Oil Spike Sends New England to Wood

LYNDEBOROUGH, N.H. -- There are plenty of ways to tell that the market for firewood has taken off here. Wood-burning stoves are selling out in stores, the price of split wood has jumped past $200 a cord and would-be woodsmen are filling up classes on lumberjack skills.

But perhaps the best way to see what's happening is to watch Maxine work.

Maxine is the nickname that logger Tom Chrisenton has given to the refrigerator-size, chain saw-swinging mechanical chopper that he uses to fell trees on his property here in southern New Hampshire.

With the frightening grace of a "Terminator" robot, Maxine needs less than a minute to make a living spruce tree into logs, limbs and sawdust. She does the job about 20 times faster than a lumberjack with a chain saw.

But even with Maxine, Chrisenton said he can barely stay ahead of the demand now -- as New Englanders stunned by the high price of oil flock back to a fuel source as old as the Colonial forests.

"The stuff I'm cutting today will either be delivered this afternoon or tomorrow," Chrisenton said. "We can't keep up with it."

Experts on this small corner of the U.S. energy market say New England has always had a thing for burning wood. People here hung on to old iron stoves, which radiate heat, as the rest of the country came to see firewood only as a kind of flaming living room accent.

Federal government statistics show that, in 2001, nearly 10 percent of New England households got some of their heat from a wood stove -- more than three times the national average of 2.8 percent.

The reason could have something to do with the self-reliant character of this region: People like being able to look out the kitchen window and see the winter's fuel stacked up. Or it could be a simple nexus of people, frosty weather and wood.

"You go down to the Southwest, it's solar" power, said Jasen A. Stock, executive director of the New Hampshire Timberland Owners Association. "Here, you know, we got trees."

In modern times, the last heyday of the New England firewood market was in the late 1970s, when oil shortages drove up the price of oil for home furnaces. Wood stoves and split logs sold like crazy.

This year, as the region enters the traditional late-summer season when winter wood is laid up, the boom times are back. "It's becoming very much like 1979 again," said Richard Wright, a New Hampshire editor of a trade magazine for the business called Hearth & Home.