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tive of these mountains, who earns most of his living creating fine furniture in Peter Kramer’s shop. Chris Bird grew up in Washington D.C. and graduated from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. He initiates bold projects, like training draft horses and building timber-frame homes.
Mr. Bird’s self-designed, selfbuilt house reflects his eclectic interests: hand-hewn walnut beams across the ceiling; local granite shaped into counter tops; a mammoth stone fireplace that he assembled. On the hearth lies a heavyduty magazine, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Nearby shelves are crowded with books ranging from farming to philosophy.
Mr. Bird likes to take his operation to the customer’s woods, where he’ll seek out standing dead trees if possible. “Why cut five ones,” he says, “when there’s plenty of dead ones to use?” This fits his desire to treat Mother Earth as kindly as possible.
Mr. Bird can log the modern way—with his tractor, front-end loader and heavy-duty truck—or he can bring his draft horses into action, if the trees are on inaccessible slopes or if the landowners want as little damage as possible to their land. <
“Chris handles a higher volume than I do,” explains Mr. Dwyer, as he positions a church beam before his blade. “I have to work slowly with much of the wood I get.” Mr. Dwyer got into sawmilling out of a desire to control, start to finish, the wood he uses in cabinetmaking.
He has been sawing beams from dismantled churches and cotton mills this spring because there’s a fellow from Louisa, Dan Ward, who runs around the South scrounging these materials and bringing them to Mr. Dwyer for sawing.
“A lot of people don’t want to saw wood like this because it’s full of nails and ruins their blades,” Mr. Ward says. “But Sam will do it, because he loves saving the wood. ” ,
Mr. Dwyer said the Ward job would probably force him to change his blades at least three times in a single day. Not only did the wood have nails, it was gritty on the outside and extremely hard. It was the heartwood of first-growth, long-leaf yellow pine—a wood gone forever, except as salavaged from old buildings.
Mr. Dwyer’s blade trimmed off the gray beam, revealing stunning orange and red streaks in the yellow grain of the wood underneath. He ran his hand over it. “Have you ever seen anything so pretty?” he mused.
Mr. Dwyer, his wife and young
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