Forever Pine

Heart Pine credit: photograph courtesy of Krantz Recovered Woods

Jimmy Krantz was driving around his city, New Orleans, one evening a couple of years ago when he noticed something different about an early-1920s warehouse that snaked along the Mississippi River waterfront. The massive port building looked strangely vacant—more than he’d ever noticed before. He stopped the car, made some calls, and sure enough, the building was being prepped for a teardown.

“I’ve got a sixth sense about buildings coming down,” says the third-generation Louisiana lumber dealer. Krantz knew that a building of that age in the South would likely contain large amounts of resin-saturated, dense, richly colored old heart pine—that is, the heartwood, the structural center, of mature, century-old longleaf pine trees. Aside from its beauty, milled heart pine’s composition makes it extremely hard and strong and enables it to dry out after floods without warping. When longleaf pine forests were abundant, and the trees were allowed to grow old, those traits made heart pine a workhorse lumber; now that the forests have been depleted, and trees are harvested at an earlier age, they make it a precious commodity.

Back on the New Orleans waterfront, Krantz ended up striking a deal to buy all the longleaf pine roof decking that could be saved from the old warehouse, keeping the timbers from going to a landfill. “They ruined half of it in the demolition, but what we did get were gorgeous, thick beams, and lots of them.”

It took Krantz Recovered Woods less than two years to clean and re-mill the reclaimed lumber from the 500,000-square-foot warehouse, and much of it was sold to New Orleans homeowners looking to renovate or add on to their historic houses. “It’s lucky they didn’t use longleaf pine for some kind of consumable item, so now we have a chance to let it live again,” says Krantz.

Many of us in the middle and deep South grew up surrounded by heart pine, wearing it smooth in some places and leaving dents in others—just through daily wear and tear. It was prevalent in the South when longleaf pines were continuously cut from forests that stretched tens of millions of acres and could produce boards deemed by a lumber grading system to be “all heart”—a grade reportedly not seen since the early 1900s. Millions of board feet went into the floors of houses and the framing of cotton mills, tobacco barns, factories, and warehouses.

But it takes a century or more for the trees to mature to the point that the heartwood of the trunk exceeds the yellow sapwood of the outer, softer living layers: The remarkable one- to three-foot-wide heart pine boards still occasionally spotted in antique floors are thought to be from pines that were two to three hundred years old when felled. Knowing this, homeowners pay as much as $20 per square foot for reclaimed heart pine that’s been sawed into flooring. And that is what inspires Krantz and other dealers like him to buy up heart pine from demolition projects, de-nail it, mill it, and build and install “new” old heart pine floors, doors, and furniture. At the current rate of consumption, says Krantz, lumber experts say there are about twenty more years of sought-after, top-quality old heart pine to be recovered from buildings. “We may be on the tail end of ever seeing this wood, of people ever touching it again, so we take a lot of care and take it very seriously,” says Krantz.