New York firewood supplier sold face cord equivalents, 8'x4'x16", for $493 during recent winter cold snap

 Shivering Americans Snap Up Firewood as Winter Grinds On...

 ... On Jan. 24, the day before a winter storm buried much of the Northeast in snow, Woodbourne Firewood had its highest-grossing sales day in the history of the company, which was started in New York in 2022, said Mr. Heby, 35, the owner. He said the company sold seven full cords of wood, units that are eight feet long, four feet tall and four feet deep, enough to fill a tractor-trailer and generating $10,356 in revenue in one day. ... Grahm Leitner, 48, a logging contractor and forester from Waterbury, Vt., said the number of days spent logging in a given year is about half of what it was in the 1980s, especially because of climate change. ...

 

Color me skeptical: Firewood prices said to be soaring

$67-$83 a face-cord for seasoned mixed hardwoods doesn't sound that high to me, but $158 for hickory would. The former were common many years ago already.

I come up with $612 for the 1776 cord through 2020, a quibble.

 

At Firewood by Jerry in New River, Arizona, a cord of seasoned firewood — roughly 700 pieces or so — goes for US$200 today. That’s up 33 per cent from a year ago. At Zia Firewood in Albuquerque, the price is up 11 per cent since the summer to US$250. And at Standing Rock Farms in Stone Ridge, a bucolic, little town in the Hudson Valley that’s become popular with the Manhattan set, the best hardwoods now fetch US$475 a cord, up 19 per cent from last year. ...

Over the course of American history, there have been any number of booms in the firewood business. One of the earliest episodes came during the British siege of Boston at the outset of the Revolutionary War. That winter, the price of a cord — a centuries-old benchmark measuring 128 cubic feet — soared to US$20, the historian David McCullough documented in his book “1776.” That’s the equivalent of some $635 in today’s dollars ... just about every major spike in energy prices in the past half century has triggered a rush into wood-burning among some segments of the population. These fevers invariably fade as soon as the energy crisis does.

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