Hickory
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Hickory. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
an American tree of the walnut family. Hickory is an Indian name. There are in all ten hickories--nine in the eastern United States and Canada, one in Mexico. The principal kinds are the shagbark, the shellbark, the bitternut, the pignut, and the pecan. The pecan is a southern tree. In sections the pecan is an important article of commerce. It brings in more money than any other native American nut-bearing tree. The pecan nut crop is over 3,000,000 pounds a year. The kernels are sweet. The timber is of little value. Shagbark and shellbark hickory nuts are fine winter nuts. They are produced chiefly in the latitude of the Ohio Valley by trees 80 to 100 feet high. The pignut is fair in quality; bitternuts are produced farther north and are not desirable. Hickory timber is proverbial for hardness and toughness. It is the heaviest of North American woods. It weighs about fifty pounds to the cubic foot. It is in demand for axhelves, ox-bows, hubs, felloes, spokes, fork-handles, axles, and sleigh material. It is estimated that 250,000,000 feet of hickory is consumed annually for the purposes named. The end of the supply is so nearly at hand that manufacturers are alarmed. The people of the West were able to pay no higher tribute to the sterling qualities of Andrew Jackson than to dub him "Old Hickory."
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
in botany and commerce, the several species Carya, a genus of Juglandaceæ. C. alba is the shell-bark, scaly-bark, or shagbark hickory, from the tendency of the bark to peel off in long, loose strips. Its wood is noted for its elasticity and toughness, growing in this country from South Carolina to New Hampshire. Other species of the genus are the mocker-nut , white-heart , or common hickory (C. tomentosa), the wood of which is excellent for mechanical purposes, or for bu burning, the bitter-nut or swamp hickory (C. and was again appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer following the retirement of the Gladstone ministry. He held this post with great success until he resigned in 1902. He bitterly opposed the tariff policy of Joseph Chamberlain and founded the Unionist Free Food League. In 1905 he was made a viscount, and in 1908 was a member of the Ecclesiastical Commission. He died in 1916 .
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 figure of a pecan crop "over 3,000,000 pounds a year" has been left far behind: the United States alone now harvests on the order of 250-300 million pounds of pecans in a good year, from orchards in Georgia, Texas and New Mexico, with Mexico a rival producer, and the once-wild tree is a fully domesticated grafted crop. The alarm that "the end of the supply is so nearly at hand" proved half right - old-growth hickory for wagon spokes, felloes and ox-bows vanished, but the demand vanished with it, and the wood survives in tool handles, drumsticks, flooring and barbecue smoke rather than vehicle parts. Botanically the counts and names have shifted: Carya is now reckoned at roughly eighteen species, several of them East Asian rather than confined to North America, and the shagbark is called Carya ovata, the name C. alba having been transferred to the mockernut that Collier's listed separately. Note also that the 1921 text on this page breaks off mid-sentence and runs into an unrelated obituary of a British Chancellor of the Exchequer - a printing accident, not part of the hickory entry.
Written for this edition, 2026.