Part 43 (1/2)
The boat yards in southwestern Oregon were the first to use California laurel for commercial purposes, but early settlers made a point of procuring it for fuel when they could. The oil in the wood causes it to burn with a cheerful blaze, and campers in the mountains consider themselves fortunate when they find a supply for the evening bonfire.
s.h.i.+pbuilders have drawn upon this wood for fifty years for material. It is made into pilot wheels, interior finish, cleats, crossties, and sometimes deck planking. Furniture makers long ago made a specialty of the wood for their San Francisco trade. For thirty years travelers admired the superb furniture of the Palace hotel in that city, and wondered of what wood it was made. It was the California laurel. The hotel's furniture was hand-made, or largely so, at a time when woodworking factories were few on the Pacific coast. The furniture was finally destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake. Furniture is still one of the products made of the wood, but the quant.i.ty is small. Other products are interior finish; fixtures for banks, stores and offices; musical instruments, including organs; mathematical instruments, and carpenters' tools, including rulers, straight-edges, spirit levels, bench screws and clamps, and handles of many kinds.
Makers of novelties and small turnery find it serviceable for paper knives, pin trays, match safes, brush backs, and many articles of like kind. One of the largest uses for it is as walking beams for pumping oilwells in central and southern California. The beauty of grain has nothing to do with this use.
Country blacksmiths repair wagons and agricultural implements with this wood. Farmers have long employed it about their premises for posts, gates, floors, and building material. Cooks flavor soup with the leaves, and poultrymen make henroosts of poles, believing that the wood's odor will keep insects away. This is probably the old sa.s.safras superst.i.tion carried west by early California settlers.
RED BAY (_Persea borbonia_) is a southern member of the laurel family, and close akin to sa.s.safras and the California laurel. The bark is red, hence the name; but it is known also as bay galls, laurel tree, Florida mahogany, false mahogany, and sweet bay. It grows from Virginia to Texas, but is most abundant near the coast, yet it ascends the Mississippi valley to Arkansas. The leaves remain on the tree a full year, but turn yellow toward the last, in consequence of which the species is not evergreen. In shape and color the leaves resemble laurel. The fruit is a small, dark blue drupe, with thin flesh. The wood is heavy, hard, very strong, rather brittle, bright red, with thin, lighter-colored sapwood. It was once very popular in the South for furniture. Rare pieces, some 150 years old, are still found in southern homes. The wood was exported prior to 1741 from the Carolinas, and the quant.i.ty seems to have been considerable. It was then regarded as a finer wood than mahogany. It was exported to the West Indies, where mahogany was abundant, and was made into furniture and finish for the homes of wealthy planters and merchants. An old report describes the wood as resembling ”watered satin.” It was in early demand by s.h.i.+pbuilders, but it has now ceased to go to boat yards. Except in rare instances, it is not reported by any wood-using industries. In Texas a little is made into pin trays, small picture frames, canes, and shelves. It deserves a more important place, for when polished and finished, it is one of the handsomest woods of this country. Trees attain a height of sixty or seventy feet, and a diameter of two or three.
SWAMP BAY (_Persea p.u.b.escens_) attains a height of thirty or forty feet, but is seldom more than a foot in diameter, and is too small for saw timber. The wood is strong, heavy, rather soft, orange colored, streaked with brown, and not as handsome as its larger relative, red bay, which is a.s.sociated with it from North Carolina to Mississippi. It is an evergreen in some cases, but in others the leaves turn yellow the second spring. The black fruit is a drupe nearly an inch long. The wood is without attractive figure, since its medullary rays are obscure, and the annual rings are indistinct and produce little contrast when the trunks are sawed tangentially.
Color is the chief attraction that can be claimed for the wood. A little is occasionally worked into interior finish.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
LOCUST
[Ill.u.s.tration: LOCUST]
LOCUST
(_Robinia Pseudacacia_)
Locust belongs to the pea family, known in botany as _Leguminosae_.[6] In most parts of its range it is known simply as locust, but in some localities it is called black locust, an allusion to the color of the bark; yellow locust, descriptive of the heartwood; white locust, referring to the bloom; red locust, probably a reference to the wood, and green locust for the same reason; acacia and false acacia; honey locust, a name which belongs to another species; post locust, because it has always been a favorite tree for fence posts; and pea-flower locust, a reference to the bloom.
[6] This is a very large family, containing trees, shrubs, and vines, such as locusts, acacias, beans, and clovers. There are 430 genera in the world, and many times that many species. The United States has seventeen genera and thirty species of the pea family that are large enough to be cla.s.sed as trees. Their common names follow: Florida Cat's Claw, Huajillo, Texan Ebony, Wild Tamarind, Huisache, Texas Cat's Claw, Devil's Claw, Leucaena, Chalky Leucaena, Screwbean, Mesquite, Redbud, Texas Redbud, Honey Locust, Water Locust, Coffeetree, Horsebean, Small-leaf Horsebean, Greenbark Acacia, Palo Verde, Frijolito, Sophora, Yellow-wood, Eysenhardtia, Indigo Thorn, Locust, New Mexican Locust, Clammy Locust, Sonora Ironwood, Jamaica Dogwood. These species are treated separately in the following pages, and are given s.p.a.ce according to their relative commercial importance in the particular regions where they grow.
