Spruce with a Story
Every piece of wood has a story. The lives some pieces have as “wood” are almost as long as the life of the tree it came from. Those pieces are special and I like to share the story behind them when I know it. I have a few such pieces of Spruce in my collection and have begun making the first instrument from it, which means it is time to share.
The material and the story behind it comes to me from Bruce Harvie. Bruce has been an important part of the tonewood world for over 40 years with his company Orcas Island Tonewoods in the Pacific Northwest. A while back, I purchased a pallet of hand split California Sitka Spruce Cello billets from Bruce and he included a few that were much older, coming from Alaska via a man named Fred Meyer.
In the 1940’s-1950’s logging was the main happening around Prince of Wales Island, Alaska and bridges were a necessary part of that operation. One of the ways to build them was to drop four Sitka Spruce logs across a river crossing, each five feet in diameter and bolt them together, then lay smaller logs across the top perpendicular to the main support logs to create a drivable surface. Quick and dirty, but not great for longevity. In the 1970’s and 1980’s many of the bridges were decommissioned or replaced. Because the logs were bolted together, they were ineligible for milling and were often just abandoned nearby, ends rotten and spot rot creeping in, incredible old growth Sitka going to waste.
Fred Meyer, who was a school teacher and Viola player in the Coffman Cove area of Prince of Wales Island recognized the opportunity and created a tonewood supply business out of saving these logs beginning in the late 1970’s. According to Bruce, this decision led Fred to become an important figure in the tonewood world, though today he might not get the recognition that he deserves. Because of the bolts, spot rot, and remote locations, salvaging these logs meant using a chainsaw to cut rounds and a froe to hand split instrument billets. The practice was old school and largely abandoned by tonewood suppliers after the industrial revolution. Fred reintroduced the practice to the tonewood supply and emphasized the importance of hand split wood for instrument construction. He also introduced the concept of labeling logs and would use colored candle wax to seal the end grain and identify the split billets as belonging to a particular log. Customers could expect some consistency when ordering because the material they were requesting was from the same log.
A couple hundred years as a tree, a couple of decades as a bridge, a couple more decades air drying as a hand split Cello billet, now I have the good fortune to turn it into a tool for making music for its next life.
