The Bradford County Heritage Association is pleased to present a series of articles researched and prepared by Dave Lennington highlighting Bradford County’s lumber and related industries.
The ‘Heritage Village and Museum is open Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays 9 AM to 4 PM, Sundays 1PM to 4 PM.
The Pennsylvania Heritage will be held September 19 & 20, 2015 on the grounds of The Heritage Village & Museum, Troy PA. A cooperative effort of the Bradford County Heritage Association and the Troy Rotary Club. This year the event will highlight the Museum’s 2015 Timber Theme.
The Area Is Just Right For White Ash Trees,
And The Trees Are Just Right For Baseball Bats
Norton pushes on undeterred. He knows these thick northwestern Pennsylvania woods. As a boy, he planted five million Christmas trees one summer in nearby fields. Later, he helped clear ground for the Blueberry Hill Golf Club, a sparsely played course just up the road.
Walking slowly now through the 1,000-acre lot his lumber company owns, Norton points out cherry, hemlock and beech trees before he spots his prey - a 75-foot-high white ash, growing tall and straight in a damp, leafy bed of ferns and wild grasses.
``Look at that one,'' he says, whispering like a hunter with a 10-point buck in his sights. ``The light is good here, the drainage. We won't know till it's cut down, but this could be a ballplayer-quality tree. Could be a good one.''
Could be Scott Rolen's bat next season.
The picturesque spot in Warren County where Norton stood last week is at the western edge of the ``Bat Belt,'' a 50-mile-wide, hardwood-rich area stretching 200 miles along the Pennsylvania-New York border. This isolated region, bounded by Route 17 to the north and Interstate 80 to the south, is to white ash and bats what Bordeaux is to grapes and wine.
``Over the millennium, the atmospheric and soil conditions just developed there to the point where they are perfect for white ash,'' said Paul Blankenhorn, a professor of wood technology at Penn State's College of Agriculture. ``And white ash is perfect for bats.''
For much of the past century, nearly all the wooden baseball bats in the world, those swung by everyone from Mize to Mays to McGwire, have been cut from hearty white ash trees, Americanus pennsylvanius, in these woods.
And for almost 50 years, Larimer & Norton mills, clustered between Akeley and Troy in Sullivan County, have been converting the best of them into billets - 40-inch-long tubes of pristine wood - that are then shipped to Hillerich & Bradsby's bat factory in Louisville, Ky.
`Maybe 95 percent of the ash logs we mill each year won't be bat quality,'' said Norton, whose father began the company in the 1950s and soon sold it to Hillerich & Bradsby, makers of the famed Louisville Sluggers. ``And of the 5 percent that become bats, only 1 percent will become major-league bats.''
Hillerich & Bradsby still dominates the bat industry, though the popularity and durability of aluminum among amateurs have sliced wood's share of the market drastically. From a high of 7 1/2 million in the mid-1970s, only about a million wooden bats are manufactured annually now, virtually all of them from logs milled by Larimer & Norton.
Professionals have always played with wooden bats, but not always with ash.
The earliest players used heavier hickory bats almost exclusively. Over the years, hitters have tried maple, eucalyptus, oak and countless other woods. But they keep coming back to ash, with its near-perfect combination of strength, weight and elasticity.
``Weight is the real key issue now,'' Norton said. ``To get the barrel proportionately the same as on an aluminum bat, you can't go lower than 31 or 32 ounces with wood. Players want lighter bats, quicker bat speed. And ash is the strongest wood per ounce.''
When pitching improved around the turn of the century and ash began to replace heavier hickory as the hitters' choice, bats were being made from trees grown in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Florida and elsewhere. But gradually, just as the state's prized cherry wood did in the furniture industry, Pennsylvania ash prevailed.
Ash grows elsewhere - the American South, Yugoslavia, the northern islands of Japan - but nowhere is the quality as good as in northern Pennsylvania and southern New York. Ninety-five percent of the bats on the market come from the ``Bat Belt.'' Even Japan's Mizuno bats.
``The climate just seems right for them,'' said Joe Tarr, a retired forester who helped Larimer & Norton find ash trees for more than four decades. ``They are a water-loving tree, and we get plenty of snow and rain in this area. And the soil, particularly where the ground has been glaciated, is just about perfect.''
``This area used to be all hemlock and pine until it was clear-cut in the 1800s,'' said Norton, standing outside his Akeley mill and pointing to the surrounding emerald mountains. ``The cutting started in the far eastern part of the state and rolled westward. It was like a giant scythe came and cut down everything in its path. You see pictures of these totally bare hillsides and it boggles the mind.
``They used the hemlock bark for tanning back then, and pine was the dominant construction wood for buildings and ships.''
When the forests regenerated themselves, different species appeared. Oak, maple and the valuable cherry dominate now. White ash makes up only 3 to 4 percent of the trees found here. Larimer & Norton and other land owners - 84 percent of Pennsylvania's timberland is privately held - have allowed natural selection to work rather than trying to plant groves of specific trees.
