I like the idea of living under ceiling beams that are at least 300 years old. Finding and reclaiming some of that old lumber will give your building project a unique appearance as well as demonstrate a commitment to reusing our resources. After all, sustainability means meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Reclaiming Our Heritage

RECLAIMING OUR HERITAGE

The phrase reduce, reuse, recycle is purposely listed in order of sustainability. It is always better to reduce our consumption, then reuse products, and only then to recycle as much as we can.

In our new house so far, we have made a commitment to reducing our floor space to under 2,000 square feet and to using reclaimed building materials as much as possible. Lumber is a renewable resource but, despite the best precautions, logging is a destructive industry. Much of the mass of a tree is burned or buried or left on the forest floor just to harvest the trunk. Landscapes are inevitably destroyed and sequestered carbon is released in the logging process. There is always waste in milling, and many levels of transportation are required from forest to mill to distributor to consumer.

It usually makes environmental sense to incur only reclamation and short-haul transportation costs by using reclaimed lumber instead. Another riff on the theme of “buy local,” as long as we don’t try to dismantle our neighbour’s shed when they are away on holiday.

Most reclaimed lumber comes from timbers and decking rescued from old barns, factories and warehouses, and some companies have been known to source wood from less traditional structures such as boxcars, coal mines and wine barrels. Reclaimed or antique lumber is used primarily for decoration and home building and is often used for siding, architectural details, cabinetry, furniture and flooring.

So far, we have been able to use reclaimed lumber as fir structural beams and inch-thick pine tongue and groove ceilings. We will also use reclaimed cedar barn board for siding.


Reclaimed lumber is popular for many non-environmental reasons: the wood has a unique, aged appearance, the history of the wood’s origins can be interesting and the wood’s physical characteristics include strength, stability and durability. Survival in an old-growth forest can be difficult. A tree grown on a tree farm doesn’t have to compete for space and light, and it will be harvested before it gets very old, so its growth rings will be widely spaced. But a tree that grew in an ancient forest had to compete with other trees, so it grew more slowly. That's why old-growth timber is strong and its rings are dense.

Many of the largest fir beams in Canada, like the ones in our house, came from British Columbia. In 1865, Hastings Sawmill opened on Burrard Inlet in Vancouver and was given timber rights to much of the surrounding area. Soon there was a mill in North Vancouver.

In 1868, Gassy Jack Deighton opened a saloon nearby. (OK, I know his credibility as a cook is immediately shot but, in those days, “gassy” meant someone who talked a lot.) This was the beginning of Gastown, the small village that would grow to become Vancouver.

Logging was mostly done by hand. Horses or oxen dragged felled trees along corduroy roads, trails with small logs placed across them. The logs were greased to reduce friction and the ridges made by the logs resembled corduroy fabric. These were called “skid roads” and they led to the water where the huge timbers were floated to the mills.

In B.C., loggers put a springboard into the tree above the ground. Two axe men stood on the board and chopped at the tree with heavy, double-edged axes. They also used long saws with handles at each end. You can see the loggers standing on their springboards in the photo below.


When the last of these majestic giants were felled and the big timber taken to the sawmills, it was the end of a special era in our country’s history. The conditions that allowed them to grow slowly and develop their dense heart centres would never be present again. Old growth by its very nature, taking hundreds of years to mature, was not considered for replanting and is now replaced by faster growing varieties.

Reclaimed beams can be sawn into wider planks than the harvested lumber. These old used wood beams come in sizes that are unmatched in today’s lumber yards and are much less likely to twist, warp or shrink because they have been exposed to many changes in humidity over a long period of time. In some cases, the timbers from which the boards were cut have been slightly expanding and contracting for over a century in their previous installation.

Barns serve as one of the most common sources for reclaimed wood in Ontario, and most farm buildings constructed up through the early part of the 19th century were typically built using whatever trees were right there on the property. They often contain a mixed local blend of oak, maple, pine, cedar, poplar and sometimes hemlock. The wood was either hand hewn using an axe or squared with an adze, and has a lovely character.

Next month, I’ll provide more information on the B.C. and U.S. west coast milling operations, including the famous Long-Bell Mill, and include a list of where reclaimed lumber is available in our area.