Several of the names refer to the color of the wood, and seem contradictory, for yellow, green, and red are not the same; yet the names describe with fair accuracy. Color of the heartwood varies with different trees, yellow with some, tinged with red with others, and sometimes it might be appropriately called blue locust, for the heartwood is nearer that color than any other.
The natural range of locust seems to have been confined to the Appalachian mountain ranges from Pennsylvania to Georgia. It probably existed as a low shrub in parts of Arkansas and Oklahoma. Its range has been extended by planting until it now reaches practically all the states, but is running wild in only about half of them. It has received a great deal of attention from foresters and tree planters. It attracted notice very early, because of its hardness, strength, and lasting properties. At one time the planting of locust came nearly being a fad.
In England it was supposed that it would rise to great importance in s.h.i.+pbuilding, and in France it was looked upon as no less important.
Books were written on the subject in both English and French. All the details of planting and utilization were discussed. Its generic name, _Robinia_, is in honor of a Frenchman, Robin. Extravagant claims were once made for the wood. When American s.h.i.+ps were gaining victory after victory over English vessels in the war of 1812, it was a.s.serted in England that the cause of American success was the locust timber in their s.h.i.+ps. The claim may have been partly true, but other factors contributed to the phenomenal series of successes.
The locust craze died a natural death. Too much was claimed for the wood. Possibilities in the way of growth were over estimated. It was a.s.sumed that the tree, if planted, would grow everywhere as vigorously as on its native mountains in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, where trees two or three feet in diameter and eighty feet high were found. Experience proved later that nature had planted the locust in the best place for it, and when transplanted elsewhere it was apt to fall short of expectations. Outside of its natural range it grows vigorously for a time, and occasionally reaches large size; but in recent years the locust borer has defeated the efforts of man to extend the range of this species and make it profitable in regions distant from its native home.
The tree is often devoured piecemeal, branches and twigs breaking and falling, and trunks gradually disappearing beneath the attacks of the hungry borers. No effective method of combating the pest is known. The planting of locust trees, once so common, has now nearly ceased.
Within its native range, and beyond that range when it has a chance, locust is a valuable and beautiful tree. It is valuable at all times on account of the superior wood which it furnishes, and beautiful when in bloom and in leaf. A locust in full flower is not surpa.s.sed in ornamental qualities by any tree of this country. It is a ma.s.s of white, exceedingly rich in perfume. It blooms in May or June. During the summer its foliage shows tropical luxuriance with exquisite grace. Its compound leaves are from eight to fourteen inches long, with seven to nine leaflets. They come late in spring and go early in autumn. The tree's thorns, resembling cat claws, are affixed to the bark only, and usually fall with the leaves. The fruit is a pod three or four inches long, and contains four or eight wingless seeds. They depend on animals to carry them to planting places. The pods dry on the branches, and rattle in the wind most of the autumn. The tree spreads by underground roots which send up sprouts. A locust in winter is not a thing of beauty. It appears to be dead; not a bud visible. Its black, angular branches lack every line of grace.
Locust wood is remarkable for strength, hardness, and durability. It is about one pound per cubic foot lighter than white oak, but is thirty-four per cent stiffer and forty-five per cent stronger. Its strength exceeds that of s.h.a.gbark hickory, and it is doubtful whether a stronger wood exists in the United States. Its hardness is equally remarkable, and is said to be due to crystals formed in the wood cells, and known as ”rhaphides.” Its durability is probably equal to that of Osage orange, mesquite, and catalpa, but it is not easy to fix a standard of durability by which to compare different woods. Locust is the best fence post wood in this country, because it is usually much straighter than other very durable woods. The posts are expected to last at least thirty years, and have been known to stand twice that long.
For more than 150 years locust was almost indispensable in s.h.i.+pbuilding, furnis.h.i.+ng the tree nails or large pins which held the timbers together.
It supplied material for other parts of s.h.i.+ps also, but in smaller quant.i.ties. The subst.i.tution of steel s.h.i.+ps for wooden lessened demand for locust pins, and in many instances large iron nails are used to fasten timbers together. In spite of this, the demand for locust tree nails is nearly always ahead of supply.
The wood's figure is fairly strong, due to the contrast between the springwood and that grown later, but not to the medullary rays, which are small and inconspicuous. The wood is not in much demand for ornamental purposes. Small amounts are made into policemen's clubs, rake teeth, hubs for buggy wheels, ladder rungs, and tool handles.