DUMMERSTON — It all started when retired forester Charles Richardson, 87, read an article in the newspaper about a “wood pantry” - stored, dried hardwood to be given away to people in need - that had emerged in New Hampshire.
“I said to myself, 'We could do that,'” said Richardson.
“Don Hazelton, Merrill Barton, and I got the ball rolling, and now we are a group of men, mostly retired, and we cut the logs, split [the wood] with a splitter, stack it and store it, and then give it away to people who need it. It's dry and it's split; for some people, it's even stacked,” he said plainly.
The group gets together two to three days per week to make all of that happen. It's a charity that operates with no application form or process for direct contact - just referrals from neighbors or family of folks in need, or from the Dummerston Congregational Church.
A cord of wood is a 128-cubic-foot stack of cut and split hardwood. And while the amount of wood in a cord can vary depending on how tightly it is stacked, there is no denying that eight years and 120 cord of wood later, the amount of wood that the wood pantry has given away would fill just about three train boxcars.
Cristina Shay-Onye knows what it means to have dry wood available for heat. She has a 2{1/2}-year-old daughter and a son who is only 6 months old.
“I was pregnant, and we were both working full time and were a little late ordering our wood,” she recalled. “Then our baby came a month early, so we didn't get our wood early enough. When it came time to start burning it, it was smoking a lot and would barely throw heat.”
“The summer was so wet, our wood was still wet, too,” she said. “The dealer kept telling us, 'We won't deliver until it stops raining,' and it never stopped raining.”
“Finding wood became my full-time job,” said Shay-Onye.
She had been reading posts from people on the Front Porch Forum online, many of whom couldn't find dry wood either. She followed up by emailing the people who asked the questions to get numbers of other dealers who might have some.
There was no dry wood to be found.
“Everyone was scrambling this fall to find some,” she said.
Eventually one of the dealers called back and left her a message that told her “about a man named Charlie who runs a wood pantry.”
She couldn't believe it.
“The temperature in the house was 60 degrees,” she said. “I had the baby bundled up, but it just wasn't warm enough in the house for him.”
“So I called Charlie,” Shay-Onye continued. “He asked me to let him make a few calls and said he would call me back.”
“Two hours later, he let me know that they were already on their way with the wood,” she said. “I was stunned!”
“I call them my Wood Angels, and I'm so grateful to them,” she told The Commons.
Richardson, Don Hazelton, and Meryl Barton, all Dummerston folks, came with a pickup and a dump truck full of dry wood.
“It was everything that they came,” Shay-Onye said. “It makes me cry just thinking about it.
“We'd spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on this wood that we couldn't burn, and I was really stressed,” she continued. “My baby was cold, [and] we didn't have enough money to buy more wood, even if we could have found some that was dry.”
“Lighting that first fire warmed the whole house in a way that felt magical,” she said.
While the men made their delivery, there came a moment when Don Hazelton, 91, needed to sit down to rest for a few minutes. Shay-Onye got him a chair, popped her baby into his arms, and took his place stacking the wood.
“I even got to babysit,” said Hazelton, with a beaming grin.
Richardson thinks of it as all in a day's work.
“What good is a bunch of green wood?” he asks rhetorically. “It gives us retired men something to do, and gives us a purpose.”
All wood from donations
Where does all this wood come from?
“In the beginning, some of the loggers that were within the town would drop some logs off on my dooryard as a donation,” Richardson said. “At that point, wood wasn't as valuable as it is today. If they did that today, it would be worth at least $1,000.”
“For some reason, the price of wood has gone up. It's about $225 a cord now, cutting wood right off the stump. Dry wood can go for as much as $400 a cord. If somebody is going to hold it until it's dry, it's going to cost more. We don't get those kinds of donations anymore.”
Even so, all the wood still comes free. People call when they have a tree that falls on their property, and Dummerston Road Commissioner Lee Chamberlain is always on the lookout when a tree is down in town - he will give the men a call.
Other people in the community, when they change over to oil heat or a pellet stove, donate the wood they no longer need.
“Lee Chamberlin and so many other people have been so kind in donating and helping us out,” Richardson said. “We're very appreciative to be supported in this way.”
'He thought we were too old to have done that work'
“We'd like to get some younger people interested in helping us with the process,” he added. “We could use some help.”
Richardson remembers a day when the group was working in their wood lot and a middle-aged visitor from Washington state walked past them.
He looked at all the rows of dry hardwood with a critical eye. He said, “I suppose you get the young bucks to split all that wood up?”
“Yes, indeed,” replied Hazelton, without missing a beat, “You're looking at 'em.”
“Must be he was surprised. Apparently, he thought we were all too old to have done that work ourselves,” Richardson added, laughing.
Another person from Dummerston who was gifted wood, and prefers to remain anonymous, had run out in March a few years back. She was out of money, and it was a particularly long winter. The storms continued through April that year.
“I came home from church one Sunday morning, and a big stack of wood was all piled neatly on my deck. I had no idea where it had come from, or how anyone knew I needed it,” she remembered. “It was a gift that meant so much to me. I had been so cold.”
Eventually, she asked a neighbor whose truck had been in her dooryard while she'd been out, and she put together what had happened and who had brought this important gift to her.
“When you're cold, it's hard to believe that there are people in the world like Charlie, Don, Merrill, and the others who help them, who would give their time to people for free,” she said, her voice shaking with emotion at the memory of their kindness.
“That's what it's all about,” said Richardson.