A few weeks back I was browsing the reuse center when I spotted— gasp! Lumber! I’ve seen a lot of odd building supplies there but actually never just stacked wood. I kinda chuckled to myself as I made a beeline for the pile, wood has become such a meme since prices have like tripled over the course of the pandemic. But my amusement quickly cleared when I recognized what kind of wood this was…
I picked up a couple boards off the top and found them a little light for 3/4”, as if too weathered, or maybe dry rotted? Only a couple boards down I found a stamp: M&M Malarkey redwood siding, from about the 1940s or 50s when the Oregon and California logging industries were in their heydey.
I was suddenly a lot more hopeful. Redwood has a great reputation for its preservative resins and I felt even the most severe weathering would only intrude 1/4” or so into the core on the painted side. At the edges the tongue and groove fittings were damaged when the siding was removed by crowbar. This kind of wood will need a planing to be usable anyways, and will probably become 5/8” or 1/2” thick before new boards are cut from it.
I went through practically every piece and tried to pick the straightest, least weathered candidates with the prettiest grain. There were some with blonde streaks scattered in the piles. It took a while to get through it, but when I did I had about 20 long boards and 5 short which I got for $45! Over the next week, I would find myself daydreaming of what I might use the boards for, and sometimes I’d think “but did I get enough for that?”. By the end of the week the thought was accompanied by a vague sense of dread— I should have gotten more!
I felt good about not just clearing out the cache though. In the meantime, I thought, if someone got the rest that would be fine. I hadn’t done so intentionally but I stood by my grace period— when I got back to the pile a couple days ago I’d say about 1/4 more had been taken, probably in portions of one or two boards. I felt okay about giving the remains the same treatment as I had earlier, picking through methodically and selecting only the best. The second time I got 15 long and 15 short and paid about $45 again.
I planed a few down on both sides, to a half inch thickness, to see what the grain really looked like and was stunned! It’s hard to get the pictures to do it justice, but it’s such a sparkly, iridescent wood. I *cannot wait* to see what it looks like oiled and sealed!
1955 wall finishes catalog — source
I wasn’t aware of the Malarkey brand before finding this siding but the stamp sparked its own little interest. I did a little googling but couldn’t turn up much information on the stuff. Some ads from after the company went public and eventually an obituary of the founder were all I managed to find.
James A. Malarkey’s M&M mill opened in 1918 when he bought a shipyard millwork company in Portland, Oregon, which made deck plugs, belaying pins, pulleys and mast hoops— details of the wooden age of sail. Following World War 1 the industry declined, and M&M began producing folding ironing boards just as electric irons became commonplace. They became one of their biggest manufacturers and quickly grew in size.
The automobile industry was taking off at the same time and brought a new demand for garages. The cars bodies of that era were made of wood panels that could not withstand much weathering. Malarkey began to manufacture garage doors, and then doors of all kinds. During this time The company began experimenting with laminated wood, which led to them building a plywood mill in Longview Washington.
Over the course of the 1930s the company bought and updated a series of mills in the PNW dedicated to plywood manufacture. The M&M production volume was then nearly 70 million board feet, about 10% of the total fir plywood industry when they began taking government contracts for marine and aviation plywood during World War 2.
In the postwar boom M&M bought one billion acres of standing timber (forest) in the redwood country of Northern California and continued consolidating area mills. Just two days after the company went public in 1948, James Malarkey died age 76. The company was sold in 1955 for a little over $50 million (roughly half a billion dollars adjusted for inflation). I think this final decade of the Malarkey brand is when my boards originated.
The World’s Largest Hollow Log — source
It’s hard to come across much information on what happened to the Malarkey timber lands after the company was sold. Rare bits turned up around the “last Malarkey giant”- the World’s Largest Hollow Log since 1987, which was apparently felled on land once owned by Malarkey a few miles north of Crescent City, California. The sheer scale of the trees that Malarkey redwood was cut from becomes apparent under the title “worlds largest”. In fact that superlative pertains just to the hollow part, and these Sequoia Sempervirens grew even larger. They can live over 2000 years and reach heights of 300-350 feet, and are only found along a 450-mile strip of the Pacific Coast of North America. I try to keep this in mind as I refinish my planks, which were part of someones house or shed too. They were likely milled from trees that predate much of my ancestry, before being worn by the weather of my region for half a century. Wood is so fascinating.