My grandfather Jack built the place that I currently call home. While I barely knew him (I was 3 when he died in 1963), my work growing food and woodworking has keep me close to him in spirit all of my adult life. This post is about his trees.
Jack built the farm house where I live but I never got the sense that he was a woodworker. He built the structures that were required to live and work on the farm and had previously worked for a company that cut timber in the Mississippi delta, but woodworking per se – not that I ever heard about. He did plant trees. He planted oaks, pecan (hickory), cypress, and honey locust trees all for different purposes. Nothing was superfluous. Oaks and cypress for shade, hickory for the nuts and the honey locust for fence posts. Anything that fell down or wasn’t needed elsewhere, became firewood to heat the several homes that housed his family and several others that resided on the property.
Since I moved onto the property over 25 years ago, I’ve continued to plant trees replacing the ones that have fallen and adding hundreds more primarily for screening the property from adjacent farming operations. I’ve written previously about using a portable sawmill to turn fallen trees into valuable lumber. Now, after many years of drying, much of this lumber is going into projects that include tables, benches, countertops, and a variety of art pieces turned on the lathe. And there have been a good many utility buildings built with the lumber as well – but that’s carpentry, not woodworking.
The table shown here was milled from a standing red oak tree that Jack planted sometime around 1930. By the time it died and had to be cut down 80 years later, it had reached a height of over 120 feet and a had a base diameter of close to 6 feet. The boards that were used for this project are part of Jack’s legacy. While I’m not particularly religious, working with these boards is about as close as I can get to understanding what the manifestation of someone’s spirit could feel like. Enough philosophy….
Boards were milled to approximately 5/4 thickness and just under 3″ wide. Then they were jointed together using biscuit joints (top deck) and lap joints (legs) to achieve a super strong table structure that has no nails or screws. I did use screws instead of clamps to hold things together temporarily while gluing. I later removed the screws and filld the holes with walnut plugs that were also milled in the shop. Hard to find those in the store! The result is a clean, functional, sturdy hardwood work table that will last until long after I’m gone.
In the meantime, it will sit between my belt sander, my planer/jointer and my table saw and serve as an infeed table for each one of these machines. From now on, wood for each new project will pass across this table. And each time I run my hand across it, I’ll think of Jack and the beautiful trees he planted and cared for and try to imagine what he would think if he could see what they had produced.
Red Oak Work Table