Story's by TexasCharlie

[TexasCharley]

My house was built in 1917. It was built to be heated with wood. There are 4 fireplaces--living room, dining room, & 2 bedrooms--& the den has a big woodstove in it. Though the house has central heat we don't use it much. Of course, I'm always on the lookout for wood, especially wood I don't have to buy.

I was driving around in Alamo Heights & Terrell Hills, 2 of San Antonio's most exclusive areas, admiring the beautiful homes. This was in summer, several years ago. I noticed a lot of the houses had cut wood stacked at the curb, so I started going up to the houses & asking what they intended to do with the wood. The San Antonio area towns had recently instituted a $50 fee for curb pickup of cut wood. When the folks asked me how much I'd charge to hault it off, I said $25--half of what they'd pay the cities. I filled my pickup bed with wood that day--& added $125 to my pocketbook.

The wood was mostly hackberry elm & Arizona ash, both of which are ideal for fireplaces, since they don't leave beds of coals in the hearth overnight. Both burn right down to ash. The wood was green, but since I've got about an acre lot I have room to let it dry. I was driving down Broadway, headed for a bookstore, when a BMW pulled in behind me & started honking. I thought maybe I had a low tire or something, so I stopped. The guy who got out of that car could have stepped out of a Brooks Bros. ad. "Hey, old timer," he said, "how much do you want for the load of wood?" Well, I told him what kind of wood it was & that it was green & would have to dry all summer before he could burn it He then offered me $100 for the pickup load of wood.

My folks didn't raise a fool. I took his money. I now had $225 in my pocket. Another hour of cruising around in the high-rent district & I had another load of pre-cut firewood & a total of $300 in my pocket. The catch is, every house at which I picked up wood had at least one chimney sticking out of it & some of 'em had 2. I have no question those people were buying firewood every winter, when all they had to do was stack the cut wood they had at the curb--that they paid me to haul off--behind the garage until it dried.

 

[Paul (AR)]

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[Micheal_R]

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[Kelley (Texas)]

Years ago, I cut through Alamo Heights when they were having one of those large trashing hauling days. Some of those folks were throwing away some good items and there were folks driving pickup trucks gathering up the good trash items as quickly as it was being placed at the curb. I suspect that most of the trash items ended up being sold at flea markets. Kelley (Texas)

 

[Royal]

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[TexasCharley]

We don't have any larch in this part of the world. For a stove, the best is oak, mesquite, or hickory. It makes coals. Most folks consider hackberry a trash tree. If your lumberyard sells 'whitewood' that's usually hackberry. The Spanish name for it is 'palo blanco,' which means 'white wood.' The Arizona ash grows very fast & is an excellent shade tree, but it has a short life. 30 to 40 years & it's done. Liveoaks, which in the deep South are called 'water oaks,' live forever. There's one at Rockport on the coast that's at least 500 years old. It's also one of the hardest woods in the world. At the Nimitz Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg I learned that the main propellor-shaft bearings for nearly all the big WW II US ships were made of liveoak.

 

[Micheal_R]

Up here, in B.C., we have whole forests of larch. The best are the dead, standing ones... you can use them almost immediately. Larch burns hot..... and with virtually no ash. Hence no clean out of the fireplaces. You can mix it with nirch. That burns even hotter but the birch does leave a lot of ash.

Calm seas

Micheal

 

[TexasCharley]

Both hackberry & Arizona ash make a lot of ashes, but iit's fly-ash--almost as fine as baby powder. The problem with green wood, especially green oak, is creosote. It builds up a lot of creosote in the chimney or stovepipe, & a chimney fire or pipe fire can be the result. I've got a damper on the stove, of course, but none of the fireplaces have dampers so a chimney fire could be a disaster.

One of the best ways to avoid that, believe it or not, is to toss a handful of ice-cream salt on the fire wihle it's flaming. Somehow that cleans the chimney. If you can get sea salt for a saltwater aquarium, that's even better. The ice-cream salt burns almost pure white, but the sea salt has a lot of different minerals in it. It burns in all sorts of colors. Back in the '40s & early '50s some catalog houses (like Johnson-Smith, not like Sears) sold' fireplace coloring powder.' You put a teaspoonful on your fire & you got 30 seconds or so of brilliant colors in the fire. That stuff cost maybe a buck for 4 oz. I'll bet it was sea salt.

 

[Sunny]

if you have one. It sounds like a really neat place!!

 

[TexasCharley]

Unfortunately, I have no way at the moment to post pictures. It was the first 'ranch style' house in the county--'ranch style' meaning 'all on one level & spread out from Hell to breakfast.' It's about 75 feet wide, built around a central hallway. The bedrooms--3--are on the south side. The living room & dining room are on the north side. The kitchen is on the west end, which is rough because of the exposure to afternoon sun. Two of the bedrooms--the ones with fireplaces--had screened-in sleeping porches which are now glassed in. The den was originally a screened-in porch, now glassed in. The east bedroom has a private bath, while the middle bedroom & the west bedroom share a bath. Two baths are unusual in a house this old. The ceilings in most rooms are 10 to 12 feet high, the only exception being the central hallway. There the ceiling was lowered to 8 feet to install the ductwork for the central heat/AC that was put in back in the '70s. The only rooms not having ceiling fans are the baths & the dining room, which has a crystal chandelier I found at a junk shop & kept in storage for 3 years before I found the house to put it in.

