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"I stood during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900," they could say.

"And I withstood the Cultural Revolution of the '60s and '70s."

"I carry pieces of them inside me," they call out to workers who remove bullets and other artifacts from the ancient Chinese elm wood.

Timbers that held up houses and temples in China for two centuries or more are finding new life here, as Mountain Lumber Co. saws them into floors and tables for a decidedly high-end market.

Mountain Lumber markets the recut elm as slices of history that could date to the Ming Dynasty, which prevailed for three centuries before expiring about 350 years ago. It's an odd twist on products from China, whose economy thrives partly on turning wood from American forests into furniture and flooring that is shipped back to America's big-box stores.

Willie Drake, the founder and president of Mountain Lumber, found some challenges as he negotiated the purchases, timber by timber. Each piece had a different owner, and the price that Drake thought was agreed upon kept rising.

"It's never over until the shipping container is out of the port," Drake said.

Chinese elm is hardwood with a mellow golden patina. Many of the boards are marked with a distinctive brown grain that ripples evenly along their length.

But it's not just the beauty of the hardwood that attracted Drake.

"The ultimate thing, for me, is the history of the wood, the story it has to tell," said Drake, who founded Mountain Lumber 31 years ago.

The company's genesis came from Drake's discovery that timbers made from American heart pine, a wood that isn't on the commercial market anymore, could be reclaimed from old factories and barns for customers who wanted heritage lumber in their new structures.

Mountain Lumber has evolved into a business that reclaims wood from many countries and many uses, such as the aging vats used in breweries. Drake competes with about 30 U.S. companies in selling reclaimed woods, he said.

If the timbers could talk, they might say, "These new owners are paying more for us in dollars than our first owners, who were wealthy in their day, could earn in a lifetime."

Mountain Lumber gets $18 to $20 per square foot for Chinese elm. It sells other kinds of wood, such as heart pine or various oaks, for prices ranging from $5 to $12 per square foot.

By contrast, hardwood flooring at Lowe's and Home Depot ranges from $4 to $8 per square foot.

"New woods are homogenous," said David Foky, the company's marketing director. "They don't have the history and character of other woods."

"We sell to the end user -- architects and homeowners," Drake said.

Mountain Lumber's reclaimed woods can be found in Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home, Foky said.

Mountain Lumber's wood also shows up in Jefferson's other home, Poplar Forest in Bedford County, and in museums and restaurants, Foky said.

"We can enhance it and help people live a part of history," Drake said.

Residential customers who buy the materials usually are building top-of-the-line homes, Foky said, but sometimes a young family will buy enough historic wood for a single showcase room in their home.

Mountain Lumber has supplied several tractor-trailer loads of wood for the current restoration of Montpelier, the Orange County home of President James Madison.

If the timbers could talk, they could tell which wars produced the bullets that Mountain Lumber's metal detectors find in them.

Displayed in the company's offices are framed artifacts that, if not removed from the wood, could destroy a saw blade -- hand-cut nails and spikes, for example.

But the items that say much about China's conflicts are musket balls, pitted with age. Workers retrieved other rounds, too -- shiny and sharp-nosed, perhaps from an AK-47 infantry rifle.

It's conceivable that the musket balls could have been fired by Chinese fighters during the Taiping (1850-64) or Boxer rebellions, Drake says, while the modern bullets could be from the Cultural Revolution that occurred under Mao Tse-Tung from the mid-1960s through the early '70s.

Drake, who was a helicopter door gunner during the Vietnam War, speaks matter-of-factly about the possible stories behind the bullets.

Although the Boxer Rebellion lasted only a year and was fought mostly in northern China by lightly armed rebels, it occurred in the vicinity of the lumberyard where Drake found these timbers, in the mountains west of the Yellow River Valley and near the Great Wall.

Although rifles were used by Western soldiers of that period, a few museums in other parts of the world display muskets that were taken as souvenirs by troops during the Boxer Rebellion.

