Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Joe Wilp climbs a narrow ladder, seats himself in a little crow’s-nest chair, and pulls levers. A greedy metal claw plucks a rough-barked log at least 3 feet in diameter from the truck bed, swings it in midair for a few seconds, and then, like a considerate monster, sets it carefully on a woodpile. Once the truck’s empty, Wilp uses a forklift to prod and topple a giant log from the pile, goes in sideways to scoop it up, and drives it to the back of the Lumber Logs lot, where his saw’s motor is already chugging. The blade rises, and he shoves the log off the forklift, rolling and nudging. A tan blizzard of sawdust swirls in the sunlight as the blade glides horizontally through the log, easy as your grandma’s cheese slicer through Velveeta.
“All right, now, this is the best part,” Wilp announces. “It’ll look like just a plain log, and then you open it up and it’s absolutely fantastic.” Like a pathologist doing an autopsy, he lifts off the top and carefully brushes away the sawdust to show off the “flame” that signals a crotch where two branches emerged. The tree was a Siberian elm, and the grain is spectacular. “The wood’s darker than American elm,” he notes. “They got wiped out with Dutch elm disease.”
All of the wood at Lumber Logs comes from “the St. Louis forest”—new subdivisions, cemeteries, parks, anyplace trees have to come down. The idea hit Tom Sontag, a woodworker, when he was trying to source boards for his own projects. He could provide a free service by picking up logs that would otherwise wind up mulched or tossed in a landfill, send the low-quality stuff (pin oak, tulip poplar) to a mill to make pallets and blocking, and (with some help, meaning Wilp) saw the primo wood into boards they could sell. All they’d need would be some serious equipment and a way to dry the wood.
“The beauty of what we do is, there aren’t old-growth trees that big in the wild,” Wilp says. “In residential areas, they get huge, because they don’t get touched.” Also, we’re “hardwood heaven,” Sontag adds, “in terms of the trees woodworkers get most excited about—white oak, walnut, cherry.We’ve got them all.”
Lumber Logs specializes in wide boards, green wood (for an ancient throwback style of woodworking), and live edge (slabs that retain the irregular bark-covered edge). Live edge is hot right now—it gets lacquered up for conference tables and home dining—so they keep plenty on hand. “People love it because it’s real, it’s natural, it’s authentic,” says Sontag. “You can’t find it at Target.”
True, says Wilp, but he’s afraid it’s “a bit overdone. You set one of these slabs on hairpin legs you bought on Amazon, I don’t know if you’re a woodworker yet.”
Still, any reuse beats a landfill. Once, some bags of concrete were delivered on a pallet, and they realized that the pallet had come from one of their logs. “Nobody else harvests sycamore for pallets,” Sontag explains. “We closed the circle right there.”
Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
The Lumber Logs showroom is open the first and third Saturday mornings of every month. “There’s silver maple, which is soft,” says Wilp, leading a tour. “Sugar maple’s hard, and black maple falls between them, with some really interesting color, blacks and purples.” Past the honey locust and quarter-sawn white oak, on a Not for Sale rack where he and Sontag set aside prize boards for their own woodworking, there’s a persimmon board ribboned with black. “Persimmon’s in the ebony family,” he explains, and when I exclaim at its beauty and ask why I never hear about it, he shrugs: “There’s a lot of underused hardwoods.” Another one’s mulberry, a streaky golden brown that’s gorgeous but commercially ignored because of the trees’ small size and scattered distribution. Sontag’s big discovery has been Osage orange, “one of the most rot-resistant trees on the planet,” dense and heavy, with wood that starts out a saffron yellow.
“You can use Osage orange sawdust to make dye,” adds Wilp, remembering the Easter his parents decided to use all natural coloring for their eggs. “We used green walnut hulls, too—you can boil them down and make a walnut dye, which is useful, because the color in walnut is different for each tree, so the dye can make it consistent.”
The cut wood is stacked with “stickers”—long strips of wood—between the boards for air flow. In front of one rack is a huge cherry root ball, dirt still clinging. “Turners like them,” Wilp says. “Can you smell the cherry? Sawing sassafras, I’ve had to go get a root beer—luckily, I live close to Carl’s Drive In. Sawing maple’ll make you want pancakes, hickory makes you want bacon, and sycamore smells like horseshit.”
He points to “a piece of Bradford pear that came out of Shaw Park” and logs that came from Bellefontaine Cemetery. Today he’s going to a Kirkwood residential neighborhood for a pickup. Meanwhile, our photographer, who does woodworking on the side, is eyeing a stack of walnut.
A big Missouri export, walnut is “right up there with mahogany in terms of working characteristics,” Sontag says. A friend recently asked him to repair some barstools that “came from some dismally cheap place, made from Southeast Asian softwoods that don’t react well to stress; they don’t hold their shape. The joints become loose and wobbly.”
As for IKEA, the concept makes him sigh. “There’s a place for it,” he concedes, “but it’s disposable. If it takes a tree 100 years to grow, then you should make something out of it that lasts 100 years.”