``There are greater concentrations of ash in some areas,'' Norton said. ``Some of our lots may have 25 percent ash, but that's very unusual. Usually, where there has been some planned clear-cutting, the percentage of ash and cherry is higher. Ash and cherry need a lot of light. In shaded areas, thick with mature trees, ash and cherry won't regenerate. Their seeds fall on the ground, and without much light, never sprout. The oak and maple take over there.''
All of which makes finding quality white ash - which sells for $225 to $1,200 per thousand board feet - an essential task for Norton. The search is more involved than simply walking through the woods and finding a stand of ash. The best baseball-bat stock can't be judged, even by experienced foresters such as Tarr, until the trees are felled.
``It's very difficult to make a determination in the woods,'' Norton said. ``Generally, you look for a north-facing slope. The rainfall pattern in this area comes from the northwest, so the north and west slopes have better moisture. You want wet but relatively well-drained soil. You look for trees with others around it so you don't have much branching. And with ash, you can look at the bark and see whether the tree has grown up straight or twisted.''
The trees to be cut are usually at least as old as Norton, who is 53, and sometimes as old as 80. They are 70 to 80 feet high, and have a chest-high diameter of 16 to 18 inches. Once they have been felled and hauled to the mill, Norton and his employees study the grain, looking for 8 to 10 growth rings per inch, indicating a steady, healthy maturity.
``That's what the ballplayers want,'' he said, ``a nice, even grain pattern.''
But not all the ballplayers. Ted Williams, for example, liked bats made from wood in which the growth rings were tightly bunched, believing that indicated a stronger, denser wood.
``He used to go down to Louisville and pick out wood that had 25 growth rings per inch,'' said Blankenhorn, who has tested the quality of white ash for Larimer & Norton. ``And I think he might have been right. But guys like Pete Rose and modern ballplayers, they prefer a nice, evenly spaced grain.''
At the mills, a 40-foot log might produce six big-league bats, Norton said. The ash logs are split, not sawed, and converted into three categories of billets.
``Ballplayer'' quality is for major-league bats. The wood in those generally comes from the three inches closest to the bark. It's whiter, and the grain is more evenly spaced.
The next-best category, No. 1 billets, is used to make the bats sold in sporting goods stores. No. 3 billets go into furniture and tool handles. For some reason, there are no No. 2 billets.
Modern players often complain that bats don't last as long as they once did. That, according to Norton and Blankenhorn, is as much a function of physics as the quality of the wood.
``We've found that the ash is as strong as it's ever been,'' Blankenhorn said. ``But now you've got all these big guys swinging these narrow-handled bats at pitches thrown 95 miles an hour by guys 6-foot-5 and 220 pounds. That's the difference. I've looked at broken bats where the writing on the baseball left an imprint. That's how hard an impact we're talking about.''
Recently, Steve Finley of the Arizona Diamondbacks broke three bats in rapid succession and complained to Hillerich & Bradsby. The company, in turn, sent the bats to Norton for answers.
``One was bad wood. It just chopped right off,'' Norton said. ``How that got through our inspection process and Hillerich & Bradsby's, I don't know. But the other two were indicative of why more bats are broken.
``These guys all want one-inch-diameter handles. Jackie Robinson and Nellie Fox used to use 1 1/2-inch handles. Now you've got these strong kids like Finley and Scott Rolen who want to hit home runs. With aluminum bats, they could hit the ball anywhere. On a wooden bat, they've got to hit it on a six-to-eight-inch sweet spot. When they don't, the results are inevitable.''
Across the road from the mill is a farm that has gone to seed. Already the tops of young trees, some of them probably ash, are rising above the grass and weeds.
"There used to be 17 farms along this one road. Now there are none,'' Norton said. ``The small farmer is finished up here. A lot of those places could be forests in a hundred years unless something changes.''
And a hundred years from now, the bats of future Hall of Famers could be plucked from them - probably in much the same way the process works today.
`The bat business,'' Norton said, ``really hasn't changed in a hundred years.''
“The tannery at Powell was founded in 1867….”1 Greenwood was the original name of the community; it was changed to Powell “in honor of Joseph Powell of Towanda, one of the chief promoters in establishing the tannery…
Greenwood Tannery was the second largest plant of its “kind in the world.”1 It turned out “sole leather only.”1 One hundred men were employed “in the tannery and fifty men all the time in the woods.”1 The company owned “15,000 acres of timber land in Bradford and Sullivan counties….”1 The tannery consumed “12,000 tons of bark a year.”1 The company owned 16 tenant houses, a supervisor’s home, and a general store.
The following headlines were from The Daily Review •$35,000 Fire at Powell Threatens to Completely Destroy Large Tannery - June 22, 1921
• Tannery at Powell is being Torn Down -1932