Cotton Wood Uses?

If you nail it down quick, it can make good boards, otherwise as George says it can twist and sweep wickedly. It used to be used for wagon bodies, and truck beds. Old milk wagons and trucks used it because it was light, and got very hard, to the point where it would get smooth enough to slide milk cans on.

I knew a logger who used Cottonwood planks to build a headboard on his log truck. He bolted the 2×6’s in three places, but they had so much sweep that they overlapped at the ends….

If you keep them dry, they can be used for cabin logs.

Markets are pretty scarce as it is often thought of as a species with a lot of defect. As George says there is a market for turning logs, used as interior plywood for high value hardwood veneer facing. It also makes good paper, so generally there are pulp markets where it grows.

I often turn to my copy of “A Natural History of Trees” by Donald Culross Peattie, when thinking about uses for certain species. I just looked now, and here is a short passage:
“Poor though its wood might be, it gave the prairie pioneers their fences and corncribs, their cabins and stables, their ox yokes and saddle trees, and even their coffins. Though the wood checks and warps badly in seasoning, many a primitive church or first hotel or school was run up out of green Cottonwood.
Nor could the lumber industry despise a tree which might be 150 feet tall abd 6-8 feet in diameter, with 50 or 60 feet of the bole clear of branches under the crown. The wood, for all of its faults is as stiff as White Oak, and as light as White Pine. For decades it was made into every kind of crate and box from packing for the heaviest pianos to the lining of cigar boxes. It was cut for excelsior, poles, posts, barrel staves, ironing boards, and trunks”.

Anyway….. have fun.

Carl