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A Renewable Resource
Nebraska farmers were not the first to recognize the virtues of Osage wood. It was highly prized by Indians for bows and clubs. Tribes in the northern Great Plains traveled hundreds of miles to trade for it. John Bradbury, Scottish traveler of the Great Plains during the early-1800s, reported that the price of an Osage orange bow among the Arikaras was one horse and one blanket. Europeans in America found more uses for the Osage wood. An extremely dense wood, 48 to 57 pounds per cubic foot dry, it is resistant to decay and insect attack because of a natural anti-fungal agent. Osage rates high in bending strength, hardness, stiffness, shock resistance, and ability to hold nails and screws. The wood is said to be stronger than white oak and tough as hickory. Because the tree typically has a short trunk it was never extensively used as saw lumber or railroad ties.
During the late-1800s and early-1900s, the wood of Osage was used for a plethora of purposes: bridge pilings, house foundations, street paving blocks, telephone poles, insulator pins, machinery parts, pulley blocks, mine timber, parquet flooring, policemen's billy clubs, tool handles, whiffletrees, plow beams, harps, smoking pipes, and wagon wheel hubs, rims and spokes. The U.S. Army extracted a dye from the roots and bark to make the khaki color of World War I uniforms. Osage was being used so extensively by the early-1900s the U.S. Forest Service was concerned the supply would be depleted. The bark was used for tanning leather and the tree was grown in Europe as food for silkworms. Osage burns extremely hot, nearly as hot as coal, making it excellent firewood in furnaces and stoves designed for high temperatures. In open fireplaces, though, the wood snaps and pops and must be burned with caution.
The fruit of the Osage orange, despite an attractive appearance, was held in such low esteem in hedgerow country that a worthless person was often described as "not worth a bushel of hedge balls." Curiously, the fruit has recently found markets as a novelty item used in dried flower arrangements and as an insect repellent. Even America's home-decorating maven, Martha Stewart, pronounced hedge apples as beautiful and useful. Naturally occurring, insect-repelling chemicals of the Osage fruit are touted to repel cockroaches, crickets, spiders, fleas, box elder bugs and ants. Simply placing a ripened fruit in an infested area is claimed to rid it of pests for up to two months. Hedge balls are sold at open markets and specialty stores, and can be purchased on Internet sites for $24 a dozen plus $12 shipping.
Miles and Miles of Posts
Today's woodworkers still value Osage orange for archery bows, waterfowl calls, knife handles and objects turned on lathes. The principal demand for Osage wood is still what it has always been in Nebraska - to confine livestock. No other wooden post rivals osage for longevity. An old saw in hedge post country is that "a hedge post will outlast three postholes." Just how long an Osage post will last depends on the size of the post, and climactic and soil conditions. Large posts are frequently said to be as solid as the day they were planted 50 years earlier, and some speculate there are posts standing in southeastern Nebraska put down in the late-1800s. The University of Nebraska extension division rates the life expectancy of Osage posts as more than 35 years. By comparison, black locust, eastern red cedar and treated pine posts are rated at 20 or more years; hickory, honey locust and catalpa at more than 15 years; bur oak, black walnut, hackberry and green ash at about 10 years; and ponderosa pine and cottonwood at less than five years.
Most hedge posts sold in Nebraska's range counties are grown and cut in Missouri or Kansas. Southeastern Nebraska has a hedge post industry, too, mostly conducted by a few cutters who do it on a seasonal basis and often to supplement full-time jobs. Lavern Bartels of Tecumseh has been a carpenter and homebuilder. In 1989 he cut his first Osage orange to sell at $1.25 per post. Since then, working only during the winter months, he estimated he has cut more than 55,000 hedge posts. Most landowners welcome someone removing Osage orange trees invading their pastures and he has no trouble finding places to cut. Bartels has cut two quarter-mile hedgerows but prefers cutting pasture trees because they are easier to get to and yield straighter posts than the tangle of branches in old hedgerows.
Bartels cuts posts in an array of lengths and diameters to meet the needs of his clientele. Line posts in farm country are typically seven-footers, three to five inches in diameter on the top. In the Sandhills, line posts are smaller, what Bartels calls "ranch posts." They are 6½ feet in length and as small at 1½ inch in diameter on top, although some ranchers prefer 6½-foot or seven-foot posts two
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