Our house is a one room schoolhouse, built in the 1920s (we think) that we moved to our site, and refurbished into a roughly 1000 sq ft cottage some 40 years ago. The other day I was sorting through some lumber I had salvaged and stored during the renovation, and came across a piece of fir window trim 6" X 48", 5/4 fir. It's pretty interesting. Not the fantastic vertical grain fir from the outer rings of massive Douglass Fir that you sometimes see salvaged from giant beams, but rather a piece with growth rings that look to have come from a bole that was 20" diameter bole at the interface between sapwood and heartwood. Roughly 90 rings/inch, so if the tree really was 20" in diameter, a 900 year old tree. I've sawn some 250+ year old oak from our place, from trees that had their tops blown out in a tornado, and found that impressive. There are 700+ year old trees near here, but they are scrubby little Eastern Red Cedars growing on dry rocky bluffs, steep enough that they weren't worth the trouble of fencing and grazing. Nothing remotely comparable to a 900 year old Douglass Fir.
Planing it down to get a surface I could count rings on brought the rich aroma of old Doug Fir that to me is the definition of what a lumber Y\yard used to smell like, when I was a kid, and the lumber yard was a magic place. All in all, a trip back in time.
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