Black walnut, also known as eastern black walnut or American walnut, once grew abundantly in the eastern bottomland forests. Trees 150 feet tall with 50-foot clear stems and 6-foot diameters were not uncommon. Black walnut was the number one prized fine hardwood in America at a time before the use of veneers. Early colonists exported the wood to England from Virginia as early as 1610. Solid walnut wood was used in all sorts of homemade furniture imaginable, during the Colonial and Federal periods, but rarely was the fine grain appreciated. Most pieces were covered with a coat of paint. The rage for walnut as a fine furniture wood occurred in a period from 1830-1860, during the popularity of the Empire, Victorian, and Revival styles. Unfortunately by this time, black walnut wood was already becoming scarce.
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The latest heyday of black walnut occurred in the 1970’s when walnut was king and prices went through the ceiling. Since then, because of economic factors, export tariffs, and preferences for lighter woods, walnut temporarily took a back seat to black cherry, red and white oak, pecan, and even sugar maple. Black walnut is now making a comeback and is competing with black cherry and white oak as one of the fine North American hardwoods.
Black walnut doesn’t warp, shrink or splinter, and it is light in proportion to its strength. The smooth, satiny surface makes it easy to handle. Trees grow faster when open-grown in fields. Here, they have broad, rounded crowns, with many branches, usually lower to the ground. Black walnut grows in
The natural range of black walnut is western Massachusetts and Connecticut, south to the North Carolina coast, southwest through Georgia and westward through the Gulf states, to eastern Texas, north through Oklahoma to southern Nebraska, and eastward through the southern regions of the northern Lake states. It is scattered in New York and can be found in extreme southern Canada.
Walnut