The house was built in 1917 with the profits from the 1916 cotton crop, which was the most profitable cotton crop in history at the time. Most of the cotton farmers around here were of German ancestry, but most of their cotton went to Britain. It wasn't used to make shirts. Cotton was turned into nitrocellulose or 'gun cotton,' the basis for cordite, the British small-arms powder. These German farmers were selling the Brits the raw material to make the gunpowder the Brits were using to shoot their cousins in France.

 

[TexasCharley]

Several years ago I was camping by myself in the topaz country in Mason County. That's all red granite country, & there is a lot of topaz up there. There are also sapphires & garnets in the creeks, but they are very small.

I was camped on one of the 'topaz ranches'--a lot of the ranchers make extra income by allowing rockhouds to camp on their places for a fee. I was camped next to a big formation of granite, well worn, with a lot of loose boulders in it. It was October, but it had been extremely hot for that time of year--in the 90s--for about 2 weeks. That night a norther hit, dropped the temp from in the low 90s just before sunset to the low 40s by midnight. I began to hear some of the most unearthly groans, moans, & squeals I ever heard in my life! I came out of that tent with a .45 sixshooter at high port. I didn't know what was out there, but I've got a lot of faith in a .45.

The sounds were coming from the rocks themselves! When the norther hit & the temp dropped so suddenly, the heated rocks began to contract. In scraping across one another they made those unearthly sounds. I later discovered you can experience the same thing--multiplied by a factor of about 10--at Enchanted Rock just out of Fredericksburg. That granite dome covers a full square mile--640 acres--& it's sort of like an onion. There is an outer layer of granite over the inner core. When the outer layer has been heated for a number of days & is suddenly cooled by a norther, that rock fairly screams!

 

[Kelley (Texas)]

There was a Texas Ranger, may have been Jack Hayes, that escaped the Indians by climbing up Enchanted Rock. The Indians would not follow him up the rock because they thought it was haunted because of the noises that it made when it was cooling off at night.

Did you ever find any Topaz in that area? I have been wanting to go up there and hunt for some, maybe camp over night. Kelley (Texas)

 

[Royal]

n/t

 

[bossman]

We climbed to the top last summer, Big time workout for old fat boy. The view is unreal

 

[Cupajo]

I used wood to heat my house for 21 years and finally caved in to the pressure of not having enough time or energy to do it any more.

I converted my wood heated hot water baseboard to an oil fired system.

With oil prices the way they have been and the reduced hours I have been working I am thinking about firing up the old wood boiler!

All those years I scrounged fallen trees and any other wood that was suitable and split and stacked it every free moment to prepare for the cold months.

I am fond of wood heat and the independance from others fuels, but am no glutton for the demands of keeping the fire burning all winter!

My wife doesn't like the idea, but she does like to be warm and perhaps the time will come when we will have to use wood to stay warm and heat our domestic hot water.

CJ

 

[TexasCharley]

It was Jack Hays. What happened was, he had a pair of Paterson Colts. Every time he saw a head appear over the curvature of the rock,he put a hole in it with his revolvers. It doesn't take that happening too many times before you run out of folks dumb enough to stick their heads up.

In that general area I have found not just topaz, but tiny garnets & sapphires, a chunk of silver nearly 99% pure, & tracings of gold & lead. There's lots of galena up there, which is mostly lead but has silver in it. I suspect what I found was refined silver from a clandestine mine & smelter, of which there were many in Texas prior to 1867. Most of the creeks have the garnets & sapphires--the biggest ones are about the size of a large grain of rice--& some have flour gold in them. Unless you've got an electronic concentrator the only way to recover flour gold is to amalgamate it with mercury & then boil the mercury off in a retort. You'll spend almost as much buying the mercury as you'll recover from the gold, & if you breathe the mercury vapor it'll eventually kill you.

 

[Paul (AR)]

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[TexasCharley]

When hurricane Carla went over the home place in Sept of '61, we lost 31 ewes. I hope everyone's familiar with 'ewe,' pronounced 'yew.' It's what you call a female sheep.

Anyway, like a sensible rancher, Dad wrote the 31 ewes off as a storm loss on his '61 income tax. The papers were filed by the accountant in Austin Dad always had do his taxes. About a month later the accountant called Dad. Seems the IRS had a question about his return. The accountant said Dad really ought to handle this one personally.

Dad went to the IRS office in Austin & identified himself. He was ushered into an office occupied by some guy with a New York accent. "Mr. Eckhardt," the guy said, "you've claimed a storm loss of thirty-one ee-wees. What is an ee-wee?" I wish I'd been there to hear what Dad had to say.

 

[Royal]

Here are Charlie's Story's

 

[Wayne in BC]

I can see that happening with a government employee for sure