After felling five ash trees in the vicinity of Rosslyn’s icehouse and carriage barn with precision and arboreal poetry Aaron and Tony passed the baton to Phil and Calvin. There are still stumps to be ground down and logs to be split into firewood, but our ash logs have migrated one step closer to their destiny as homegrown lumber, stump-to-barn paneling for a future building that still exists only in the gray matter between my ears.
Over the last 17-1/2 years we have repurposed plenty of Rosslyn trees into timber, but we’ve always hired sawyers who transported their portable sawmills to us, milled the timber onsite, and left us with a stack of drying lumber that we would transform into floors, furniture, finish trim, and even docks and gates without the wood having ever left Rosslyn’s property.
Frankly, it’s been a source of pride. Often the end product exists only yards from where it grew over decades. No transporting hither and yon. No warehousing. No tractor trailering. From stump-to-floor. From stump-to-table. And so on.
But this time we’ve made a difficult decision to try something different. We’ve elected to mill the logs offsite in order to 1) reduce the impact upon the property while we’re trying to button up loose ends, and to 2) better align this scope of work with a new construction project that will [hopefully] take place on another property north of Rosslyn.
And so it is that Phil and Calvin spent today muscling logs onto their trucks with the brawn of an excavator (and the finesse of an adept operator), then hauling them to Elizabethtown where they will be milled by Roger Denton. I look forward to seeing the results of this collaborative effort. Until then, many thanks, Phil and Calvin.
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