Credit: Joey Weber, via Flickr
Andrew Jackson famously earned the nickname “Old Hickory” because he was said to be tough as hickory wood on the battlefield. To promote his brand, Jackson backers put hickory poles in lawns all over the country and passed out hickory toothpicks and canes.
But since his presidency ended in the 1830s, hickory wood has been far less celebrated. It’s slow-growing and its grain pattern and color are inconsistent. It’s so dense it will break saw blades. Loggers often skipped over it.
That’s starting to change. Though not reaching its Jacksonian height, hickory is now making something of a comeback, impacting the specialized industries that have depended on the tough wood for decades, like makers of hammer handles, railroad ties, and drumsticks. One of the largest drumstick makers in the country is in Prospect, Tennessee, about 90 miles south of Nashville. The company uses Tennessee hickory to make about 60,000 sticks per week, and its seeing new competition for its only raw material.
So what does this mean for consumers? Take a walk in Fork’s Drum Closet, a drum store in 12 South, and George Stuteville will tell you. He’s been watching prices inch up for months.
“They [customers] always know prices go up. And they want to get a deal on it all the time, as well. We’re very aware when prices go up, and we’re the ones who hear about it, as a small business.”
Drumsticks By The Thousands
Hickory trees are found in several states east of the Mississippi, but since forests cover more than half of Tennessee’s land area, it’s one of the biggest hardwood-producing states in the country. And there’s something about the type of hickory found in and around Tennessee that makes it the top destination for drumstick makers.
Bob Hughes, who runs the drumstick plant in Giles County, oversees the production of 60,000 drumsticks every week.
Bob Hughes runs the drumstick factory in Prospect, which straddles the Tennessee-Alabama border. Their volume is more than almost any other plant in the country. Weekly, that means up to 16,000 sticks. Is that meeting demand? “No,” Hughes said, “there’s a lot of people beating on a drum.”
Hughes knows quite a bit about hickory. He’s done it all in the timber business.
He’s standing in a lumberyard where log piles are stacked some 20 feet high outside the factory, called ProMark, which is a subsidiary of music company D’addario. Outside the factory, Workers strip the trees of the bark. Inside, Hughes points out the first machine in the process, where a man, known as a sawyer, operates a circular headsaw. What he’s after is white chunks. The darker wood is separated and then sold to other company, like makers of palettes.
“Our sawyer, who’s been here for quite a few years, knows that what he’s actually looking for is for the white wood on the outside of the log. So he just rolls the log cuts all the white wood off that he can get.”
In recent months, though, Hughes says getting any hickory at all has been challenging, as other industries have been increasingly snapping it up.
Wood dowels, made out of hickory trees, are sent to another processing center, in Houston, Tex., to be made into drumsticks then sent to stores nationwide. (Photo credit: Bobby Allyn/WPLN)
Hughes turns to his wood-buyer Ed Moore, who is more alive to this reality than anyone. He negotiates tree prices with loggers at sawmills. Before the hickory craze, Moore said, the trees were easy to spot because they were surrounded by tree stumps.
“Loggers would cut the red and white oak out and leave the hickory,” Moore says.
Changing Fashion Brings New Competition
Lately, a group has started outbidding Moore for hickory at wood auctions: the flooring industry. He says they’re sucking up the inventory, and the cost of wood has doubled in the past year. “Flooring drives everything with prices these days,” he said. In turn, it’s driving up the price of products like drumsticks.
Coincidentally, the shock-resitstant nature of hickory has made it appealing to floor consumers.
David Turner of Buy Floors Direct shows off an example of hickory wood, which has been selling rapidly lately. In the past year, Turner has been having trouble keeping enough of the wood in the store to meet demand. (Photo credit: Bobby Allyn/WPLN)
David Turner oversees operations for Buy Floors Direct, one of the largest wood floor sellers in Middle Tennessee. For some reason, he said, hickory sales have been escalating lately. His theory is that consumers are craving distinctive wood patterns, a departure from the consistent straight-grain look of oak, the most popular flooring wood.
“You can even see in here, now this would look like the normal, the blonde board. And right below it: chocolate. Dark chocolate,” Turner said, pointing to a palette of hickory wood, which has splotchy colors and inconsistent grain patterns. Turner calls this character, others say it has rustic flare. Consumers these days, according to Turner, want wood that’s almost indestructible to compete with the blows of every day life.
Consumers say things like: “I’ve got kids, pets, lots of activities, high-heels, the whole nine yards,” Turner said
What Turner is seeing at his store reflects a broader trend in consumer preference, says Adam Taylor, who studies the state’s $21 billion forest products industry at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville:
“Fashions change, so people are starting to be interested in unusual woods, like hickory, for flooring. It’s not that the woods are unusual, but it traditionally hasn’t been used for that application.”
Taylor says when more industries compete for wood, many single-product factors see costs rise.
“It was kind of considered to be a weed tree in the past, and I’m glad we’re now starting to consider hickory as a potential beneficial part of our forest,” Taylor said.
A worker cutting hickory wood with a woodsaw at a plant in Giles County, Tennessee. The process begins when loggers chop down hickory trees. Then the wood is cut into segments, seen above, then eventually carved into dowels. . (Photo Credit: Bobby Allyn/WPLN)
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