I forgot that I pulled this old pine stump out of the ground a couple years ago. It's been sitting by my wood shed covered in leaves and pine straw. It's very heavy and appears to be solid fat wood. I started slicing away at it and that's exactly what it is. Smells strong and lights quickly. A recent post some of you were talking about this and that made me remember about this stump.
Thanks so much for posting this! I’ve always wondered what Fatwood looked like in its natural state. By the time I get it, it’s uniformly split and sealed in a bag.
It seems to be solid. Very heavy and hasn't turned punky like most pine that lays on the ground. I sliced off about 50 or so small pieces and that was only off a small chunk that I removed from this piece. The hoarder in me wants to find more but this alone will last a lifetime!!
I thought it was cool too. I'd been watching youtube videos about collecting fat wood but I never really realized what part of the tree it was coming from. One guy was taking off branches and finding it where the branch met the tree but this is much easier and probably more condensed.
Yes.......lights quickly and is not easy to put out. I was able to shake a piece back and forth and it kept on burning. Finally went out when I blew really hard on it.
Same here....it doesn't take much. I light it and surround with a couple pine cones and build kindling around it and start my fires from the top down method.
There was an industry in Brunswick, Georgia back when I was in High School there that rendered down Pine roots and stumps to make turpentine, rosin and other organic solvents and materials (all flammable). It was either "Hercules", probably, or "Allied Chemical" can't remember which (T.Jeff Veal would know). Their railroad yards would be full of open hopper cars of massive fatwood root balls and stumps that had been dredged from swamps throughout the South. The swamps had been logged many years past but the stumps and roots were preserved by the turpentines and tars. The aromatic turpentine smell permeated the surrounding countryside for miles around. My guess is that the resource eventually played out and the industry may not be there anymore. Whenever we camped around the Altamaha or Satilla river basins, we would first look for fatwood stumps to start the camp fires. Here in Doug Fir country where I am now, I find sections of fatwood in my firewood that smell similar and whisk me back to those teenage years. Such aromatic sections of wood nowadays go immediately into my kindling cache. Gotta love a thick piece of kindling that lights with the touch of a match and burns like a paraffin fire starter!
It was Hercules back then...70's -80's... We went by the plant in '19, it had changed names It was in operation until recently. Had a fire, it's closed.
The trees that made fatwood or "fat lighter" as it's called down in Dixie, we're old growth long leaf and slash pines, they were huge...I've seen one tree that was still 40' tall. This was a big stump that we cut up, carried it to Backwoods Savage GTG in '19. Gave some away as door prizes... cut pieces... we still have 1 stump about that size
