The strength and toughness of elm make it suitable for frames of tables.
When thus used, it is generally out of sight, but not infrequently it is
made into table legs as well as frames. Statistics show that more than a
million feet are manufactured yearly into handles in Michigan alone. All
three of the northern elms--white, cork, and slippery--are listed in the
handle industry.
Many millions of feet of elm are yearly converted into automobile
stock--3,000,000 in Michigan. Horse-drawn vehicles take more. The most
common place for it is the hub, but it serves also as shafts, poles,
reaches, and even as spokes for wagons of the largest size.
The important place in the slack cooperage industry held by elm is well
known. It is a flour barrel wood, but is employed for barrels of many
other kinds. It stands high as veneer, not the kind of which the visible
parts of furniture are made, but the invisible interior, built up of
veneer sheets glued together. A similar kind of veneer forms the boxes
or frames of trunks--the part to be covered by metal, leather, or cloth.
The slats which strengthen the outside of trunks are frequently of elm.
This wood is not in favor for one important purpose, hardwood
distillation. It has escaped pretty generally also from being employed
as a farm material, on account of its poor lasting qualities. Some
slippery elm was mauled into fence rails in the pioneer days of Ohio,
Indiana, and southern Michigan, but that was only because it was
plentiful and convenient. Cork elm probably never made a fence rail,
because it is so unwedgeable that no rail splitter would have anything
to do with it. At the best, it is but a temporary makeshift as fence
posts, but by applying creosote and other preservative treatments to
lessen decay, it measures up with most other post woods.
The elms are not indispensable woods in this country, but their
exhaustion, should it ever come, will leave many places hard to fill. As
far as known, no woodlots of any species of elm have been planted in
this country, and there is little prospect that any will be planted,
because the slow growth of the trees discourages foresters. A century
or two is a long look ahead.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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