![]() ![]() “The character of the wood grain was different from what I had ever seen before. “I was blown away at the quantity and quality of the wood in those stacks of lumber,” he said. As it turned out, a man in Mullins had just torn down his 1913 house and wanted to sell the wood. John recalls flipping through newspapers and scouring ads for construction material. “It’s a nice place now, but at the time, it needed a ton of work.” “10 years ago, my wife and I moved into our current house,” he said. John remembers the moment he first became smitten. ![]() “When surrounded with all that history, sometimes you can really feel what it would have been like to live here 100 years ago.” All that growth, coupled with wide girths, meant massive oaks, chestnuts and other hardwoods. In antique photos, West Virginia loggers casually pose by 200-foot giants. He’s talking about the mammoth trees that used to pepper our mountains. “Wood is a renewable resource, but timber like that will never be harvested again.” “West Virginia’s virgin timber has been gone since the 1920s,” he said. There’s a mysterious beauty all its own: durable and tough, but lined with delicate whorls and ripples. John Petretich, owner of Virgin Timber in Oak Hill, is awed and humbled by wood- the older, the better. Whether recycling pioneer cabins or commissioning salvaged pieces, they’re preserving our past, one beam at a time. Our story.īut what happens to American history if these fragile structures disappear?Ī few Southern West Virginia companies are making sure that doesn’t happen. What they left behind- cabins, barns, shanties- tells their story. ![]() That can-do spirit inspired settlers to spread across America’s frontier and fight the odds. Independence- it’s what makes our country great. ![]()
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