If these timbers could talk, they might say: "We were conceived and grew in China because one of the Ming Dynasty's first acts, in the 14th century, was reforestation. We served our owners well, and were proud to support their homes and temples. None of us ever imagined that the ways of the world would change and that we'd be carried across oceans and sawed into planks, so that new owners could tell our story to their friends, guests and customers."

Two years ago, Drake learned from James Godfrey, a friend in Charlottesville formerly associated with Sotheby's Auction House, that elm wood from buildings that might date back as far as the Ming Dynasty era was available in China. Those one-story structures had been torn down to clear land for a construction boom in cities where skylines are dotted with tower cranes hoisting steel and concrete for skyscrapers.

Experienced in buying reclaimed lumber across the United States and in several European countries, Drake and Godfrey traveled to northern China, to a lumberyard west of the Yellow River Valley where old, hand-hewn timbers lay waiting for buyers. Some of them had remnants of the red and blue paint that decorated them when they were part of temples or homes. They were likely twice as old as other lumber Drake sold.

Usually the timbers were sold to Chinese furniture makers who cut them up for table legs, Drake said.

Drake saw in them the kind of wide flooring boards that are valued in the high-end flooring market -- boards with a really long history.

When he started talking with the Chinese businessmen, the details got sticky.

"They are slow to make decisions. They are the most incredible negotiators I've ever met. The deal is never finished until the wood is on the ship," Drake said.

The timbers were from central and northern China, brought to the lumberyard in quantities of one or two by different owners.

"Every timber you buy has a negotiated price. By the time it is loaded, the price can change three or four times. It will be loaded and the Chinese negotiator will say, 'I never said that' regarding the price, and it will cost you as much to unload it as to pay the new price," Drake said.

"In order to get a timber you want, they will make you take a bad timber, and pay more for it than for the good one."

Drake had the timbers trucked to port in Canton in southern China, where other issues came up.

"At the port, they don't have a lot of patience. We have to pay demurrage charges" for delays in moving freight, "and they add up."

Delays can occur in dealing with customs officials who, among other things, require that the logs be fumigated in the shipping container to avoid transporting exotic insects to America.

Once all the negotiations were finished, the timbers continued on a journey through the Panama Canal to Norfolk, where the last leg was a simple truck ride to Ruckersville.

It was an upstream journey, in terms of the prevailing trade patterns for lumber. Virginia exported $32.7 million of wood to China the first 11 months of 2005, an increase over $28 million for all of 2004, according to the state's Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. Most of it probably was made into furniture, wood-industry watchers said.

This wood can prove its heritage with ease. Does it really date to the Ming, the last truly Chinese dynasty, which ended in 1644?

Drake tells customers that the timbers probably are 200 to 400 years old.

They could be from buildings erected during the Ming Dynasty -- or the Ching Dynasty, which succeeded the Ming and had Manchurian origins. The Ching Dynasty survived until 1911.

Mountain Lumber provides customers with historic accounts of a particular wood's use, Foky said.

Buildings that stood in the United States can be authenticated from tax records and other public documents, but the ancient Chinese elm timbers came from structures that had been torn down before Drake found the wood.

With the flooring from these timbers, "we provide a more general history," Foky said, one that was vetted by Godfrey, formerly a senior vice president and director of Chinese art at Sotheby's in New York.

Godfrey said he traveled with Drake through China, looking for the kind of timbers Drake wanted.

"I knew that it was truly from the 17th and 18th centuries, and even earlier," Godfrey said. "The unique character of Chinese architecture was very distinguishable. Their use of wide-diameter vertical beams and large, occasionally square horizontal beams that fit together in mortise-and-tenon fashion are typical of Ming and early Ching architecture," Godfrey said.

"If you visit China today and visit the Imperial Palace or Summer Palace and take a close look at the temples and pagodas associated with them, you can actually see these architectural members."

Brad Reed, an associate professor who specializes in Chinese history at the University of Virginia, said Ming-era timbers could have come from private homes, "which is rare outside of elite homes."

And the timbers might say, "Thus history comes full circle. We began our service holding up elite homes in China, and now we become the flooring in the houses of America's well-to-do."

Source: http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/01/23/1308377.htm