In the construction of a frame house several kinds of wood are needed. First, the framework of rough-sawed spruce. Second, a better wood, like white pine, for door and window frames. Third, the outside covering. This may be clapboards, for which nothing has ever approached white pine, although it is necessary now to find substitutes. The roof, if shingled, may be of cedar, or cypress—some spruce is used to-day. For interior work, floors may be spruce, white pine, cypress, yellow pine, or hard woods. For finish or trim, many woods are used such as white wood, oak, yellow pine, cypress, cherry, and bay wood.
Spruce.—This wood has been used almost exclusively in the past for framing, but great inroads have been made in the supply, especially by the manufacturers of paper pulp. Consequently the cost is increasing rapidly.
Three varieties are recognized, white, black, and red. White spruce is a distinctly northern tree, delighting in the cold climate of Canada, but dipping down along the Maine coast. It is a beautiful, straight, and tall specimen, frequently found as high as a hundred and fifty feet. The needles are only three quarters of an inch, or less, in length and clothe the twigs in an entire circle. Cones two inches long, bearing under their scales tiny winged seeds. It is used often as an ornamental evergreen for lawns, and for this purpose probably has no equal, as, unlike the Norway spruce, it holds its foliage, dense and green, close to the ground.
The wood is weak, knotty, and soft, but suitable for rough framing.
Black Spruce.—Another northern tree, rarely found in forests below the Canadian border, except around the Great Lakes.
Leaves about same size as in white spruce, but cones smaller, more oval in form, and one inch and a half long.
Spruce gum is obtained from this tree, which has a more pleasant odour than white spruce.
Wood used for pulp making, framing, and, quartered, for sounding-boards of musical instruments.
Red Spruce.—A close relative of the black and sometimes confused with it, but it is a distinct tree, reaching its best development several hundred miles south of the black spruce, in the Appalachian Mountains, and extending as far south as North Carolina; while the black variety barely crosses the borders of Canada into Maine.
Needles about half an inch long. Cones small, sometimes barely an inch and a half. They fall the first winter, while those of the black remain on the tree often for years.