Hoping some of the gurus on here can help identify what species of wood I am dealing with...
Fireplace mantel and beam project that I need to try and match some wood for to add additional beams.

These are pieces from the ones currently in place. Reclaimed from an old barn in central Missouri...

The one that has the warm reddish tint has boiled linseed oil applied to it.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!

More pictures here - https://www.24hourcampfire.com/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php/galleries/14694366/wood-beam

Can you show pictures of a Cut end of it?

Looks like pine to me.

Pictures on the left look like red oak take a look at the heart of it!

Its chestnut i think,,,the old growth chestnut been extinct in missouri for decades,,but used to be one of the most common lumber types in the ozarks till the plague got it

It is definitely not oak... not heavy or dense enough.
Here is an image of a freshly cut piece. The beam it came from was said be over 100 years old.

I didn't think about chestnut. It does have a blonde color when cut, and a honey tone when boiled linseed oil is applied to the freshly exposed wood.
The red and dark tints on the piece above are what happens when I take a draw knife to the aged surface.

+1

My first thought was some species of pine.

Can it be longleaf pine? Didn’t it look like that? Not much longleaf pine left.

I'm by no means of wood expert but I pushed many many acres of brush with the Dozer and I burn firewood 365 days a year in a wood boiler in Southwest Missouri Premier II post picture it could be Sycamore but I wouldn't argue stronger than any case

Pretty light?

Soft?

Any cedar odor to it?


Almost looks like cedar to me. I have seen cedar 6x6 posts that look a lot like that when ripped. May be completely wrong too.

Were those peices cut from a large support beam for a structure?

What part of the country are they from?

Good guess. If it is cedar it was a big one. Look at the rings in the section that was cut. But definitely hard to say without an up close look and touch. Cedar Elm? Don't know where this is.

I still think it looks like pine though.

The original beam came from a barn in central Missouri that was over 100 years old.
It was 14 foot long and 6" x 8". I have attached a picture of what it originally looked like, and what it looks like now... which is why I am trying to match it.
The mantle is half of the original 6" x 8" beam. The sides are other half, split to make two 4" x 6".
And now that it's a year and a half later, the wife wants me to 'finish out' the framing and take the top all the way to the ceiling...

Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

Could very well be chestnut. Doesn't look like pine at all to me...I'm staring at a heart pine mantel as a I type this.

Cannot be 100% but odds are very high it is chestnut. Close-ups of the end grain and a quarter-sawn surface would be very helpful and would raise the odds a bit. But chestnut is way ahead.

The red really makes it look like cedar. Dont know if thats lighting or what, but if i were you and I'm no expert by any means id go with pine and do a faux stain and distress job to match. Just my opinion. Plumbers torch is a handy tool too for these kinda jobs.

Looks like chestnut to me. Would be a lot easier to be sure if I could feel how heavy and hard it is and what it smells like but just from the pics I'd say chestnut.

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.

I’m focusing on this pic the OP posted

Tight, clear grain.

Compared to both white and red oak beams of similar age and size, it is lighter.
Lighter would apply to both physical weight and wood density

Man that is some pretty stuff. That’s POST blight lumber. Fairly heavy stuff in comparison to softer woods.
I think the OP mentioned the beam he had didn’t feel to dense. And from the sawed picture, I am gonna go with a softer, moisture-bug resistant wood like a cedar or Cyprus too.

Looks a whole lot like Beech to me based on that photo.

That’s the pic that I made my final guesstimation with.

That reflective ‘sheen’ midways down on the right sells me in for or cypress



But...just my opinion and what my eyes are seeing.
Ask 20 people get 20 different answers

Nothing against it, just trying to do ones best via a picture. If I could hold it and gouge a fingernail into, any of us could make a more educated stab at it.

I’m still thinking longleaf pine. It was almost like oak. They made lots of large beams out of it. It covered most of the southern states. Logged out by the 1920’s.

In 1900, Southern Yellow Pine was what concrete blocks are today.
Twenty years ago they tore down an old cotton mill in Macon Georgia. The thing was timber framed with giant 16x16 yellow pine timbers.
They set up a sawmill in the corner of the plant, and they would cut you whatever kind of plank you wanted. Heart pine.
This mill had been built in 1880.
My buddy and I went over, he got some 2x4s and some 1x12s to build some stairs with.

I counted the growth rings in one of those beams, and it went back at least 220 years. These giant trees were growing a century before the American Revolution.

Maps are not wrong. But... A lot of chestnut came down the Ohio made carrying people and belongings to get to Missouri on the way west.

Same piece of cut-off... two sections fast sanded to 180
Pictures pretty much suck but they are the best I can do for now

The fact that it was a load carrying beam, and the flat sanding, vs. Developing ridges in the slow growth sections suggest to me that it is not pine or cedar.

If a lot of trees are growing in an are where the barn stood I've gut my doubts about imported or shipped wood. Maybe for a wealthy persons home but not likely a barn as long as trees were close by.

In the hand hewn, mortise & tenon days, logs usually came from no further away that you'd want to drag one with a team of horses. Other than Chestnut, which is gone, look around the area where the barn stood & see what trees stand now.

These are the recommendations of some of the local historians when questions arise as to the construction of original log homes that dot the area.

Southern Yellow Pine is very good for beams. Look up the charts, it is as strong as oak in the beam configuration.

Kind of looks like cotton wood to me. Long leaf pine is rather heavy. Sycamore is also heavy. Poplar and cotton wood is a lot lighter in weight. I never used cypress so can't comment on that, but lack of bug holes could be a clue.

Cottonwood would not be good for a beam.

You sure know a lot about wood. Do you happen to have any extra stocks laying around?

Thanks for taking the time to sand those pieces. Definitely not oak or chestnut. Grain is very plain and uniform.

It might just be southern yellow pine: Southern yellow pine (SYP) consists of four major species: loblolly, slash, longleaf and shortleaf. ... This fast-growing species produces some of the strongest wood in North America. Structural uses, such as roof trusses and decking, are the more common uses for this wood.

Lets say it is yellow pine. Easy to google what is similar.

Its not Pine or youd smell it,,same as Oak,, its not osage orange,persimmon or wild cherry or pecan, Cypress is not common in the area OP says it comes from, chinqupine or post oak usually has a twisted grain Not Hickory either,, chestnut ,Ash,elder is best bet

I’m curious to know what it is!!

Can you dig a fingernail into it and gouge it pretty easy?

Being in Missouri and that age they mostly just cut trees and made lumber in those days...one of our Old barns had a walnut Beem ...my dad saved it when he tore down the barn..

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That's wormy and has a different grain configuration due to the way it was sawed.

This is true ....but it didn't stop the old timers from building with what they had.. We had a lot of old barns and houses built with rough cut cotton wood...in those days that was just about the only trees around here in Nebraska..
As for central Missouri there were plenty of better choices...

When looking at the end grain, do the pores seem to be the same size throughout the cross section, or are they larger in the area of the growth rings?

That is true, not too many extra trees in Nebraska. And my great great grandfather homesteaded in South Dakota in 1882. I always wondered where they got wood for building a house.