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I got this stack of lumber, about 125bf, for less than a dollar a foot.  There's a lot of waste in it, but at that price, I really don't mind.  It came from a sawyer that got his hands on a 150 year old log cabin that had been torn down.  He tells me it's chestnut.  I've never worked with it, so I don't know.

I'm really surprised at how very light it is.  I'm pleased with the grain patterns; it reminds me of pecan a bit, which makes sense, as I believe they're related woods.  Immediate plans with it are several children's writing desks and then a reading/dinner stand for the couch.  Any thoughts on it?

Oh yeah, the wood is very dry and will be stickered soon.  The lumber you see standing is cherry.






Here is the desk I am designing in Sketchup; it's originally from Amazon:

Characteristics often are the same for several species. End grain is a good deciding vote as to what you have. Hobbit House always has good end grain pics

For characteristics though I do like The Wood Database

You mentioned light weight, it's not 100%, but usually lighter weight woods also have lower numbers for their Janka Hardness Here you can see Chestnut has a Janka of just 540. Both Soft Maple and American Black Cherry share a 950. I find both of them to weigh very close to the same, while the few Chestnut boards I have handled my first thought was, sheesh this is light.

Does yours have any bug holes? If not it was probably down, and turned into a barn before the blight. They didn't mess with dead trees, especially if the bark was gone.

Check the end grain, but from what you describe you may have a pile of Chestnut, a buck a bd/ft is a good price for Chestnut. YOU SUCK    

No bug holes.  At the age of the cabin claimed, I assume it was before the blight.

It wasn't *exactly* bought with cash.  I traded it for a 16" RAS I had bought for cheap at an auction.  The price I paid for the saw translated to about $1/bf; I had listed the saw for $600 on CL.  He offered to trade the lumber for it.  I think we were both happy with the trade.

I guess it's safe to assume that this wood is "safe" for building light-load furniture with?  Maybe some small boxes, too?

The blight that killed Chestnuts in New England is still killing the sprouts. Powder post beetles in the sap wood would be more of a concern.

The wood does look like Chestnut. I have used several lifts of salvaged Chestnut for jobs. It's hard to forget that grain after hand planing it. Old Chestnut is pretty stable, so it will stay put after you mill it.

In old hemlock woods in Massachusettts, there are still pieces of pre-blight Chestnut leaning on old Hemlock trees, where large trees fell over. The wood only rots where it makes ground contact. Through the 1980's, there were still standing dead Chestnut trees, even though the blight hit from 1910 to 1940.

Try using stickers where the wood meets the concrete. It keeps sand off the wood, which will dull your knives and blades. The same goes for the end grain on the cherry. That said, I ran a 1/2" diameter rock through my main plainer in June. A dirty fudge on a fudge lift at the lumber dealer mashed the stone far into the wood, and I missed it. The knives found it. They made bead molding after that.

My brother made a side table out of chestnut and said it worked like white oak.  I saw the stack before he worked it and it looked like w/o.  His had the worm holes. 

I know people are working on getting the chestnut back but only been successful in imported sprouts.  I don't know the difference between European Chestnut versus the US trees.

I started milling this stuff last night. Some of it is wormy, some isn't. Yeah, it does work a lot like the oak that I've used before.

I think there's an effort to add Chinese Chestnut genes to American Chestnut. Chinese Chestnut is blight resistant. This seems like a place where genetic engineering/gene splicing could pay off. I'd think using selective breeding would be a pretty slow process. Here's a link to the American Chestnut Foundation:

http://www.acf.org/

I haven't a clue where I came across the info, but years ago read something online, seemed like a reputable source at the time????? Anyhow they said there were pockets in the South that never got the blight, wanna say Georgia, and Alabama. Big mature bug free Chestnuts. Made me always a bit gun shy of Chestnut either reclaimed or bottom dredged for $$$$$$$$ per bd/ft. Here the price was obviously a no brainer.

Mac, alot of the old log homes in Maryland are chestnut. Most of them. Some are white oak and a handful are locust.There's thousands of these buildings, including barns in Carroll, Frederick counties and western Md. Most have had siding installed over them so you don''t really see it till you go inside. Many homes use the chestnut logs as joists, only flat part is where the floor was nailed down and the floor boards are also chestnut.

I do home inspections and for some reason I get a lot of those homes. I try not to stare when I go inside. I'm really surprised you were able to get it because the Mennonites seem to know where every stick of it is and when it's being torn down.

I was in this one last year. It's got vinyl siding on the outside. That's all chestnut, even the painted ceiling joists and floor.

Both Wood Database and Hobbit House are both excellent references, as Steve N. says.  Each has its strengths.  Hobbit House has many fine high-resolution photos of clean end-grain for visual comparison  But the best popular-level reference I know for systematic wood ID is Bruce Hoadley's book, "Identifying Wood,"  It’s widely available at public libraries or from Taunton Press.  

Hoadley distinguishes four sub-groups of ring-porous domestic hardwoods based features visble with a hand lens in clean-cut end grain: Chestnut & Oak, Elm & Hackberry, “Confusing” (including ash and a few others), and Hickory & Pecan.  Ring-porous woods have large pores concentrated in distinct early-wood layers.  Woods of the Chestnut and Oak Sub-Group have more-or-less radial arrays of tiny pores in late-wood.  Chestnut differs from oak in having very narrow rays, mostly only one cell wide in contrast to the prominent wide rays of oak.  

The whole scheme is too much to reproduce in detail here, but you should be able to verify if you have chestnut from a clean end cut using the three characteristics in the previous paragraph with reference photos from hobbithouseinc.com. 

http://www.hobbithouseinc.com/personal/w...%20plh.htm

http://www.hobbithouseinc.com/personal/w...%20plh.htm