Our Heritage Preserved is pleased to announce that reclaimed heart pine is once again available! Years of aging have enhanced the beauty as well as the color. The slow air drying process Our Heritage Preserved uses on the reclaimed wood yields a product that allows great versatility, unparalleled strength, and a deeper, more beautiful color and luster than can be obtained in any lumber today.
When the first colonists arrived on the shores of America, they found virgin forests of Long Leaf Pines growing to over 150 feet. This wood was later nicknamed heart pine because, at full maturity, the trees had a unique attribute: they consisted almost entirely of heartwood, the wood of the center of the tree, with very little sapwood surrounding the outsized heart. The heartwood was claret-colored, bug-proof, rot-resistant, incredibly strong and very durable. The heart pine lumber was used for virtually every building purpose. The wood’s strength made it suitable for constructing bridges, warehouses, homes, and even railroad trestles. Large quantities of heart pine wood were exported to Europe. Most of the buildings of out country’s own industrial revolution were constructed of heart pine. By 1900, this seemingly endless supply of wood vanished. With encroaching civilization, the conditions necessary for these trees to reseed and flourish no longer existed. No one realized it at the time, but the magnificent forests of heart pine were gone forever.
