HOW MUCH WOOD CAN WOODCHUCK SALVAGE? 6,000,000

Why does Minnesota’s legislative session
always come down to the last minute?
More
than
$373
in coupons
inside!
NORTHLAND FORUM, PAGE B1
May
M
ay 1199
SUNDAY, MAY 18, 2008
DULUTHNEWSTRIBUNE.COM
$1.50
MINNESOTA
SUPERIOR COMPANY DISMANTLING OLD GRAIN ELEVATOR
HOW MUCH WOOD CAN
WOODCHUCK SALVAGE?
Waterfront
regulation
changes are
in the works
DEVELOPMENT RULES: The agency
will host public meetings in June to
gather input for new regulations, which
have been ordered by the Legislature.
BY JOHN MYERS
Why now?
NEWS TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
6,000,000 BOARD FEET.
Timber from defunct elevator prized for its high quality
150
Height, in feet, of the
Globe grain elevator,
which is being dismantled by Wisconsin
Woodchuck LLC.
120
Approximate age, in
years, of the Globe elevator, which was the
largest in the world
when it opened in the
late 1880s.
Pressed by conservation
groups to buffer Minnesota
lakes against rapid development, and ordered by the
Legislature to act, the
Department of Natural
Resources is slowly working
to craft new rules for waterfront construction.
The DNR will host public
meetings across the state in
June and is expected to
have some recommendations
ready by mid-2009. It would
take another year after that
to officially change the state
regulations through the
state’s complex rulemaking
process.
It would be the first
change of statewide lakefront development rules
since 1989 and only the second since 1971.
The DNR will look at setting new rules for things such
as lot size, setback distance
from the lake, buffer zones
between homes and water,
septic tank rules, subdivision
limits, forest and agricultural
practices and more.
Inside
For years, the
increasing pace
of construction
along the shores
of Minnesota
lakes has been
a growing
problem.
Schedule of
public meetings.
PAGE A7
See WATERFRONT, Page A7
MINNESOTA LEGISLATURE
BY NINA PETERSEN-PERLMAN
NEWS TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
T
In 2007, the
Minnesota Legislature ordered
the Department
of Natural
Resources to
write new rules
governing
waterfront
development.
The agency was
ordered to start
the process this
year.
Legislators, governor reach
agreement on health care
he Globe grain elevator
stands 15 stories over
St. Louis Bay in Superior.
Negotiators reached a compromise that
would broaden eligibility for private and
state-subsidized insurance, but as of
Saturday evening had yet to reach a
consensus on key issues including property
taxes and the state budget. The fate of a bill
capping spending on the Duluth school
district’s red plan remained unclear.
Decommissioned in 1989, it
still carries the pungent scent of its
forgotten cargo. Inside, the wooden
boards that make up 133 grain bins
bear corrugated grooves born of a cen-
MORE COVERAGE IN
LOCAL NEWS, PAGE C1
tury of grain cascading down them.
This structure, the biggest grain elevator in the world when it was built in
$7.10
Top price, per board
foot, for white oak
timbers salvaged from
the Globe elevator.
White pine timbers are
less expensive.
the late 1880s, contains the equivalent
of an entire forest of antique, oldgrowth white pine in its walls.
PHOTOS BY BOB KING / NEWS TRIBUNE
Annette Tracy uses a hammer to pull nails out of boards
recovered from the massive Globe elevator in Superior
(top), in preparation for the old-growth wood being sold for
use in new buildings.
Now, 120 years after it rose over the
Many of the nails
pulled by Tracy and
others are of the
old square-headed
variety.
bay, the building is being deconstructed as carefully and slowly as it was
built. Instead of its parts going into a
$9.50
Top price, per board
foot, for eastern white
pine dimension lumber
salvaged from the
Globe elevator.
landfill, Wisconsin Woodchuck LLC,
Online
which salvages old-growth lumber,
Go to duluthnews
tribune.com to view a
gallery of more photos
of the deconstruction of
the Globe elevator in
Superior.
will recycle 6 million board feet from
the Globe elevator and two neighboring structures for use in new homes
and other buildings.
INSIDE
SPORTS
Trials, travails of transfers
A look at the Minnesota State High School
League’s transfer rules — and how those
rules affected two Northland prep athletes.
