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By Eugene J. McCarthy
I met over the holidays a friend who had recently moved from Minnesota to Washington, D.C. He had just gone through his first experience of buying fireplace wood in Georgetown, and had found that his experience with wood, its measurement, type, and quality in Minnesota was quite useless in Georgetown.
Having observed the wood trade from both ends of the line—that of a purchaser in Georgetown, and, not as a producer but as an observer of producers in Rappahannock County, I attempted to explain the whole matter to him.
I grew up in a rural community in Minnesota where wood was used for fuel, and I knew from experience, sustained by an education in which measures such as pecks and gills were still taught, that a cord of wood contained 128 cubic feet of wood, allowing for some air spaces, and that the common practice was to measure a cord of wood as four feet by four feet, by eight feet.
My first surprise in buying wood in Georgetown when I moved there, as my friend had, was that a cord of wood was still four feet high, roughly eight feet in length, but that in width it was only eighteen inches. I also found that wood was sold as measured in ricks, racks, which in Minnesota were measures of hay, and cribs, which were measures of com. The measurement depended on the dimensions of the pickup truck from which the wood was delivered. The exact volume of wood in a rick, rack, or crib, I had never found out. The sellers did allow a prospective buyer to make a quick judgment by eye and then decide whether the price was right.
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