Patriot Barn Cherry


Every piece of wood tells a story—if you know how to read it. Sandy East, owner of American Antique Lumber, harvested the wood for the Cherry topsheets from an old dairy barn in the Ohio River Valley. The wood is more than 600 years old, which means it was growing long before Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World. “You can tell the quality of the wood from the older barns vs barns built after 1870,” East said. “There’s a difference in how they tooled stuff, too.”

Cherry—prized for its smooth-grained, reddish-brown hue and lustrous patina—was traditionally used in making furniture, and it’s unusual to find it in a timber, which makes this wood fairly rare. “The pioneers probably didn’t care as long as they had a straight tree,” East said. And because the canopy was so dense back then, the trees all grew straight to get to the sunlight. “The pioneers that built this barn were probably opportunists who just grabbed the trees closest to the building site, which in this case happened to be cherry.”

For more about East and his historic hardwoods, read our recent interview with him.

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