White oak from the Catskills, and the mill I trust.

I buy almost all of my white oak from Reed & Sons, a small mill outside Windham, NY, about seventy minutes from the shop. Ken Reed's grandfather started the mill in 1953. Ken has been running it since 2002. I met him the summer I opened the shop, drove up on a hunch, and I've been back roughly once a month ever since.

When I walk through the stacks I'm looking for four things. Rift-sawn or quartersawn boards for anything structural, because they move less across the grain than plain-sawn. Growth rings tight enough that I can count fifteen or twenty in an inch, which tells me the tree grew slow and dense. A moisture reading between 6 and 8 percent on a handheld meter, taken from the end grain of three boards in the middle of the stack. And a clean smell. Case-hardened wood, dried too fast in a rushed kiln, has a sharp, acrid edge to it. Properly dried oak smells like a barn in October.

Big-box lumber is stacked outside, dried on a schedule that suits the yard, and priced to move. It costs about a third of what Ken charges me per board foot. I've built with it exactly twice, both times in the first year of the shop, and both pieces came back inside of eighteen months with joints that had pulled open. The wood was still moving because it had never actually reached equilibrium. It looked dry. It wasn't.

The best board I've bought from Ken was a walnut slab, 12/4, about eleven feet long, that he'd been holding under a tarp behind the mill for four years. He'd taken it down in a windstorm off a tree at the edge of a pasture in Delaware County. The heartwood was so dark it read almost purple in raking light. He wanted eight hundred dollars for it. I paid without thinking. That slab became the top of the Catskill Dining Table, and it's the only piece I've ever built that I regret selling.

If you buy from a small mill and pay a premium, you are buying two things. The wood, obviously. And the fact that someone stood in the yard, sorted the pack, and turned the boards over as they dried. That second thing is almost all of it.