LANI/PUFF Don't laugh. I had thought the same thing - It could be $$$$ walnuts. Wonder what would happen if they had those cut down ( a shameful task) and sold the lumber.
BL How much would the black walnut be worth ?- see post above this.
Unfortunately Nada Tsk.
Tsk you really can't sell the lumber from a Black Walnut tree because the saw dust is toxic to animals and humans.
You can use a home wood mill, but you still have to be very careful around that saw dust.
Lumber mills won't touch it because they usually sell all the saw dust to various places for various uses.
Again it is also toxic to the mill workers so they just don't want to deal with it at all.
We took down one of the last dead Black Walnut trees in our area in the mid 90's.
https://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/terrestrial/pathogens-and-diseases/thousand-cankers-black-walnut-disease
Even using chainsaws out in the open air we wore face masks and goggles while cutting it up.
My friends father had a home wood mill and he took two 8' lengths of the main trunk to mill into planks.
He made some kitchen cabinet doors for his wife after the wood had cured/seasoned for a couple of years.
They were absolutely stunning BTW.
Unfortunately he forgot my warning about working with the B.W. wood and got sick as a dog after sanding it without a mask on after like 3 years of it being felled.
His son, our friend took the bottom round -or- flush cut of the tree (about 2 feet high x 3 feet round) and made a salad bowl on a wood lathe from a 'hunk' of it for my Mom.
With the warning don't ever put real salad in it or ...
I still have it. I'll post a pick of it later if I can dig it out.
The totally dead Black Walnut Tree that we cut down in Montvale, NJ in 1993 was in the back yard of the family's home for over 70 years they told us. It was about 60 ft high with a classic canopy shape for it's type from what we could tell from the skeleton of it's former self.
http://texastreeid.tamu.edu/content/TreeDetails/?id=52 It was near their deck so it had to go as it was coming apart badly and was a safety issue.
They and us were sad to see it go.
But some of it's main trunk wood went to good use as I mentioned in my previous post.
I found out years later that Pete my friend made from the Bottom Round 3 salad bowls and a handful of custom rifle stocks that he made good money on.
One bowl went to my Mom, one went to his Mom and the other one went to ..
This is what I found out many years later ..
Pete had found out somehow where we had taken the tree down from and gave the last bowl to the Mom of that house and he said she cried because her father had planted the tree before she was born and as kids she and her siblings used to play in a tree fort that he made for them in it.
She said to Pete that she felt like he had just handed her back a piece of her Father. The circle.
Trees are like giant old souls that see everything and only speak their wisdom when the wind helps them express it.
I hated to take a tree down unless it was absolutely necessary.
I don't do tree work anymore myself because it's a younger man's than I's dangerous occupation.
I'm very happy that I lost no digits nor appendages during the years I did it.
Chainsaws, height, rope and wood chippers don't give you boo boos.
That exact Black Walnut tree still lives on long after peeps thought it was gone.
The holes and black stain on the bowl are the rust stains from the iron nails that held fast that 1st wrung up to that tree fort.