David Hozza and Judy Peres are working to salvage the wood — a project Hozza once thought could be done inside a year.

"Three years and two months, but who's counting?'' said Hozza, a former St. Paul City Council president and investment banker who formed Wisconsin Woodchuck to dismantle the 122-year-old former Globe Elevator piece by piece and to reclaim the centuries-old wood for use in new homes and for flooring, paneling and other purposes. Peres, a former Chicago newspaper editor and reporter, is his partner.

It's a good thing Hozza, who was on the council three decades ago, retains a sense of humor, because less than half the wood from the tallest of the three empty buildings has been taken down and stacked or sold since the work started in July 2006.

He could blame the recession, which hurt the home-construction business just as the project got going. But that doesn't reflect the daunting task that's always been there.

"Salvaging wood out of a building is never very easy,'' said Tom Caspar, editor of American Woodworker magazine. "But this is remarkable. It is a Herculean effort.''

THE BUILDINGS

As many as 3,000 men, mostly immigrants, spent two years erecting the elevators, finishing the work in 1887.

The eastern white pine, some of it already hundreds of years old, came out of the vast forests of northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. It was brought to the site in the Duluth-Superior Harbor and cut to specifications. Douglas fir, southern yellow pine and white oak also are found in the buildings.

The main building, three-fourths as long as a football field, is almost 150 feet high. Two other storage buildings aren't as tall, but are twice as long. More than 2 million board feet of old-growth white pine were used in each. When they were finished, they made up the largest elevator complex in the world.

Collectively, the buildings contained 289 bins or silos that could hold 5 million bushels of grain. Until 1989, the grain was loaded onto large freighters docked next to the main building and transported to Europe and elsewhere.

THE PROJECT

The salvage project got off to an unlikely start.

When Hozza was an investment banker, he was approached by the former owner of the buildings, who wanted to develop the property into a marina and recreational vehicle campground. For the project to work, however, the buildings had to be taken down.

Seeing so much wood that could be resold and believing it might otherwise be headed for a landfill, Hozza quit his job to form the salvage operation, and secured rights to the main building.

"I thought we'd have the building down and the wood sold in one year,'' said Hozza, who lived in the office trailer adjacent to the buildings for 14 months and has since acquired rights to the other two structures.

Eventually, Peres, who met Hozza through an online dating service, joined the operation.

Wisconsin Woodchuck dismantles the buildings and sells the timbers, mainly to timber framers. A subsidiary, Old Globe Reclaimed Wood Co., resaws the wood and mills it into handcrafted flooring and paneling.

"When we get an order, this gets loaded on a truck and taken to Rhinelander, (Wis.,) where the (subcontractor's) shop is,'' Peres said, showing off stacks of timbers that have been cleaned of nails and labeled.

The two also are collecting and reselling an estimated 500,000 of pounds of wrought iron, a purer form of iron that is becoming increasingly rare.

THE WOOD

The wood is especially appealing to woodworkers for its "green" qualities and for its character, which includes a polished erosive effect from years of grain flowing across it, according to Caspar.

"First, new trees weren't felled to obtain the wood,'' Caspar said. "Second, it shows quite a lot of character that you wouldn't get from freshly cut wood — all the nail holes and some of the weathered surfaces inside the grain silos. As grain fell down inside the silos, it wore away the wood much like water does on rock and created patterns unlike any I have ever seen before. Where there's a knot or a nail, the wood is not worn away. You have this incredible sculptured effect you can't create yourself.''

Tom Schoeller, owner of St. Paul-based Mendota Mantels and Old Growth Woods, makes fireplace mantels, tables and other furnishings out of reclaimed timbers and likes working with the wood. Because it has been air-drying for so long, he said, it's more stable and less likely to twist or crack. "It didn't take long to realize this wood is so much nicer to work with than new wood because of that stability issue,'' he said.

It's also not easy to find.

"In the reclaimed-timber business, white pine is not easy to come by,'' he said.

Phil Bjork, owner of Great Northern Woodworks in Cambridge, Minn., uses the wood in homes he builds and said it has "a very nice patina luster that goes deep into the wood.''

But it also has two other characteristics he likes.

"It's historical,'' he said. "Literally, some of these trees were alive in the early 1700s.

"It's also a great use of recycling. What typically has been bulldozed down in the last 30 years is being cleaned up and dressed up and put to an appropriate use.''

Hozza said the wood often is denser than today's pines.

"The knots and the character of the wood are much more intricate than the stuff you would get today, which is almost like white bread or plain vanilla,'' Hozza said. "You don't have the complexity in the grain and the color. Because of the aging and humidity, the wood has taken on a honey hue, almost a light golden that, again, you don't find in new white pine.''

THE WORK

The work has been more labor-intensive and expensive than Hozza ever envisioned.

Not only was it difficult to remove heavy machinery from the upper floors, but there were many more interior walls, as well as more wood, than he expected.

"It's like a box of Cracker Jack,'' Hozza said.  "There is a surprise in every bin.''

A huge crane was used to haul down machinery from the upper floors of the main building. Then crews took on the task of disassembling the building one bin at a time.

With each, workers using chainsaws cut through slabs of boards that have been nailed together to form walls. A crane lowers the slabs to the ground, where other workers take out the nails. All of the wood is kiln-dried to kill any harmful organisms.

Buyers can choose wood ranging from 12-by-14-inch timbers to flat tongue-and-groove products. The price for white pine goes up to $4 a board foot, with white oak up to $7.

The company could continue taking down the building without interruption, but then would be stuck with a huge supply of exposed wood. Hozza said the most efficient system seems to be to have 200,000 board feet available, enabling more dismantling when demand requires it.

"We can't afford to go any faster than we can sell it,'' Peres said.

"My guess now is we'll finish Building One in six months, then take down Two and Three as demand dictates,'' said Hozza, adding the company is mildly profitable and current on its bills, but in a holding pattern.

So far the company has spent about $2 million to buy the buildings and to dismantle half of the main one. Hozza said he expects to spend another couple million dollars for the entire project, but it's difficult to predict what factors — time, demand, weather and other unknowns — will come into play.

"If I was a younger man, this would all make sense,'' said the 64-year-old Hozza, who estimates the entire project could take another five years to finish.

For more information about the Globe Elevator project, go to wisconsinwoodchuck.net or oldglobewood.com.

Source: St Paul Pioneer Press