Firewood & Woodyards

The Moncure address is Hunt's Pittsboro Woodyard, one of four the company runs — the others are at Youngsville, Spring Hope and Sanford — and all four take pine and hardwood saw logs plus pine and hardwood pulpwood, accepting, in the company's words, “loads of all sizes”. Hunt Forest Resources was founded in 2004 and now employs more than 40 people across six North Carolina locations, among them Registered Foresters, timber buyers and licensed real estate professionals. It publishes annual figures of 7,000 acres of timberland managed, 56,000 trees planted, 5.5 million board feet of lumber produced, 650,000 tons of logs supplied and 4.5 million pounds of wood waste recycled. Affiliated brands cover lumber, recycling and firewood.

Now trading as Kindled Provisions — Hunt Forest Resources states flatly that “East Coast Firewood, LLC is now Kindled Provisions” — this Moncure operation produces kiln-dried firewood rather than sawn products. The wood is USDA-certified pest- and mold-spore-free, which is what allows it to be moved across state lines and into parks and campgrounds. Production runs on a Multitek firewood processor and a Pezzolato vertical splitter, with quality checked using digital moisture readers on random samples, and the species offered include cherry, oak, hickory and Southern Appalachian hardwoods. The business shares its address and phone with Hunt's Pittsboro Woodyard and ships across the southeastern United States.

Not a wood products mill. The company's own site describes an excavation and grading contractor, family-run since 2003 and holding an NC unlimited general contractor licence for grading and excavation, doing new-construction excavation, retaining walls, septic installations and driveway and road repair. Alongside that it runs a rock yard open to the public selling topsoil, mulch, gravel and patio rock, delivers firewood, takes brush and stumps at a dump site, and stores RVs and boats. Veteran discounts and free estimates are advertised. Nothing anywhere on the site mentions logging, timber buying, pulpwood, biomass or pellets, so the primary-processor classification this listing was built from is not supported by any source found.

Firewood is the actual business here: the Forest Products Locator lists a hardwood firewood operation in size class 2, and the state timber buyers guide adds pulpwood purchase and timber cruising on top of it. Two Canton addresses are on record, the Old Henson Cove Road yard and a second at 54 Pasture Drive. Yellow Pages posts retail hours far longer than a firewood yard usually keeps - 6:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday, 8 to 8 on Sunday - and notes PayPal is accepted. The Better Business Bureau opened a file in November 2012 but the business is not accredited and carries no rating, the BBB saying it has insufficient information.

Sweet potato storage boxes and environmental silt fence stakes are the unusual end of this business - the stakes treated against mould, the boxes built from dense oak, hickory and ash. Louisburg Hardwood is the parent of Smoke House Lumber Company in the Inez community and a sister company to Louisburg Box and Pallet, and describes itself as having been in the timber, sawmill, firewood and silt fence stake business for many years. New and used Class B pallets round out the product line, with heat-treat certification held for USDA export requirements. BBB records put the start of the business at 1983 with incorporation in 1995, and give it an A+ rating. A second yard operates on East River Road in Louisburg, in Franklin County.

Much of what this Raleigh woodyard handles never came off a timber tract at all — the company says it takes logs from local job sites and customer properties that would otherwise go to a landfill and turns them into green and kiln-dried firewood, mulch, custom-cut lumber, rough-cut boards and project slabs. Firewood can be bought by the pound for pickup. The yard is on Hillsborough Street across from the State Fairgrounds, open weekdays 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., and it covers the Triangle from Chapel Hill and Pittsboro east to Zebulon and Clayton. It has been family-owned and family-operated since 1994. A 4.5 score across 86 reviews is published on Birdeye, which describes 85 of those as coming from Google.

View clearing on mountain property is the stated specialty here, and this is a residential and commercial tree service rather than any kind of timber operation. The work runs from removals and pruning to stump grinding, crane jobs, firewood cutting and sales, mulch and yard landscaping, across a stated service area of Franklin, Cashiers and Glenville. The company says its owner has 12 years in the tree business in Franklin and describes the firm as licensed and fully insured; the BBB records an A+ accredited rating and a business start date of June 2016. Nothing published indicates it buys pulpwood, biomass or standing timber from landowners.