A Pile of Warmth and Affection

The ever-quotable Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection.” Living out at Walden Pond, he spent plenty of time with wood. “I deal so much with my fuel, — what with finding it, loading it, conveying it home, sawing and splitting it, — get so many values out of it, am warmed in so many ways by it, that the heat it will yield when in the stove is of a lower temperature and a lesser value in my eyes, — though when I feel it I am reminded of all my adventures.”  Happily for Thoreau, the land on which he was living was part of his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson’s woodlot, so the getting was good.

He wasn’t the first New Englander to have firewood on the mind.  The settlers arrived here in the midst of the Little Ice Age, a period of abnormal cold that lasted into the middle of the 19th century. Snow stayed on the ground longer, harbors and rivers froze, and stocking the woodpile was as important a task as putting food on the table.  During the winter of 1637-38, only seven years since establishing their town, Bostonians had nearly exhausted their wood supply.  “We at Boston were almost ready to break up for want of wood,” wrote Governor John Winthrop.  They ended up buying it from folks living inland.

Elsewhere across New England, the woodsman and his ax became an enduring sight, and no wonder:  Harvard historian John Stilgoe reports that “the typical family consumed about 10 acres of woodland annually to cook, process farm produce, and keep warm,” with the people of Massachusetts alone burning approximately two million cords—roughly 2,000 square miles of timberland.  Wood was as good as money:  in winter, parents were often charged tuition in terms of loads of wood to be delivered to the schoolhouse; in Dorchester, the price was half a cord per student.  Oftentimes, a school’s woodshed was bigger than the schoolhouse itself.

Nowadays, while the vast majority of us rely on fossil fuels rather than wood for heat, many are the fireplaces that crackle on a cold winter’s evening, even as our furnaces and boilers crank away in the basement. And still feeding those beloved flames is the beloved woodpile, the object of any true New Englander’s affection.

For those who buy their firewood plastic-wrapped down at the supermarket, or order from a purveyor who delivers it “cut, split, and stacked,” the building of a woodpile is not something to worry about.  But folks facing the small mountain that the delivery truck just dumped in the driveway -- or who are among the hardy willing and able to cut their own wood -- the woodpile is an art form worth understanding.

It all starts, of course, with a tree. Felled and limbed, it’s divided into 8- to 16-foot logs, which are then cut, or “bucked,” into rounds, billets, or bolts -- sections the right length for burning.  The rounds, if big enough, are split into sticks, and the sticks are what get stacked into woodpiles. That makes for hard physical labor, leading Thoreau and others to call wood “the fuel that warms you twice.”  David Tresemer, author of the exhaustive book Splitting Firewood, parses the work more exactly, calling out a full 10 steps between tree and fire, but the fact remains:  There’s a whole lot of energy that goes into a woodpile.  No wonder the American folklorist Eric Sloane reported reading several historic wills in which “the wood supply was considered as important an inheritance as any other item.”

With such value sitting there, stacking should be done carefully and with an eye to aesthetics. As Ceylon Monroe writes in the rural-life magazine Grit, “A woodpile is a public thing – as much of a ‘statement’ as your garden or your mailbox.”  Aside from impressing passersby, the purpose of a woodpile is to store wood neatly and in a way that allows air to circulate, seasoning the wood by drying it down to around 20 to 30 percent moisture content.  The traditional New England woodpile has two stable “towers” on either end, leaning inwards slightly and built from even-sized, flat-bottomed sticks crisscrossed in the manner of cribbing. So that the bottom layer of wood doesn’t rot, smart stackers put their piles on treated-wood runners or shipping pallets. For the right air circulation, the sticks should be piled, as an old saying goes, tight enough to let a mouse through, but not enough for the cat chasing him.

The long, squared-off woodpile is a classic sight, but a rival style has its adherents. Variously ascribed to Scandinavians or Shakers, the round pile has the advantage of being quicker to build, more stable, and able to shed water more effectively. In one popular version, sticks are arranged in an 8-foot diameter circle; as the pile rises, all the irregular and hard-to-stack pieces (sometimes called “chunks”) are thrown into the hollow inside.  For further stability, poles fashioned from saplings are laid across the circle at intervals to act as tie-rods. Finished off with a cone-shaped top and covered with a tarp or thick shingles for rain protection, this is an eye-catching way to stock up for cold nights.

Whatever the shape of your woodpile, if you’re buying instead of chopping, make sure you get what you pay for. A true cord of wood is 4 feet high, 4 feet deep, and 8 feet long — 128 cubic feet. Many wood sellers offer what’s known as a “face cord,” which is 4 feet high and 8 feet long alright, but only a stick’s length deep, usually 16 inches -- one third of a true cord. So misleading is this practice that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts mandates that “cordwood” be defined as being 4 feet long, that “firewood” only be offered for sale in cubic feet or meters, and that “the terms ‘cord’, ‘face cord’, ‘pile’, ‘truckload’… shall not be used in the advertising and sale of cordwood or firewood.”

As both a libertarian and a tightfisted Yankee, Thoreau would have be conflicted by such a law. For Bay Staters in the grips of a tight economy, however, it can only increase the affection with which they regard their woodpiles.