Precious wood recovered from old JI Case warehouse
Much of timber is southern longleaf pine from 19th century
RACINE - It’s not often you find the wooden equivalent of a hidden stash of gold amid industrial ruins of the northern Midwest.
But that’s exactly what Jeff Janson says he has found in some early 20thcentury JI Case steam engine and thresher machine warehouse buildings being dismantled here.
Janson is co-owner of Urban Evolutions, an Appleton-based company that is reclaiming timber from the project located along the Root River about a half-mile west of where it flows into Lake Michigan in Racine.
The timber in the buildings is more than a bunch of old, junk wood.
Much of the timber is 19th-century old-growth, longleaf pine from slowgrowing forests that once covered an estimated 92 million acres of the South — roughly from east Texas to southern Virginia.
The forests were all but wiped out in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by rapidly growing America’s demand for lumber.
“You can’t buy it. The only place to find it is in a reclamation project,” Janson said. “We think it’s really high quality, and I think our customers were really shocked to find it here.”
Count Shawn Burks, owner of Antique Woods of Louisiana, based in Baton Rouge, among those customers.
“It’s a precious commodity. It’s like gold or silver,” Burks said. “I think it’s more precious than silver and gold, personally.”
Also known as “heart pine,” the timber at the site — including massive 10inch-by-10-inch, 1,000-pound structural beams and 2-by-11, 200-pound floor joists — is being reclaimed as part of the dismantling of the old warehouses.
“The tensile strength of it, it’s just tremendously strong,” Burks said. “It’s just a premium wood. It’s old-growth, tight-ringed, beautiful material.”
The trees from which the timbers
were made, “were a minimum 200 years old,” Burks added. “We’ll never see that quality of longleaf again.”
Janson is hoping to harvest 2 million board feet of the timber from the site.
“This is like a needle in a haystack, this building,” Janson said, while working at the site on recent cold, gray December morning. “The longleaf pine is really sought after.”
“It’s as hard as oak. It’s as heavy as oak,” Janson added.
Trend drives demand
These days, being old, green and sustainable is cool. There are a number of television shows, such as “Barnwood Builders,” that focus on the process of giving new life to reclaimed materials.
“The thirst for these products has grown exponentially across the country and the world just because of the feel and the look of it,” Burks said. “But even more than that, it’s sustainable, it’s green.
“I tell people I was green before green was cool. It’s a passion of mine.” The same goes for Janson.
“We wouldn’t be in business if we weren’t saving the resources...” Janson said. “From barns to factories to schools that can’t be used anymore — we are able to save those and repurpose the material for a variety of things.”
Janson said he is hoping the timber being pulled from the warehouses will end up being used in projects across the U.S. and the world.
“If you look at the color and patina, it has a richness to it,” he said. “With an oil finish, it’s really going to pop.
He’s also reaching out to customers who he hopes will see value in the reclaimed products. “I have a customer in Japan, I’m waiting to hear from him,” Janson said.
“We really consider ourselves material design partners,” Janson added. “We want our designers to feel like we can help make them shine.”
Value hard to estimate
The monetary value of the wood is tough to calculate.
Reclamation companies such as Janson’s pay for the salvage rights to a building. Then they sell what they salvage to customers. Whatever is left after all the expenses are deducted is the profit on the job.
The price often depends on whatever Janson and his customers negotiate.
Potential bidders are allowed to take samples of wood in a building before they bid on a reclamation project. But in huge, multi-story warehouses, it’s impossible to sample every piece of lumber.
Based on samples he had analyzed at a laboratory, Janson said he had “a pretty good idea,” about the presence of the longleaf pine before he bid. He also had to agree to buy all the wood in the buildings, no matter the species.
He will have to find buyers for all of it. “There’s always risk,” Janson said. If much of the wood had been white pine or hemlock, for example, “I’d be in trouble,” he said.
He also reached out to customers before he bid to see if they were interested in the longleaf lumber.
“Before we signed on the dotted line, we had customers lined up,” he said.
“I’m wholesaling some of it and some
of it I’m selling retail,” Janson added. Urban Evolutions has a showroom at 2401 W. College Ave., in Appleton. Janson co-owns the company with his wife, Robin.
Painstaking process
It’s Janson’s job to evaluate each piece of lumber reclaimed from the old warehouses. Every timber is assigned a number and a grade. Then it’s bundled and shipped to customers.
“I think we’re getting close to 3,000 (timbers) that we have recovered to date,” he said.
Janson has so far lined up customers from Louisiana, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia and Montana.
Janson is a subcontractor reclaiming the wood on the project. The general contractor is Veit & Co. Inc. (Veit is also participating in the dismantling of the BMO Harris Bradley Center in downtown Milwaukee.)
Janson is working with crews from Recyclean, a Kenosha-based reclamation company, to reclaim the timber.
In addition to reclaiming what is estimated will be 2 million board feet of timber, Urban Evolutions is also seeking to recover 250,000 board feet of factory maple flooring.
And, Recyclean owner Mike Goffman and his crews are also recycling all the bricks from the warehouses. Goffman expects to recover close to 3 million bricks from the project.
“We’re recycling 80 percent to 90 percent” of the buildings on the site, Janson said, including all the metal in the buildings.
It’s tough, sometimes dirty and strenuous work.
“A lot of people look down on laborers,” Goffman said. “We pay them well. We treat them with respect.” Wages for his crew members start at $16 an hour.
Dismantling the old buildings is part of the process of eventually redeveloping the site.
An unusual find
Even though nearly everything in the buildings is being recycled or repurposed, the timber is Janson’s focus.
“We have about 200 semi loads of lumber between now and April 1 to move off that site, which is no small task,” he said.
The southern longleaf pine ending up in massive warehouses in the northern U.S. was not an accident, Burks said.
“It’s very unusual for longleaf to be in that part of the country,” he said. “So, there was an engineer or an architect on the job that spec’d out longleaf and got it there.”
“I don’t know what forest it came out of, but I’m projecting southern Virginia, maybe into Tennessee or the Carolinas,” Burks added.
(Burks, by the way, is a former linebacker for the NFL’s Washington Redskins. He was inactive the one time he had the chance to play against the Green Bay Packers at Lambeau Field. “I stood on the sideline in street clothes,” he said.)
Big machines and ‘The Poky Little Puppy’
The massive buildings were constructed in 1909 and served as warehouses for Case threshing machines and steam engines, said Gerald Karwowski, a local historian in Racine who operates the RacineHistory.com website.
When an order was received, it was pulled from the warehouse, loaded on flatbed rail cars and shipped all over the world, Karwowski said.
“It was like a big Amazon,” he said. But the history of the buildings doesn’t end with Case, Karwowski said.
By the 1950s, Case had moved to more modern facilities elsewhere in Racine County.
Western Publishing moved into the warehouses and converted them to manufacturing and distribution of its products, which included the Little Golden Books brand of children’s books. Among its most famous titles is “The Poky Little Puppy.”
“They put a second life into those buildings,” Karwowski said. “It’s a wonderful history.”
That tends to make the old timbers and flooring coming out of the buildings even more desirable.
“Our customers, they love the story, they love the history,” Janson said.
Preserving pieces of that history and keeping it out of landfills is an added bonus.
“There’s only a certain amount of these structures and buildings left,” Burks said. “None of this should ever be discarded.”