Vintage Select / Crown Heart Pine

History and Characteristics of Vintage Select/Crown Heart Pine

Our reclaimed heart pine select grade is, without a doubt, our most refined reclaimed flooring. Selected from the same beams and boards as our reclaimed character grade heart pine,

Select/Crown grade is +95% heartwood, +95% clear, +90%vertical grain.
Very occasional pin knots, pitch pockets, nail holes, and flat grain may be present to allow longer length boards. Vertical Grain may have from 8 to 80 growth rings per inch.
Vertical grain, aka “quarter sawn”, and “rift” is the densest form of yellow pine and has been highly valued as the finest flooring since early colonial days.

Found extensively in Colonial Williamsburg, “Heart Pine” is a particular species of yellow pine. Pinus Palustris, aka “long leaf yellow pine”(its needles often exceeded 12” in length), and “Georgia pine”, grew as the predominant coniferous tree from the gulf coast to northern Virginia. Heart Pine was most heavily harvested after the Civil War and into the 1920’s. Its use as the preferred structural heavy timber in most industrial factories, warehouses, and tenant buildings provides us with a treasured resource preserved for careful extraction and reuse.

Specifications

Reclaimed solid heart pine flooring is normally milled to 3/4” thickness.
Vintage Lumber is also able to meet customer’s requirements for both thinner (minimum 3/8”) and thicker solid flooring.
Select/Crown grad heart pine is usually available in RW 2” to 5”. Clear, vertical grain boards are scarce, but occasionally available up to 9”. The wider the widths required, the higher the costs. Our RW flooring is usually not sold as a repeating pattern(equal lineal feet of each width). For prompt filling of orders, we base our RW counts on available widths in inventory, and we calculate a 9 or 10 board width sequence to facilitate installation to avoid all of one width remaining at the end.