Teaching old logs new tricks

One man's passion for recycling trees sprouted from when he was 12.
Chicago Tribune
This is a story of death and resurrection. And trees. Old trees.
And, most of all, one fiery-eyed man with a sawmill, two rehabilitated truck trailers now put to good use sucking water out of old wood, and a dream of making history -- history you can sit on, eat off of, sleep on, heck, the list is endless -- out of every fallen limb and trunk in Chicago and its wooded environs.
The man's name is Horigan, Bruce Horigan. And, like every self-respecting hero in any tale worth telling, he's part romantic, part dreamer and decidedly passionate when it comes to trees and the recycling thereof.
Horigan calls his business Horigan Urban Forest Products, and though he's been aiming for this day for years and years, he's only had the business, the tree recycling business, that is, for the last two.
What Horigan does is head-slappingly simple, one of those why-didn't-I-think-of-that ideas. He hauls away old trees when they come down for whatever reason -- lightning strikes, high winds, house building, road widening, old age or infirmity -- then he saws them into boards out on his rented lot and kiln-dries the wood in his souped-up truck trailers, as long as it takes to get 'em good and dry, what with his industrial-strength dehumidifiers and racks and garden-variety red rubber hoses.
And then, working with Amish furniture-makers, artisans and fine carpenters, restoration carpenters or otherwise, here and abroad, he has the trees made into furniture or built into rooms that he hopes will be around far longer than the old trees themselves.
'They've created history'
"The cool part about it is they've created history," says Horigan, 48, who sports close-cropped gray hair and high-octane energy. "Those pieces of furniture will hopefully be fought over by the generations and last, hopefully, longer than the 225 years of the tree itself."
Truth be told, Horigan's brilliant idea is a tad slow in catching on.
"It needs to catch on," says Horigan, bouncing along the highway in the front seat of his forest-green Century Suburban with centuries' worth of lumber stacked in the back. "I literally sold my [tree care] business for this. I can actually go back [to the original business] but this is what I truly believe in, and there's no reason for it not to work -- except for lack of knowledge."
The way he sees it, the math is elementary: "There are hundreds of trees coming down each and every day, regardless. I'm trying to keep it from being turned into firewood or mulch. Each board foot that people use here is one less board foot that has to come from the woods of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, the Northwest or the Southeast."
Indeed, out of the 50,000 board feet he figures he's milled and dried in the last two years, some 2,000 board feet are now in living rooms, libraries and bedrooms all around Chicago.
There's the red oak made into a bar in the hip East Village. There's an ash tree from Lake Forest College that was bent into a rocking chair with a cradle attached. There's a red oak fireplace mantel in Ft. Sheridan. And a reproduction of a 16th-century dining table is being made, in England, from a red oak that came down in Glenview, Ill.
An old friend
It was a centuries-old swamp white oak in Northfield, though, that Lynne and Chase Curtis could not bear to have turned into so much mulch. The old tree had stood beside the driveway, shaded their days, figured into family photos, made for a new-driver obstacle course, for decades.
"It all began 41 years ago when we moved into this house," says Lynne Curtis, remembering the big tree with the lightning scar that needed help, right from the day they moved in. "It was going to cost $600 to fill the cavity of that tree with cement, which is what they did back then, and we didn't have $600, but we decided to find the money.
"We lived happily ever after with that tree until it started declining, about three years ago. We said we'd do whatever it takes. It was right by the driveway, so every teenager and every adult had to miss it to get out of the garage.
"I just imagined all those years of who had lived in it, what insects, what birds, the animals. Two people, reaching out their arms, couldn't touch their fingers around it."
Twice Horigan treated the old oak in hopes of saving it; the second time, he wouldn't take a penny for his work, saying only if it lived, could they pay him. The old oak didn't make it.
Two Columbus Days ago, when the big old tree came down as the Curtises and their three grown children stood watching, Horigan was right at their side. In talking about the tree business, he mentions that you have to be part grief counselor. In the case of a downed tree, he says, nothing heals the hurt like knowing you can make it into something that will last for a very long time.
Through Horigan's connections, and after a field trip with him to downstate Atwood, Ill., the Curtises wound up having two Amish brothers from Atwood make four fireplace benches and four end tables out of their old oak, as well as 12 Nativity sets for their grandchildren and children. Each morning now, Lynne Curtis sits on her old tree to put on her walking shoes.
Where idea came from
Horigan, who grew up in Pittsburgh and now lives in Glenview in a turreted, gingerbread Victorian he saved from the wrecking ball and moved down the block, says the idea of making something out of a tree that would last forever came to him when he was 12.
Back then, he had neighbors who had inherited a chest of drawers he has never forgotten. The chest, dating back to John Alden who came over on the Mayflower, had been passed down for nearly 400 years, always to the oldest son who had a son turning 21.
"That type of thing has always meant something to me," said Horigan. "Four hundred years ago, that's older than the tree. The second life is longer than the first life. That's recycling."
As soon as Horigan moved to Chicago in 1977, he started working for a tree company. By 1978, he was struck by all the dumping of beautiful logs. "There's gotta be a better use for this," he recalls thinking.
In 1983, while working toward a business degree at Lake Forest College, Horigan stumbled across a research paper on the city of Chicago trying to recycle trees. He was struck again, and wrote a marketing paper laying out his first concrete thoughts on the notion.
Straight out of school, he did a stint in the corporate offices of Marshall Field & amp; Co., in the State Street store, and made it a habit to use his lunch hours meeting with the retired executives of a not-for-profit group called SCORE, Service Corps of Retired Executives. The retirees were helping him flesh out his business plan.
After Field's, Horigan, a certified arborist, went to work for the tree company now known as The Care of Trees. He approached the owner, John Hendrickson, who had dabbled in the mulch business, but wasn't interested in Horigan's recycling idea.
On his own
By 1991, Horigan was out on his own, with a tree-care and tree-trimming business. He had Plans A and B up his sleeve: "To get it up and running, to run without me, so I could borrow against it. Or to sell it and use the money for my recycling business.
"I'm either very stubborn or ..." His voice trails off. "Plan B happened." Davey Tree Co. bought the tree-care business in 2003, and Horigan launched his lifelong dream.
"The hardest thing," he says, "is creating a market for it. I thought it'd be easier, that people would love to use this wood. But furniture-makers already have their wood. I'm trying to get people to actually want this wood, to ask for it."
Rick Illian, a project manager for Creative Wood Concepts in Chicago, is one of those who has used Horigan's wood, restoring turn-of-the-last-century wainscoting in a Gold Coast townhouse. The cost of the wood is clearly in line, says Illian and other woodworkers, with what you'd pay elsewhere for comparable timber.
Illian, for one, couldn't imagine using anything else. Horigan's oak, he says, has Old World graining that couldn't be found at a lumber yard.
And that's not all.
"It has more meaning than when you go to a lumber yard, where it comes from a farm and is grown for construction.
"It has a story."
It has indeed. And, perhaps, a happy ending.
XInterested in recycling a tree, or wood from such a tree? Call Bruce Horigan at (847) 729-1023.