Stop Buying Firewood — The Logger's Stacking Method That Doubles Your Heat

In October of 1952 a schoolteacher named Almeda, up Dry Fork, West Virginia, had eleven dollars of good split oak in her yard and the coldest house on the creek. The wood came in April. Her brother heaped it against the north wall and wrapped it tight in a war surplus tarp, top, sides and all, and it sat there looking like thrift itself for six months. By January there was ice in the water bucket, ten feet from a full woodpile. Across the creek, a track layer had the same oak, from the same seller, for the same eleven dollars. His house you could sit in with your coat off. Two yards, one creek, the same wood. The difference was the stack. I'm Harlan Sawyer. Seventy-one years old, fifth generation on Sawyer Ridge in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. I went in the woods at fourteen, in 1969, and came out in 2011. My grandfather Enoch was a scaler, and near everything in this video comes out of the tally book he carried in his coat from 1931 until the winter he died. He could read a family's whole winter off their woodpile without slowing his walk. This video teaches you to read your own. Six pieces to a stack that finishes in one summer instead of two. Five cost you nothing but an afternoon. The sixth is the wind row, the piece that does the real work, and it fell out of the books about the time the word "seasoned" quit being a fact and became an advertisement. Two scrap boards and a strip of rusty tin. Against buying the word "seasoned" every fall at full price, or eight dollar bundles at the gas station that work out to north of a thousand dollars a cord. CHAPTERS 00:00 Two men, the same load of oak 01:12 Almeda, Dry Fork, 1952 03:05 How we store wood now 03:30 What the record says 04:00 Reading a stack 04:30 The tally book 05:21 Who I am 06:14 The six pieces 07:09 One — split it first, smaller than you think 09:05 Spring maul beats fall maul 10:14 Two — get it off the dirt 12:18 "You grew a garden, boy" 13:37 Three — one row deep, out in the light 15:23 Where half your heat goes 17:23 The block-pile man and the wind-row man 18:09 Four — the mouse and the cat 21:23 Five — cover the top, never the sides 23:41 1974, and the word "seasoned" 24:28 Gas station arithmetic 25:37 Six — the wind row 27:23 The October proof 28:37 Back to Dry Fork 30:23 The whole thing, in order 31:04 Your turn Tell me down below — what did your people call the woodpile? The rank, the rick, the cordwood row? Who taught you to stack, and what was their one rule, the sentence they said every time like scripture? And if your granddaddy had his own version of the mouse and the cat, I want that saying word for word. I'm collecting them like arrowheads. The story that gets the most replies down there is the one I go deep on next. SAFETY, PLAIN I'm not your fire marshal. Keep woodpiles clear of the house wall — wood against siding invites every bug in the county to move in with you. Give any stack over shoulder height cross-tied ends or a post, because wood falls harder than it looks. Burn at twenty percent moisture or below, get your chimney swept every year by somebody who does it for a living, and if your stove came with instructions, follow those too. This isn't either-or. Stack it dry, friend. It keeps. #firewood #firewoodstacking #seasonedfirewood #cordofwood #woodheat #woodstove #homesteading #selfreliance #frugalliving #appalachia #oldways #offgrid