Woodworker builds on the past

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

Joshua Huskins sees beauty, history and potential in old fallen barns.

“It’s a piece of history. Somebody put a lot of time into building it 100 years ago,” Huskins said.

The woodworker hails from Augusta, Ga., but came to the Fox Valley for a six-month job installing reclaimed pine wood flooring for a Chicago CEO’s $5.2 million estate in St. Charles.

Huskins, 27, who now lives in Campton Hills, decided to relocate three years ago when he saw potential in growing his business, Amberwood Reclaimed Lumbers. The company specializes in custom woodworking for homes by using reclaimed lumber from very old structures such as barns, schools and homes.

He has installed 2,500 square feet of hard pine flooring in a Frank Lloyd Wright home in Wisconsin, as well as installed flooring in a home within Aurora’s historic district.

“Reclaimed material is made of some of the most beautiful wood,” he said. “It comes from something that was done 100 years ago, when there were no saw mills.”

His workshop is on a country road near Maple Park, where there is some of the reclaimed lumber from deconstructed structures as old as the 1800s — perfect for flooring, moldings and furniture.

On another pallet is a stack of reclaimed heart pine beams made into tongue-and-groove hardwood flooring.

“This flooring has a history behind it, and I know where each piece came from,” Huskins said.

Barn lumber is valuable for its strength, character and dense nature, he said.

“The slow-growth wood is what makes the difference from the pine floors you buy today,” Huskins said. “This wood was growing back before the country was settled and logging began.”

Huskins said slow-growth trees have very tight growth rings that are visible at the end of the beams. “It makes for beautiful flooring that is one-of-a-kind and hand selected for the finished product.”

Wood with character

The character of reclaimed wood can’t be manufactured, he said.

He’ll often hear from someone whose barn has fallen into disuse or been damaged in a storm. Some of the reclaimed lumber came from a Dittman Road barn in Campton Hills, just southwest of Elgin, he said.

“We can do all sorts of projects with something that a tornado took down,” Huskins said. “We are providing a service by having it cleaned up, keeping it out of the landfill and keeping new trees from being harvested.”

Huskins recently acquired the wood from the Abraham Lincoln memorial tree in Batavia that had to come down after it was damaged in a severe windstorm last October.

The tree, believed to be 100 to 150 years old, is referenced in Batavia lore as one of two trees planted as a memorial to two Civil War figures, Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln.

The owners of the tree, the Gosselin family, years ago had support cables installed to extend the life of the black locust as long as they could. But DeMar Tree & Landscaping Services of St. Charles believed that with the decay, it had become too much of a risk for toppling on the family’s 1849 Greek Revival home along Route 31.

Huskins said he will transport that wood to a solar kiln in Indiana for drying.

“I thought it is amazing that the tree is documented in a history book,” Huskins said. “Black locust is a gorgeous wood that is extremely durable and incredibly water resistant.”

Huskins said he wants to do more research before deciding what to do with the wood, but he is planning to provide some of the wood to someone who will smooth it out for desk pen sets, so that more people can share in the history of the tree.