History of Heart Pine

Longleaf pine, the primary source of heart pine, was once one of the most prominent trees found in the Southeastern United States. Their territory engulfed a massive 60 million acres of the south ranging from Southern Virginia to East Texas. Longleaf pines can take up to 500 years to fully mature but were quickly revered as one of the best, most abundant hardwoods available at the time. Post-American-revolution booms lead to increasingly high demand for this structurally sound, abundant, hardwood. Early settlers of the region quickly began cutting down these pines to build their homes out of and it was also highly coveted by shipbuilders of the time. In the early 1800’s it is estimated that 80% of homes in the southeast were framed using heart pine. Some of the most notable homes to date are George Washington’s Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello residences. As America became entrenched in the industrial revolution, other countries began to take note of the many uses for heart pine. Many cargo ships heading to Europe were built with heart pine and soon became used to transport heart pine from America back to Europe as demand increased. Soon heart pine could be found all across Europe too, from elegant Victorian homes to timbers for bridge construction.

Why is it at the bottom of a river?

As demand kept rising, supply kept shrinking. People began to push farther and farther south to find more longleaf pines. Since this was still in the beginning years of the industrial revolution, trains were not yet an effective way to transport these massive trees, and loggers turned to the rivers. Chopping down these massive trees with an ax these loggers then used mules or dug small canals to get the logs to the river. Once they had a large quantity, they constructed rafts of pines that were chained together and sent down the river to a nearby sawmill.

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Unfortunately for these loggers the densest of the logs tended to sink. Rather than lose the entire raft, these logs were quickly unchained and allowed to sink down into the tannin-rich waters where they’ve remained, undisturbed, and preserved by their thick resin and the cold river waters for hundreds of years.

Heart Pine today

Today less than 10,000 acres of old-growth heart pine remain, a staggering 2% of the original population. These remaining areas are highly protected, leaving the only source for true old-growth heart pine to be previously harvested trees. We search far and wide for these trees, only taking the ax-cut or dead-head logs indicating they were cut down before 1880 when the two-man crosscut saw became more prominent. We have always maintained our state-mandated license when recovering these logs and will continue to do our part to remove these historical treasures in the most responsible way possible.