PAGE D1
US
Crafting caskets
Family tradition and a friend
in need inspired a Duluth
woman to start a side business — making caskets.
PAGE F1
See WOOD, Page A8
FORECAST: Sunny, cooler
SUNRISE: 5:30 SUNSET: 8:41
HIGH: 58 LOW: 35
COMING MONDAY
Strong demand for scrap metal has
local salvagers paying more for junked
cars. Read more in Business Monday.
INDEX
Volume 138
No. 15 © 2008
Corrections ......A2 Movies..............C3 Sports ................D
Dear Abby........Us Obituaries ........C7 TV ....................Us
Local news ........C Opinion ..............B Us.......................F
TO REACH US
Home delivery: (218) 723-5252, (800) 456-8080
Corrections: Call editor Rob Karwath at (218) 7204177 to report inaccuracies in today’s edition.
FROM PAGE ONE
A8 Sunday, May 18, 2008
www.duluthnewstribune.com | DULUTH NEWS TRIBUNE
WOOD | Company gives old lumber a new lease on life
Judy
Peres,
president
of Wisconsin Woodchuck,
stands on
a stairwell
in the
area
where the
trains
used to
pull in to
load grain
at the old
Globe elevator in
Superior.
From Page A1
PHOTOS BY
BOB KING /
NEWS TRIBUNE
St. Louis
Bay
535
Banks Ave.
Wisconsin
Woodchuck
2
Duluth
Harbor
Basin
ABOVE: Bill McGrew, a Wisconsin Woodchuck employee, uses a pry bar to pull a board loose from a slab of
wood removed from the old Globe elevator. The boards —
destined to be reused in new building projects — are separated and de-nailed by hand.
BELOW: The Globe elevator, seen in a historical photo,
was the largest of its kind in the world when it was built
in the late 1880s.
53
Tower Ave.
Employees of the Superiorbased business are about
halfway done with the
painstaking process of dismantling the main building, which
they started in July 2006.
Woodchuck CEO David Hozza
said he originally estimated
the takedown of the main
building would take a year.
He didn’t account for how
difficult it would be to remove
the metal superstructure and
4,400-pound metal pulley
wheels, nor for the vast amount
of wood inside the building.
The template for the building
showed fewer inside walls than
there were, Hozza said.
“There was much more
wood than we anticipated,” he
said. “We’re finding bins within bins.”
Before taking on this project, Hozza, a former investment banker, said everything
he knew about wood came
from what he learned in an
eighth-grade shop class. In
2004, Gordy Oftedahl, who
owns the property, enlisted
Hozza to help him find a bank
to finance his proposed conversion of the land on which
the Globe elevator sits into an
RV park and marina; the plan
is still in the works.
“They all said the same
thing — we will not touch the
project until the buildings
come down,” Hozza said.
Sure the wood would have
resale value, Hozza jumped
into the architectural salvage
industry and created Wisconsin Woodchuck. He contracted
to do the work with Oftedahl,
who still owns the land. The
company closed on the main
building in April 2007. It purchased one of the two neighboring structures, used for
passive grain storage, in
December, and will close on
the third building soon.
On a sunny morning earlier this month, a crew perched
on top of the building used
chainsaws to cut through 8-by12 and 8-by-24 slabs of nailedtogether boards. A crane carried the slabs to the ground,
where another crew separated
and pulled nails from the
boards, using metal detectors
to ensure they found as many
as possible.
All the wood is kiln-dried to
kill any critters that may have
made their home in the lumber. Some of the wood is sold
as-is, but much of it is handsanded and oiled before it goes
to customers.
It’s a huge task — one that
has Woodchuck’s competitors applauding them for taking it on.
“They’re very brave,” said
Peter Krieger of Duluth Timber Co., which does similar
work salvaging industrial
wood across North America.
“It’s a lot of work. It makes me
tired just thinking about it.”
On top of Woodchuck’s
challenge of disassembling the
building is the challenge of
unloading their product onto
a shaky housing market.
Woodchuck President Judy
Peres said the timbers — the
long
beams
that supported
the structure
— have sold
themselves
due to their
scarcity. Tall
specimens of
white
pine
just don’t exist
PERES
anymore after
massive deforestation of the
area, she said.
But the dimension lumber
— boards pancaked and nailed
one on top of another to create
the bin walls — has been
tougher both to get out of the
building and to sell.
