Lol. I know my wife jokes about the wood hoarders and my obsession too. She loves it though, she loves the heat from the stove, and the low utility bills.
My wife has a love hate thing with my hoarding. She loves the house being 75 all winter. She hates how I spend hours looking at this site, buying saws, cutting trees and chasing craigslist scrounges....
My wifes only complaint is when I wake her up early on the weekend to watch my daughter instead of sleeping in. She doesn't know the finances, just knows that I am the responsible one with it.
In New England the British needed White pines, Big Tall straight ones for the royal navy ship masts because those trees were no longer around in England. So, they marked such pine here with a Broadaxe meaning those trees belong to the crown. In many towns around here the colonists, some dressed up as Indians, cut down. In a nearby town they have a historical marker conveying that fact. I'm going that way this PM and will snap a pic to post later. The act of cutting them down was referred to as the "Mast Tree Riots". We New Englanders were such rascals that we started a revolution and created a new nation. You all are welcome.
I doubt there would be, the mast trees were huge, telephone pole straight trees. There was a special way they cut these prize trees, first they would cut a good road into for the special wagons they used. They were hauled by teams of 22 or so oxen. The road obviously had to be some what straight, they were not making many turns with that size of a team hauling a hundred or more foot tree. At the site of the felling, many nearby trees were felled, the brush and branches from these trees then were used to create a landing bed to prevent the huge mast Tree from breaking under it's own enormous weight when it hit the ground, which did happen, too often for the folks doing work. Broken Mast Tree means you didn't get paid. They then hauled the trees to colonial ports like Portsmouth, Bangor, & Bath were loaded on special ships of the Royal Navy to transport back to the English shipyards. So one can see with all the work and effort, how important to the British they were. A tavern just 10 miles from where I type now, was a place where settlers with the "Live free or Die" attitude, and a little rum in the mix, are said to "AHEM", have known something about who cut down the King's trees. But no one could remember their names in that tavern when questioned. The same went on in Maine as well, But at that time, Maine was not yet a state. It was on the map as "a part of Massachuesets.
Thank you for the history lesson, NH mountain man! Too bad we couldn’t turn the tide and told the British immediately that it wasn’t theirs to begin with and having them respectfully to comply but I guess we won that bloody argument.
