My Love Affair with Southern Yellow Pine

Southern Longleaf yellow pine, pitch pine or old growth pine are other names for the very popular Heart Pine. From flooring to furniture and cabinetry, many people across the country are rediscovering the natural beauty of Heart Pine. Given the name because of the high content of heart wood, Heart Pine is different from other pines because of the tight growth ring pattern and its unique red - amber color.
The history of heart pine begins in the south where virgin forests of Longleaf Pine covered nearly 70 million acres of the southeastern coastal plain of the United States.
Averaging 150 miles in width, these majestic forests ran from Virginia to central Florida, and westward along the gulf coast as far west as Texas. Many of these trees reached to heights of 175 feet and took from 150 - 400 years to mature. Logs were floated up the Mississippi River to Iowa, and it was the wood of choice in houses built before 1900.

My first personal relationship with yellow pine started almost two years ago when we bought a 1905 four-square house that had wonderful yellow pine woodwork--almost none of it painted--and while it is a simple house, the woodwork made it look magnificent.
More recently we bought an 1860 farmhouse, which used to have 20 foot lengths of 5 1/4" yellow pine boards laid right on the joists--no subflooring, just planks of wood holding up the floor--thank goodness the house is completely over built! But alas, underneath the carpet and the period-inappropriate tile, most of the floors were quite damaged, or worse, they had been replace with plywood. Just our luck, there was a drought on yellow pine flooring at every salvage place in Eastern Iowa--I did manage to buy about 400 square feet from an 1880 farmhouse that had been torn down, but that wasn't nearly enough. My husband managed to find quite a lot of yellow pine flooring that had been salvaged from an old school being torn down, and we were in business. The floors are absolutely gorgeous--a beautiful grain, and the wood looks warm and inviting when finished.