“It’s staggered parts,”
crane operator Butch Zillmer
said. “You have to take one
part off, then the other.”
Because the wood is largely
being sold to people with
expendable income who are
building second homes in
places such as the Canadian
Rockies, though, Peres is confident the housing slowdown
won’t affect the company too
badly.
Phil Bjork, owner of Cam-
Belknap St.
The Globe elevator, which stands 150 feet high over
St. Louis Bay and contains 133 grain bins, was built with
thousands of boards — many of them nailed together to
form huge slabs of wood.
SUPERIOR
NEWS TRIBUNE GRAPHICS
bridge, Minn.-based Great
Northern Woodworks, used
Woodchuck wood — he estimated about 40,000 board feet — to
build a large timber-frame
home for clients from Colorado.
“The nature that it is
antique and it’s from a timber
supply [that] perhaps the world
will never see again — the historical impact of what the
building was and being able to
make it live again is very
appealing to people,” he said.
Byron G. Ellingson of Minneapolis is using the dimension
lumber to remodel the floors of
a bedroom and living room in
his cabin on Bone Lake, about 7
miles east of Forest Lake, Minn.
He also is using slabs of graineroded wood as accent pieces
around his fireplace.
“I took wood from the old
grain chutes so it’s sandblasted across 100 years. I’ve never
seen anything quite like it,”
he said.
Antique wood may be more
expensive, he said, but it’s of a
much higher quality than what
comes out of today’s tree farms.
“The grain is much denser
in older wood,” Ellingson said.
“You don’t get grain structure
in a tree that’s fully grown in
Duluth Timber also salvages wood
Fast facts about the Globe elevator
The main grain elevator
stands 150 feet high over St.
Louis Bay.
It has a 20,000-squarefoot footprint.
Two neighboring buildings,
Elevators 2 and 3, stand 80 feet
high, 88 feet wide and 465
feet long.
The main elevator and the
two other elevators on the property used for passive grain storage have a combined capacity
of 5 million bushels.
Grain from the Globe Elevator was loaded onto freighters
that traveled through the Great
Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway, and went as far as
Europe.
The complex was originally
owned by F. H. Peavey and Co.,
and later became part of
ConAgra Foods. ConAgra
decommissioned the Globe
elevator in 1989.
20 years.”
Woodchuck has formed a
subsidiary called Old Globe
Wood, which is processing the
dimension lumber into planks
for flooring and paneling. Old
Globe uses penetrating oils
and beeswax to finish the
wood, which helps to bring out
the antique appearance, Peres
said. If it gets marred in some
way, you can just rub some
vegetable oil into it to restore—
and possibly enhance—the
wood’s finish, she said.
“It makes you realize how
alive the wood is,” Peres said.
“It’s very different from taking
a stick of wood and covering it
with polyurethane. Then it’s
like dead wood, covered with
plastic. This is live wood. It’s
breathing. You can feel the
pores and you can smell it.”
Wisconsin Woodchuck
isn’t the only wood salvage
business in the Twin Ports.
Duluth Timber Company has
been in the game for about
30 years and operates all
across North America.
Along with its Duluth facility, where the company does
most of its milling, it has
another site in Washington
state. The company currently
is working on deconstructing
a 400,000-square-foot
sawmill in Oregon, General
Manager Peter Krieger said.
Reclaimed wood has both
environmental and aesthetic
appeal, Krieger said.
“There’s something about
the first cuttings out of the
virgin forests that looks different from lumber produced
from a tree farm,” Krieger
said. “The material is denser
because it was slower growing … These are trees that
are hundreds of years old.”
Krieger estimated his products cost three to four times
as much as new wood fresh
out of the forest.
Duluth Timber’s Web site
is www.duluthtimber.com.
Salvaged wood prices
Woodchuck
Web site
TIMBERS
Eastern white pine: $1.35-3.50 per
board foot
White oak: $3-7.10 per board foot
DIMENSION LUMBER
Eastern white pine, unfinished: $69.50 per board foot
NEWS TRIBUNE
For more information about the
company and its
operations, go to
www.wisconsin
woodchuck.net
“The grain is much denser in
older wood. You don’t get grain
structure in a tree that’s fully
grown in 20 years.”
BYRON G. ELLINGSON of Minneapolis, who has used lumber salvaged from the
Globe elevator to remodel his cabin