Salvaged Soul: A Salvaged Wood Home in West Virginia

Enlarge Image Image Gallery A deck overlooks the trout stream that flows past the house. As a gift to the Drakes, builder Bruce Wohleber fashioned a handmade Adirondack chair for each family member. Photo By Michael Shopenn

Made entirely of salvaged wood rescued from across the country, Willie Drake’s unique home in the West Virginia mountains is the perfect ambassador for his reclaimed wood business. Willie’s company, Mountain Lumber, gives wood from across the globe a second life; the organization has rescued more than 20 million board feet of pine and other woods since it opened in 1974. Willie’s home is a beautiful embodiment of his business’s motto: “Every floor has a story to tell.” The kitchen counters are reclaimed Russian oak from 1920s railroad cars; cabinets are local wormy chestnut. The redwood porch flooring hails from a Richmond, Virginia, water tank; the porch’s columns are from a 19th-century Massachusetts textile mill.

In the early 1970s, Willie was a student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, but he felt a longing to be closer to nature. He left the university in search of a lifestyle that would keep him outdoors, near the woods and mountains he loved.

Willie began working as a carpenter, a chance job that ended up sparking his life’s passion when a contractor asked him to find some chestnut for a client. It was the perfect job. The hunt for old chestnut—virtually decimated in North America by blight in the 1930s—meant using his skills as an outdoorsman and put him in contact with the people and terrain of backwoods West Virginia.

“I became totally excited by the idea of looking for salvageable wood,” Willie says. “It gave me a reason to be in the mountains, kept me in contact with the mountain people, whom I’ve always enjoyed, and gave me a good product to sell to my friends.”

Soon he’d moved beyond the backwoods and began scouring cities for wood to salvage from deconstruction and redevelopment sites.

Surfaces with stories to tell