As settlers trickled into the Great Plains during the mid and late 1800s, their first act of homesteading was often to build a rough shack out of cottonwood lumber — or to move into one abandoned by ...

Q How much shrinkage in drying should we see in yellow-poplar and Eastern cottonwood lumber? A This sounds like an easy question to answer -- all I have to do is look up the numbers in a book. But ...