Grandpa’s Wood: A Story of Survival, Property Rights, and Being Willing to Do What the Other Guy Won’t

[Originally published in the Front Range Voluntaryist, article by Margaret Howe]

My grandfather was born in 1922 in the village of Lynnville, Illinois. He was born at home, and although I don’t know exactly who delivered him, it wouldn’t surprise me if it was his grandmother, who was a bona fide “country doctor,” of the sort of that grew her own herbs, set broken bones, and delivered everyone’s babies. There were no board certified doctors in Lynnville. They didn’t even have reliable electricity until the post-war era, and nobody had indoor plumbing, either.

My great-grandparents owned a grocery store, and during the Depression, that was not a bad profession to have. They had a huckster wagon, and my grandpa grew up working either behind the counter or on the huckster wagon route. He cut and carried ice for people’s ice boxes, bartered and traded with the farm wives for goods, and made the Friday run into Jacksonville to sell the chickens the farmers didn’t want to the slaughterhouse, from whence they would be sent on to Chicago.

Life was tough in Lynnville, and a lot of people were dirt poor. He told me stories of folks coming in to buy dog food to feed their families, since he knew they didn’t keep dogs. He caught and sold squabs and brought them into town to a restaurant to make extra money so he could buy guns and ammo to go hunting. The social event of the year was the Christian Church’s barn dance, and Halloween was a time for terror, not because of ghosts, but because outhouses tipped, buggies wound up on top of the schoolhouse, and windows all over town ended up covered in a filmy layer of soap.

Since there was no central heat, people had to cut down trees and chop wood. Anyone who has ever chopped wood knows that this is no mean task, but most people do not take into consideration what has to happen before the tree comes down. Back in those days, people would stake out trees a year in advance. They would strip the bark completely off to kill the tree, and then they would mark it as their own. Grandpa never gave me the specifics on how one came about a tree when one didn’t have wooded property, but I assumed it was either a payment or trade situation. In any case, once people had a tree stripped, they would tag it as their own and come back later to chop it down and haul the wood.

Of course, there are always scavengers. Sometimes people would come and take a tree that had already been stripped and which belonged to someone else. God help them if they were ever discovered, though. In a rough world where fuel was scarce and people depended on wood not only for heat but also to cook food, taking a family’s tree was literally grounds for murder, not because people were evil but because it put their family at risk during the harsh winter months.

There was a woodpile out back behind the garage when I was growing up with my grandparents, but I never paid it much mind. We rarely used the big fireplace in the living room, and that wood had probably been there since the beginning of the Vietnam War. My grandpa told me a story once that made the woodpile more intriguing, though. I didn’t believe him initially, but my uncles later confirmed it to be true, and when I put story into the context of my grandfather’s background, it made a lot more sense.

When my folks were younger, they did use the fireplace somewhat frequently. During an especially cold winter, it came to my grandfather’s attention that there was a thief stealing logs from his woodpile. Whoever it was hadn’t even bothered to mask their footprints. My grandfather, even though logs weren’t a matter of life and death anymore, couldn’t quite shake the anger that came naturally at having his property walk away like that. You can take the boy out of Lynnville…

It is also worth mentioning that my grandpa was in the Corps of Engineers during the war, and he was the unit's demolitions expert. He drove the truck full of dynamite and rigged everything to blow bridges and the like. He was also a lifelong gun aficionado who made his own ammo and knew, in my estimation, everything there was to know about guns.

The demolition expert’s solution to the woodpile thief problem was to take a piece of wood, drill out a small piece in the middle, and put in some gunpowder. Not a lot – just enough to make an impression. He replaced the little wood plug, and left it where he knew it would get picked up right away. And he waited.

Not a week or two later the family heard a great boom from a couple of blocks behind the house, and a minute or two later, fire engines came barreling into the area. And he waited.

About half an hour later, a man called, and he read my grandpa the riot act when he picked up my phone. He accused my grandpa of trying to kill him. The man accused him of wanting to blow up his house. I’m sure he called him “everything but a white man,” as Grandpa used to say.

Grandpa’s response? “Let me get this straight. You’re calling my house to confess that you stole wood off of my property to heat your house? I ought to call the police myself and report a thief in the neighborhood!"

The man didn’t know what to say, of course, since he knew it was true. He let off a string of swear words and hung up the phone. Grandpa never heard from him again, and no more wood ever went missing off of Old Man Howe’s woodpile.

People with “modern sensibilities” will no doubt say that my grandpa was a crazy person, but that is not an accurate portrayal of the man. He was from a different era, and it was an era to which he remained faithful his entire life. He was also a person who, quite frankly, didn’t give a f**k. More than anyone else I have ever met in my life, he did not care what people thought of him. He was also more fiercely protective of his property than anyone else I have ever known. He never called himself a libertarian, but he was – probably the truest libertarian there ever was.

We have it a lot easier today than my grandfather did growing up. It is tough to understand the importance of property rights when we are so far removed from them. To truly understand the value of property, one has to be in a situation of dependence and survival, and I have never met a single American living that sort of life in this country. We are spoiled. We are pampered. We have phones that summon taxis from thin air, cars that show us we are backing into a phone pole, and crock pots and thermostats that can be remotely controlled. These are wonderful things that seem frivolous but have dramatically improved our collective standard of living. That improvement has come at the cost of understanding of basic principles, though.

Can there be any better explanation of Rothbard’s idea about homesteading, taking from Locke, than the simple example of the stripped tree? Rothbard’s proposition was that, if a person settled a given piece of ground and worked that ground and made it productive, it was his. He had homesteaded that ground. It is still pretty common in this area of the world to own wooded ground, for hunting if nothing else. To go out and strip a tree for winter wood is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and it asserts ownership. To have someone come onto the ground you own and steal something, or have someone come and steal something you have rightly purchased from the landowner, was treated as an act of aggression.

How do we deal with aggression today? We allow the government to steal our money. We allow property taxes to be levied upon ground and buildings which we have purchased with our own earnings. How would our grandfathers and their fathers have handled someone coming onto their land and stealing the fruits of their labor? They would have treated it as it deserved to be treated: As theft carried out by an unethical scoundrel against a hardworking person trying to do right by himself and his family.

I am not trying to romanticize the past. I could tell a lot of stories that paint a far less quaint picture of the early 20th century. Nevertheless, there are lessons to be taken from my grandfather and his explosive woodpile. It is selfless, not selfish, to take care of yourself and your family. It is unethical in the extreme to deprive someone of the fruits of their labor. Property rights are worth preserving as a basis for our ethical and our legal codes. They are worth fighting for, and it is worthwhile to ask ourselves once a while how far we would really be willing to go to keep them. Sometimes you have to do or say something that puts the world on notice. Sometimes you have to take a stand. Sometimes you have to put a little proverbial gunpowder in your wood.