Heart pine — The wood that built America

Before the American Revolution and into the early 20th century, the abundance and attributes of the longleaf pine, or heart pine, made it the building material of choice for structures throughout the Southeast.

During America’s colonization this native wood was declared the “King’s wood” and used for shipbuilding because of its durability. Settlers used the sturdy, pest-resistant old-growth heart pine timbers for log cabins in the 1700s and 1800s. Later, the wood was used to construct fine Victorian homes and hotels.

“Heart pine once framed four of every five houses in Georgia, Florida, the Carolinas and is used as flooring in Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and Washington’s Mount Vernon,” said Carol Goodwin of Goodwin Heart Pine Co.

Goodwin’s husband, George, scours Southern rivers hunting for sunken treasure in the form of rare heart pine and heart cypress logs lost over a century ago during water transportation to nearby sawmills.

“If there’s one point to be made about heart pine, it’s that antique heart pine does not come from standing trees. All of the few remaining original growth trees, trees old enough to produce mostly heartwood, are protected. Antique heart pine comes primarily from beams out of old warehouses or from logs that sank on their way downstream over 100 years ago,” Carol Goodwin said.

Sprigg Lynn of Washington’s Universal Floors is a huge fan of heart pine. “It’s a real utility wood and the hardest of the pines,” Lynn said.

There are just a couple of ways to get the wood, pulling it out of old houses, barns and buildings and recovering it from rivers. Some companies have started making an engineered heart pine wood product.

“We have quite a few customers, especially in this area, who use it when they remodel an older or historic home and want to match the original flooring,” Lynn said.

The wood’s color and grain make it a favorite for homeowners, manufacturers and installers.

“The resin in the wood gives it a luminous quality,” Goodwin said. “It almost glows. A pinstripe vertical grain lends an almost contemporary style and plain sawn with arches and curly or rosemary heart pine with swirls and lacy grain is found in only one board or two out of every 400 to 500 river logs.”

Newly milled wood is pale yellow, Lynn said, but over time turns a deep red.

The type of finish used on installed floors produces variations on the color, Goodwin said, with oil stains creating deeper, richer red tones. Although the wood is popular for flooring applications, it also is widely used by builders to create staircases, railings, balusters, furniture and moldings.

Rick Ballon builds and ships heart pine projects across the country and is in talks to work on a historic house in the Washington area.

“We do a lot of custom work on site,” Ballon said, “but the biggest project I tackled was a four-story staircase made from 4,000 board feet of heart pine.” After completion, it was disassembled and shipped to Colorado.

“Heart pine is a very dense and stable wood that can be precisely milled,” he said. “The river-recovered wood is especially beautiful. Customers love its warmth and richness. It’s an incredibly vibrant hardwood.”

Its intrinsic qualities aside, wood professionals revere heart pine’s history. “Walking on heart pine floors is walking on history. A house built in 1920 might have boards from trees that are over 500 years old,” Lynn said.