I would rather have a record somebody can check than a claim they have to take my word for.
That is the whole reason any of this gets written down. Everything else about this timber — that it is two hundred years old, that it came out of a swamp nobody had cut, that it was down two years before I got to it — is a claim. Claims are cheap and everybody selling wood makes them. A dated record with a coordinate on it is a different kind of statement.
What Actually Gets Recorded
Each documented tree gets a tree number. The number goes on a tag on the tree and it follows that tree from where it lies, through the mill, into whatever it becomes. A blog post carries the tree from the ground onward and holds the number and the coordinate together in one place. The tree map is the index into those posts.
The tag itself carries the number and nothing else — no species, no date, no stage. That is deliberate. A tag that carries only a pointer can never become a false statement; the record holds the data, and the record can be corrected. A tag stamped "white oak" cannot be.
Where the Record Actually Starts
Before any of that, there is a GPS waypoint. The unit writes the name, the coordinate and the timestamp into one file at the moment I stand next to the tree, and that raw export is the original — the map pin and the blog post are both derived from it. Keeping those exports gives me a chain of custody for nothing, which is worth more than it sounds: a map pin can be dragged and a layer can be lost, but a dated file and a dated post are fixed.
What It Deliberately Is Not
It is not an inventory. A number means a tree was found and written down, nothing further — not that there is lumber, not that anything is for sale. No buyer is ever named, no price appears anywhere in it, and nothing is marked sold, because one sold pin would imply every other pin is for sale. That is covered on why availability isn't listed.
Provenance is not decoration on this material either. A slab that can be traced to one tree, on one date, at one coordinate is a different object from a wide board off a pile — and if somebody is going to build a table out of a two-hundred-year-old oak, the story of that tree is part of what they are buying. It ought to be checkable.
Contact
Old Growth Mill
Axson, GA 31624
Email: [email protected]
Phone: (912) 310-0650
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