{"id":17547,"date":"2017-05-10T08:39:00","date_gmt":"2017-05-10T14:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=17547"},"modified":"2017-05-10T08:39:00","modified_gmt":"2017-05-10T14:39:00","slug":"the-merc-is-gone-but-its-beautiful-wood-lives-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2017\/05\/the-merc-is-gone-but-its-beautiful-wood-lives-on\/","title":{"rendered":"The Merc is gone, but its beautiful wood lives on"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Lumber\"<\/a>

Martin Kidston\/Missoula Current<\/p>

With the deconstruction of the Missoula Mercantile now complete, Home ReSource on Tuesday launched its Mercantile lumber sale, making an estimated 200,000 board feet of historic and rare lumber available for public purchase.<\/p><\/div>\n

As crews toiled away within the confines of the Missoula Mercantile this winter, those at Home ReSource puzzled over the monumental task of moving, sorting and stacking an estimated 200,000 board feet of lumber.<\/p>\n

There were nails to pull, prices to set and, above all, a method was needed to make it available to the general public.<\/p>\n

Mission accomplished.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone wanted it right away, and we just weren\u2019t ready when it started coming out of the Merc,\u201d said Katie Deuel, executive director of Home ReSource. \u201cWe\u2019re so aware of the value of this wood to the community, and we wanted to do it right.\u201d<\/p>\n

With the lumber stacked about the expanded lumber yard, Home ReSource<\/a> opened its doors\u00a0Tuesday\u00a0to a steady stream of customers looking for wood painstakingly salvaged from the Mercantile.<\/p>\n

Withing an hour of opening for the nonprofit\u2019s lumber sale, one man rang up a $1,300 charge buying rare timbers for a home project. A woman bought smaller pieces to make a kitchen table.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the unique things for us is that we took down the Merc, which is a building that means tons to our community,\u201d said Deuel. \u201cThis is wood that came from our local forests. It seems like both human history and our natural history. It\u2019s part of our heritage that way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>Crews with Home ReSource began deconstructing the Mercantile in February, shortly after a District Court judge ended a protracted legal debate that pitted community activists against the owner of the building and developers looking to repurpose the property.<\/p>\n

By March, crews had removed the structure\u2019s roof and by April, most of usable lumber had been salvaged from the building. Much of the wood, including galleon-sized 6x8s and planks 16 inches wide, is rarely seen on the shelves of area home improvement stores.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou aren\u2019t going to find this kind of wood,\u201d said Deuel. \u201cIt\u2019s old-growth wood with tight grains and it\u2019s clear. It was sitting in the Merc for 100-plus years. We hope it goes somewhere and stays for another 100 or 200 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

To accommodate the arrival of so much lumber, Home ReSource expanded its yard to the west, more that doubling its space. Amid the stacks of lumber and planking sit steel I-beams and pillars, pipes and other salvaged goods.<\/p>\n

The deconstruction effort, carried out by a crew of 13, was the largest ever undertaken by the local nonprofit.\u00a0\u201cWe\u2019ve never had this much wood here,\u201d said Deuel. \u201cWe\u2019re pretty strict about safety, and we have a pretty clear process when we go in and take down a house. We thought really long and hard about how we were going to take that building apart.\u201d<\/p>\n

During the process, Home ReSource worked closely with another contractor, who orchestrated changes along the way. The contractor was new to deconstruction and wasn\u2019t that interested in the process when the project began.\u00a0By the end, Deuel said, the contractor was sold on the process.<\/p>\n

\"Home\"<\/a>

Martin Kidston\/Missoula Current<\/p>

\u201cYou aren\u2019t going to find this kind of wood (anywhere else),\u201d said Katie Deuel, executive director of Home ReSource.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cAs a nonprofit, our goals are to provide affordable materials to the community and to reduce waste, which is where the deconstruction comes in,\u201d Deuel said. \u201cAll of this would have gone into the landfill if a big machine would have taken that building down.\u201d<\/p>\n

That could have meant tossing out centuries’ worth of history, much of it dating back to the old-growth forests that were present long before Europeans occupied Western Montana and logged the landscape.<\/p>\n

Much of the wood now bears the notches of 19th-century construction. The timbers are rough cut in places, bearing the scars of a bygone century.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re going to make a table for our kitchen, and maybe some benches to go with it if we can find the right stuff,\u201d said Marcy Hanson, who came looking for wood with personality.\u201cIt\u2019s sad to see an old building like the Merc come down\u2014it kind of breaks my heart,\u201d she added. \u201cBut I love that they\u2019ve reclaimed the pieces of it so that it\u2019s not a total loss. We\u2019re taking a little Missoula history home with us.\u201d<\/p>\n

The rings present on thick timbers run tight, lending partial insight to both the climate and the age of the old-growth trees before they were felled and milled. Some were harvested before Montana became a state.<\/p>\n

In other old-growth timber taken in Montana, isotopes have been found with traces of the Pacific salmon that used to migrate inland. To Deuel, such stories told by the wood are fascinating, making it prized for community reuse.<\/p>\n

\u201cCommercial projects come up once in a while, but there aren\u2019t a lot of buildings like the Merc,\u201d said Deuel. \u201cIt was actually five buildings in one. By today\u2019s standards, it was overbuilt. There was a forest of trees in there.\u201d<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on Missoula Current<\/a>, an independent online newspaper, of which\u00a0Martin Kidston is the founding editor.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As crews toiled away within the confines of the Missoula Mercantile this winter, those at Home ReSource puzzled over the monumental task of moving, sorting and stacking an estimated 200,000 board feet of lumber. There were nails to pull, prices to set and, above all, a method was needed to make it available to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":97,"featured_media":17548,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,16],"tags":[5661,5839,5659],"class_list":["post-17547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-diversions","category-montana","tag-home-resource","tag-katie-deuel","tag-missoula-mercantile","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/97"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17547"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17551,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17547\/revisions\/17551"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}