Wood

WOOD On land and at sea, wood figures prominently in American folklife because of its adaptability and abundance. Historically, European settlers marveled at the forested environment of the New World and harvested trees for house construction, craft, and food. Woodcrafts such as the preparation of medicines and dyes from bark, the construction of dugout canoes, and building shelters in bark were learned from Native Americans, while Europeans made intensive use of timbers for traditional houses. was, in fact, the chief resource of agricultural settlement and commerce into the twentieth century. Its significance endures: Wood still provides the material for houses, barns, farmstead structures, and their furnishings; commerce in timber provides a liveli-

hood to loggers, carpenters, builders of ships and boats, and makers of furniture and musical instruments; and the use of wood generates a market for a wide variety of metal tools to cut and shape it. Wood and forests also hold symbolic meaning, reflected in American folk speech: “hicks” (rustics, derived from the image of the hickory shirts worn by loggers), “knock on wood” (indicating wood as a luck-inducing substance), and “not seeing the wood for the trees” (conveying the lesson of understanding the general point).