Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Help with identifying wood species

Take a piece and sand it clean and take it to your nearest Woodcraft store. If its like the ones we have they'll tell you pretty darn quick. Then give 1 million dollars cash to the fire member who guessed right.

my first thought was chestnut, based on the age.
(but I don't need the million dollar reward, got plenty of money)

Phil 4:19

it looks like a very strait cut, and a very strait board...............I have no way of knowing about saw mills...but those cuts look really sharp for an old saw........but just guessing.

Chestnut. The location bumps the odds to chestnut a bunch.

I'm with the chestnut crowd. Many of the older homes here were chestnut, as it was very plentiful and popular many, many years ago.

If it were further south, I'd say cypress... Especially given the red tones and wood density.

central Missouri, The latitude is not that far off or distance wise, I’ll go with cypress too

That’s where the guys are see that ‘pine’ reference.


Along the Mississippi there’s a lot of cypress swamps. There’s hella cypress swamps in west Tn.

You want to build a barn out of wood that insects and fungus don’t favor,

My guess would be oak because it is far superior for strength and with a beam in a barn that would be the most logical choice. Lots of oak available in that region. The small size of the growth rings on one piece shown in the link is indicator that it is more likely a hardwood.

I would like to point out that Chestnut is one of four American woods that are called open grain ring pourous woods. The others are Oak, Ash and Hickory. All have these open rings. I might have seen some rings in the far right piece of wood in the picture of three pieces. Hard to tell if those rings were present in the large beam.


I looked at all the pictures and the detail isn't there. Some fine sanding is needed to properly see the grain. Perhaps you can sand a few pieces down to 220 grit and show them again? Quench the wood with water and quickly take the pictures. Any finish that darkens the wood makes it harder to study.

Cypress makes sense, given the location, and it may well be. We work with cypress quite a bit, even had a load from S. Illinois a few years ago. But it doesn't look like cypress to me. Judging by the end cut pic, I'm going with Longleaf Pine, final answer.

Looks like chestnut

I was going to say chestnut. But I looked at several maps of the original range of the chestnut tree. These maps show that the chestnut did not grow in Missouri.
Are the maps wrong?

I looked that earlier. You’d have a drive passed a lot of other species and mills to get chestnut.

Of course there always trains

His wood looks more ‘clear’ than corse grain and wormy characteristics of chestnut

Yes that is the map I saw. I am in the NC mountains we had lots of chestnut. I have some chestnut 1x12s, and 2x4s, that I got off an old barn.
Chestnut was widely used around here for log cabins, and for timbers and beams.

They said that in the fall the nuts lay six inches deep beneath the chestnut trees, a feast for deer, bears, and turkeys and hogs.
What a disaster that the chestnut forests were destroyed.

I’m pretty sure there was chestnut in the Ozarks and foothills of Missouri/Arkansas before the plague although Hickory was the commercial wood then.

What about fir?

Not all and even most chestnut was not wormy. Chestnut was not just used locally it was shipped all over the country. In the areas that it grew there were more chestnut trees than both red and white oak.

Might be from an Ozark Chinquapin. Wood was probably very similar to a Chestnut, of which it is a cousin. I still see small trees here but they never get very big as they suffer from the same blight as the Chestnut. They get to a small tree or large bush and then die back, and then sprout from the roots and go through the cycle again. Found on on my place last fall that was bearing nuts. miles

I don’t know bout no “winner winner chicken dinner”

I’m just not seeing ‘this’

Pics of chestnut below

Is what you have heavy or light?

Subjective question, for some. Depends on how much lumber you work with.