Making What's Old New Again

Moving these large timbers around in China is done by hand, and at 1,200 pounds each, it requires great physical effort.

Inside a small lumber yard near China's Lu-liang Mountains, ancient elm logs spread across a wide field. Once part of Ming Dynasty structures, these 400- to 600-year-old timbers are each owned separately and sold as a lot of one. Willie Drake, owner of Virginia-based Mountain Lumber, purchased several hundreds of these logs in the spring. Back at the company's headquarters in Ruckersville, Va., he is transforming these ancient logs into flooring, beams and other architectural details.

Acquiring the timbers required perseverance and patience. Mountain Lumber purchased a dozen containers, holding 85 to 100 logs. Drake spent weeks negotiating the purchase with hundreds of different owners, all seeking their price.

Willie Drake personally inspects each piece of Ancient Chinese Elm once it arrives in Virginia. It then goes to Mountain Lumber's sawmill for cutting, which then yields a deep butterscotch-colored beam.

The giant beams are up to 20 feet long and more than 25 inches in diameter. Centuries ago craftsmen had collected the wood and hand-chiseled mortise and tenon fittings to frame buildings. Nails were never used. Each timber fit into the structure like a jigsaw puzzle, and because of this technique, when the buildings were dismantled, almost no damage was done to the timber.

Drake traveled to China to recover the timbers and selected each log individually. Each timber was loaded by hand and trucked 1,500 miles across the Yellow and Yangtze rivers to the port at Canton. Once loaded on a merchant ship, the wood traveled half a world away to the port of Norfolk, Va.

In milling these giant beams, Mountain Lumber first checks for metal. While they rarely find a nail, "we find more embedded bullets than anything else," said Mountain Lumber's David Foky. "Our crews have found everything from ancient soft lead bullets to the more modern full metal jacket variety."

The Ancient Chinese Elm flooring is a rich butterscotch color with deep swirls of chocolate grain. The wood wears well because of its extreme hardness. Because of the size of the logs Drake found in China, the wood yields especially wide planks. Unlike historic heart pine, Mountain Lumber's specialty, machining the giant elm required resetting all the angles for the milling machines. "There is a cross graining in the way elm grows," Foky explains. "The pattern is a more complex weave than a straight grain."

To learn more about these giant timbers, go to www.mountainlumber.com.