Butcher Blocks

In my Lake Arrowhead shed on John Muir Street lurks a beast: a 400-pound vintage butcher block table, originally 31x33x33”. However, now it is legless. During one of its many laborious moves, it lost 4 legs and now only the massive top remains at 16x30x30” (picture shows the legless block on its side in the shed). My contractor discovered it and suggested we make it “something” in my John Muir Street kitchen. 

Divine provenance: that butcher block table will think it has come home to John Muir Street. It owes part of its history to the naturalist Muir (1838-1914), the founder of the Sierra Club (1892), who fought against pillages of first growth virgin hardwood forests of the East Coast. Those old growth winter maple forests are the progenitors of my butcher block.

Between 1860-1900, Pennsylvania led the nation in lumber production, and widespread pilfering by lumber robber barons, notably the Pinchots of Milford, PA. Clear-cut first growth maples from the Pennsylvania hillsides were trundled down hillsides to the Susquehanna at Williamsport. My butcher block, when it was a tree, was chained and shunted through this river’s massive “log booms,” a huge flotilla of enormous logs stretching for miles, each log branded, taxed, and levied. 

James – son of lumber baron Pinchot – was so dismayed by the source of his family’s millions, he endowed a new school at Yale. It would be the nation’s first graduate forestry program. James’ son Gifford (1865-1946) would in turn become the fourth chief of the U.S. Division of Forestry, and the first head of the U.S. Forest Service.

At first meeting, (1896-7) John Muir and Pinchot were philosophically at odds in the matter of conservation versus preservation of resources. Pinchot was a materialist, Muir was a spiritualist, and they warred over Pinchot’s dam at Yosemite (Hecht Hetchy). Muir, by now a friend of presidents, lobbied formation of the Nation Park Service (1917). The influential editor of The Century Magazine and fellow camper with Muir in Yosemite, Robert Underwood Johnson (1853-1937), championed Muir and his formation of the National Commission to Preserve Yosemite. 

My butcher block knows all of this history because it has LIVED it. It came from an East Coast butchering family who relocated their business in 1920s to San Diego. I bought it from their son’s kitchen and had scraped from it the grease of years, when my piano mover brought it to a (bad) boyfriend’s household; he stole its legs to spite me when we broke up. In heartbreak, it moved to Santa Barbara and because it was legless, spent 15 years on Caesar Chavez in storage. 

Thinking my son could make legs, I gave it to him, but forgot to consider that his wife might not like 400 pounds suspended on new legs above her two kids under 3 years old. So the butcher block came poetically back to John Muir (one more time since it last saw him in 1890s) on John Muir Street. 

Known for its rugged durability, I cannot imagine a time in U.S. mercantile history when butcher shops and hog famers clamored to buy 400 pounds of maple, end-grain, stacked block upon block, bolted together (as those four through-rods or bolts needed to be tension adjusted for the climate), and perched on legs. Pork production became nationalized after 1920, and the neighborhood butcher became obsolete. The boards were of 7/4 maple stock 16” lengths, width on average 2×2” with the ends stacked up as end grain, glued together edge to edge. The end grain was easy on knives and was remarkably self-healing when cut, as the wood fibers closed up. Some modern, paltry, 5” thick butcher block counter tops are edge grain: the cutting edge has high moisture resistance. 

I must be in lifelong love with butcher blocks as I have three huge Boos Blocks, each Boos stamped with the year and month since its founding in Effingham, IL, in 1887; the year Conrad Boos developed an impact absorbing table for his blacksmith. Before a national linkage of railways, each little town had a woodsmith who would make butcher blocks. When trains dominated in the 1890s, John Boos realized he could purchase winter maple (freeze zones had minimal wood pests) and ship his blocks all over the country. Successful, he showed a Boos Block in 1900 at the Paris World’s Fair. By WWII, Boos was supplying U.S. Army, Navy, and Marines with butcher blocks and counter tops including those on massive aircraft carriers. Sadly, in the 1990s food safety guys said wood was a germ repository and recommended (now found to be dangerous to us and the environment) polyethylene plastic boards. I’ll keep my 400-pounder I think. Value? $800-1000.