In his work as a timber frame builder, David Bowman seeks out trees specifically suited to the structures he’s creating. He harvests from his own woodlot in western Massachusetts and from other properties nearby. Using his portable Wood-Mizer mill, Dave saws much of the timber he uses in his timber frames, custom cutting what he needs. He is also a founding member of the Massachusetts Woodlands Institute, a subsidiary of the Franklin Land Trust, which helps landowners actively and responsibly manage their woodlands.
I grew up in the hill towns of Massachusetts, mostly in Worthington, which is the next town over from Cummington, where I live now. It was nice growing up here. It was always quiet and still is. The hill towns aren’t a destination, like south Berkshire County or North County or the Pioneer Valley. We’re mostly left alone up here.
I spent a lot of time as a kid hiking in the White Mountains with my father. We climbed Mount Washington numerous times, mostly in the winter, because it’s more of a challenge. We did river trips up in Maine and one in Canada. It’s a long time ago now. It’s funny how time passes by. I just turned 60 a week and a half ago. Up until this point, I’ve always thought of myself as being on the younger side of things. But 60 has different connotations. And I psyched myself up for it so that when it actually happened it was anticlimactic. I still feel young. I still feel good.
I fell into things not really knowing what the heck I wanted to do. I certainly wasn’t one of those 5-year-olds who said, “I’m going to be a doctor!” and then they grew up to be a doctor. Not me. I went off to school for forestry at the University of Maine in Orono. Their forestry program then was based a lot on the paper industry. Back in the ’80s there were still a lot of paper companies up there. And I got a little disillusioned with it.
I ended up in philosophy classes in my third year. I realized there was no way I was going to graduate in four years, especially since I had no clue where I wanted to go. So I dropped out and went to cook food in Bar Harbor, Maine. That’s still one of my favorite places. It’s a magical place, with the granite outcroppings right on the ocean. I worked there through the ’80s.
I came back to Worthington and decided I wanted to be a hermit and live off the grid without a phone or credit card or anything. I looked around and bought a piece of property with the help of my parents. It was a pretty substantial property, about 80 acres. I got a little tractor with a winch on it and cut down a bunch of trees on the property. At the bottom of my hill, there was a little sawmill – one of these old, case handset sawmills that dotted the surroundings. They’re all gone now. It’s just the big mills now, although I guess I count myself as a little mill.
In 1987, I built a timber frame cabin and thought, “Oh, this is kind of fun.” Then I convinced my parents to wait a year to replace a barn that was falling down, and I rebuilt that as a timber frame. And pretty soon, I’d turned it into a career, I guess – I’m still doing it. I bought my first portable sawmill in 1993 and built a timber frame house next to the cabin in 1995. And my shop I built in 2003. I had a house fire on Christmas day last year, so now we have to see if we can salvage the house. The roof didn’t burn, and the timbers are OK, so I think it might be salvageable, but the interior has to be gutted.
My house was off the grid for 30 years. I just put it on the grid two years ago, and that’s because I put in a big 5 kilowatt solar array, which basically pays my electric bill. The reason I went electric is that I want to get rid of propane. I really don’t want to use fossil fuels. I have to use them in my business – I have a diesel tractor, and I don’t have enough electricity out here to power the sawmill electrically.
I had no carpentry experience when I started. I bought a book by this fella named Jack Sobon, who was a traditional timber framer who went to the Rhode Island School of Design and wrote a book about how to build a 12-by-16-foot cabin with hand tools. I read through the book and went to flea markets to buy old tools that were really well built. Jack’s book explained how to build something and how to do different things, but it didn’t really tell you how to work a chisel or how to plane off a surface.
The principles were pretty simple. It’s mortice and tenon joining. So, you build a mortice that a tenon has to fit into. If you get the measurements right and you build a bunch of these things, you have a building. I didn’t realize it at first, but Jack Sobon lived five minutes from my place in Cummington. When I came across something really difficult, I would go ask him, and he would help me out. After I built three frames by myself, learning along the way, he hired me on and off to do work for him.
I use the appropriate wood for where something’s going. I use a lot of found curves in my structures, like curved braces. When I do porches, I use cherry or locust curves, because those woods are rot resistant. White pine is actually moderately rot resistant – old growth stuff in particular. If you’re walking through the woods and you see an old rotten log and you kick it and it hurts your toe, that’s probably either cherry or white pine. If you cut into an old, rotted white pine log, you will find that while the sapwood is rotten, the heartwood is not.
