“Wheresoever we landed upon this [the James] River, wee saw the goodliest Woods as Beech, Oke, Cedar, Cypresse, Wal-nuts, Sassafras, ... and other Trees unknowne,” wrote George Percy, one of the original Jamestown colonists in 1607. Captain John Smith, who explored and mapped both Virginia and New England, recorded that “all the Countrey is overgrowne with trees.”

Indian clearings, even those made in the course of fire-hunting, were infinitesimal in the vast extent of the woods. The white man’s efforts made a bigger dent, but after a century of English settlement the Reverend Hugh Jones could still report that Virginia was “one continuous forest.” And the same was true of the whole Atlantic coastal area—to say nothing of the wilderness beyond the mountains.

The size of the individual trees in this primeval forest rarely failed to excite comment, beginning with George Percy’s mention of the “goodly tall Trees” he saw near Cape Henry, the Jamestown settlers’ first landing site. With an unlimited supply of very wide boards to be had for the sawing, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonial cabinetmakers found good use for them in table tops and leaves, and the sides and tops of chests. Boards were often 18 to 20 inches wide, and sometimes they measured as much as two feet in width. In colonial days even wild cherry sometimes stood 100 feet tall and four feet thick.

Up and down the coast of America grew an enormous variety of trees, both evergreen and deciduous. All of them found some use in the colonial home, from rough-hewn structural members to finely crafted furniture—and even to common hairbrushes and combs. In 1774 William Aylett of King William County, 50 miles from Williamsburg, advertised:

PLANK and SCANTLING to be sold by the Subscriber at his Saw Mill near Aylett’s Warehouse, Mattapony River, upon the most reasonable Terms, and of the following Kinds, viz. White Oak, Black Walnut, Sweet Gum, Ash, Poplar, Birch (which makes elegant Furniture) best Yellow Heart Pine for Flooring, and clear of Heart and Sap if required, common high Land and Slash Pine for other Uses....

Almost anything could be made of wood, and almost everything was, including many of the articles we today are familiar with in steel, iron, copper, aluminum, alloys, plastics, and rubber. Pitchforks, tableware and kitchen utensils, wheels, axles, gears and bearings, tool handles and sometimes the bodies of tools, all were made, at least in part, of wood.