The Spirit of Stacking
From Shaker rounds to ricks, here's how to build a pleasing pile of firewood.
November/December 2007
Ceylon Monroe
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Several ways to keep your firewood off the ground, neatly stacked and protected from precipitation are shown here.
Composite image by Nate Skow
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In my part of upper New England, winters are long and cold; one definition of security is a big stack of well-seasoned firewood. The urge to “get the wood in” runs deep, an itch that kicks up when the leaves begin turning in mid-August and won’t stay scratched until the snow season’s fuel supply is ready to hand.
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Some folks are satisfied with storing their fuel in haphazard heaps, but students of the stack know that firewood quality will improve with time when billets are well placed in a proper woodpile.
Building a woodpile is an art and a science. Firewood just dumped in a heap won’t dry properly or burn well. But even the toughest ash and beech fire logs will start quickly and burn efficiently if seasoned in the woods for 6 months to a year, sectioned to stove length, split and piled in the woodshed or barn for some months more. The trick to building the pile is to leave room for plenty of air.
Stacked in the woods
Since colonial days, wood cut from trees too small to saw into lumber has been bought, sold and traded by the cord – 128 cubic feet of 4-foot-long logs – and aired in a stack 8 feet long and 4 feet high. Loggers were paid by the cord as piled in the woods – each cord was anchored at one end against a standing tree with the other end ricked against a pair of stout poles sunk in the snow or soft ground. A crafty woodcutter would build in as much air as he could, padding his wages a bit and helping speed the seasoning process.
Left in the woods through at least one season of dry winter air, the logs would lose their live wood moisture content in excess of ambient humidity (about 20 percent) through evaporation in warm weather and, more slowly, via sublimation (direct transformation from ice to water vapor) in freezing temperatures.
Come the wood-selling season the following fall, big-wheeled log wagons pulled by ox teams would haul the 2-ton cords to wood yards in town. There, the 4-foot logs would be sectioned to stove length (a bit less than the width of a parlor stove’s door or length of a range’s firebox), or divided in the middle for 2-foot-log-burning stoves. And it would be stacked in
4-by-4-by-8 cords again for sale. (For more on cords, see “Firewood Warms Body and Soul”)
Exposed to the elements
A woodpile is a public thing – as much of a “statement” as your garden or your mailbox. In some parts of the country, locals judge a person by the trueness of his or her firewood stack. In any case, you will be rewarded with a fine supply of warming wood in the winter if you follow a few basic rules when organizing your own pile of pieces.
If your woodpile is outdoors, give it as much sun as you do your garden, since billets stacked in the moist shade will never dry. Encourage air to move through channels in the stack, by orienting sticks so that the cut ends face the direction of prevailing air movement.
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