I got my sawmill because I wanted to control the quality for my building. When you order from a mill, even a really good mill, they don’t know what you’re doing with the piece. They don’t know that they’re floor joists and they can’t have a spike knot going through the middle of them. Often, you have to reject more than one or two pieces. I solved that problem by buying my own logs or taking them off my property and sawing them myself so I know what I’ve got. Appropriate use of materials is one of my goals. I don’t want to be wasting things. Junky logs should either be left in the woods to fertilize the forest or they can be cut up for boards or something where you don’t need the highest quality.
The forest is full of junk trees now, because we’ve done such a bad job of forestry over the past few centuries. There are all these firewood trees out there, and these trees are all bent and leaning. If you cut down all the good pine trees, then the hardwoods grow up and they compete, and the ones on the edge bend over looking for sunlight. So, you find a lot of curves or forks, and they’re highly useful. I’m building a porch now out of cherry forks that will frame it. Basically, it’s just stuff you’d find in a log truck full of firewood. But I find use for it. I cut them on my mill in one plane. Then I lay them on sawhorses and I saw the other curve out with a chainsaw.
I have a number of woodlots where people cut repeatedly on them, and I know where the curved trees are on those lots. On my place, I know where every curved tree is. Each one is only specific to the building, though, because each building is a different size. You need to fit the curve to the plan. Then you go marching off into the woods to find this. One of the main reasons to do this is just to get a good woods walk.
My main forte is to go find all the trees for somebody’s house on their own property. I just did a frame for a guy where we cut all the main timbers, the flooring, the trim – he had enough timber on his property to do all of this. We used crotched braces, which are pretty cool. There are 54 crotched braces in the frame. Most people who come to me are interested in doing something as sustainably as we can do it.
I love this work. It’s so much fun. I just slowly got into it. It was kind of just by chance. I’ve built just about everything – houses, barns, outdoor pavilions, decks. I’ve rebuilt barns. I’ve taken down old structures and put them back up as houses. I also teach workshops, including some for the Heartwood School. They have a series of programs for timber framing and other subjects. They have a carpentry for women class. They do things like concrete countertops, a stairway building class. It’s a nice school and is actually part of the Timber Framers Guild now.
I’ve done some Game of Logging training at the Heartwood School, which made me realize how little I knew and how remarkable it is that I am still alive and have all of my limbs. It truly is a fantastic course. I would recommend it to anybody. I can cut down trees and saw them, but
I’m getting to the point where I don’t want to be spending huge amounts of time in the woods with a chainsaw. I’d rather be looking for the trees and finding them, then have somebody else cut the trees and skid them out.
I haven’t really cut much off of my property for business purposes for about 10 years. I cut a few trees here and there, and I do manage it for timber. It’s an interesting piece of property. When I bought it, it had been owned for about 25 years by somebody in Rhode Island who bought it as an investment. They didn’t live here or work the land, and they did not have it logged off. Usually, people log the land off to get the maximum value, then they sell you this piece of crap. But this land hadn’t been logged off. There were merchantable trees and a nice forest – and there still is. I’m trying to keep that.
Half of it is actually somewhat of an old growth forest. I cored a hemlock tree out back that is about 280 years old. I have a stream that bisects my property. The stone walls go up to the stream, and then they stop and don’t continue on the other side of the stream. The other side of the stream is where the old growth is. The characteristics of the forest change from one side of the stream to the other. The trees are relatively small, but they exhibit old growth signs, like deep, furrowed bark and lack of taper. I don’t know why it wasn’t cut. The properties surrounding me have stone walls on them, and those properties go way back out into the woods, paralleling my land, but it’s not old growth forest. It’s just this little chunk.
I do know all the birds around here. That’s one of the fun things about forestry. I have open fields and mid-succession forest here, so I get all these different types of birds. The towhees just showed up, and they love this thicket of balsam I have here. I rarely see them, but I hear them as they hop around in the trees and hide out. They kind of remind me of how I would want to be if I was a bird.
Massachusetts has this big problem – not so much Vermont and New Hampshire, although it’s happening there, too – where the forest is fragmenting into smaller and smaller pieces. Forest management gets harder and harder to do when you’re talking about 15 acres, 20 acres. All these big old farms and woodlands that have been lotted up become very difficult to manage properly. I don’t know what the future holds. Quite frankly, I’m not so sure it’s a rosy picture. But you’ve got to try where you can.
I am a hopeful person, even though I don’t think the end game is going to be all that pleasant. Because I do know good people and I see good people, and I enjoy those people’s company. And I see that we’re trying to do things to help out and to manage the human imprint on the planet in a positive way.