Everyone Laughed When the Boy Asked for Their Dead Chainsaws — Until They Saw His Backyard Sawmill 

Everyone Laughed When the Boy Asked for Their Dead Chainsaws — Until They Saw His Backyard Sawmill 

On a Tuesday morning in March of 1987, Caleb Dykstra stood at the edge of his father’s equipment shed in Hardin County, Iowa, and watched a perfectly good day’s work disappear before it even started. The chainsaw in his hands, his father’s Husqvarna 61, a machine that had cut timber on the Dykstra farm for 11 years, had seized up somewhere between the carburetor and the crankshaft.

And no amount of pulling the cord was going to change that. He was 14 years old. He had $40 in his pocket, a list of trees his father needed down before spring planting, and exactly zero mechanical experience with two-stroke engines. His father, Emmett Dykstra, was in town at the co-op. The trees were not going to wait.

Let me tell you about Hardin County in 1987, because you need to understand the place before you can understand the boy. Hardin County sat in the middle of Iowa like a square of good black dirt that God had ironed flat and handed to German and Dutch farming families three or four generations back. The county seat was Eldora, a town of about 3,000 people with a grain elevator, a hardware store, a diner that served the same breakfast special every day of the week, and a co-op where men gathered on Tuesday mornings to talk

about seed prices and diesel costs and whatever piece of equipment had broken down since last they met. The farms in Hardin County were not small. Emmett Dykstra ran 640 acres of corn and soybeans, which was a respectable operation by any measure, and he ran it the way his father had taught him and his grandfather had taught his father.

Methodically, without complaint, and with a healthy suspicion of anything that cost more than it was worth. The Dijkstras had been farming the same ground since 1921. They did not throw things away. That last part matters. Let me tell you why it matters. Because the entire story you are about to hear turns on a single habit that Emmett Dijkstra had inherited from his own father.

A man named Clyde Dijkstra who had survived the depression by refusing to let anything leave his property that still had a use inside it. Clyde had built a lean-to shed behind the main barn in 1938. And he had filled it over the course of 40 years with every broken tool, every cracked implement, every seized engine, every bent frame that the farm had produced.

Not as junk, as inventory. There was a difference, and Clyde had explained it to Emmett, and Emmett had explained it to Caleb in almost exactly the same words. Junk is something you can’t fix. Everything else is just something you haven’t fixed yet. By 1987, that lean-to shed had grown into a structure roughly the size of a two-car garage stacked floor to ceiling with machinery in various states of disassembly.

And Caleb Dijkstra had spent most of his childhood in it. He knew the shed the way other boys knew baseball cards or comic books. He knew which shelf held the magneto from the 1962 Farmall that had thrown a rod in 1971. He knew where his grandfather had stored the drive chain from a corn picker that hadn’t run since Kennedy was president.

He knew the smell of the place. Old grease and iron and the particular sweetness of rust that has been sitting undisturbed for a long time. And he found it more interesting than almost anything else in the world. His mother, Vera Dykstra, said he had grease in his blood instead of plasma. His father said nothing, which in Emmet Dykstra’s vocabulary was the highest form of agreement.

So, when the Husqvarna seized up on that Tuesday morning in March, Caleb did not panic. He carried the saw into the lean-to, set it on the workbench, and started taking it apart. He was 14 years old, and he’d never rebuilt a two-stroke engine, but he had read every issue of Small Engine Repair Illustrated that the Eldora Public Library carried.

And he’d spent enough time in that shed to understand the basic principle his grandfather had taught him. If you know how a thing was put together, you can figure out why it came apart. Three hours later, with the carburetor cleaned, the crankshaft seals replaced from a parts bin his grandfather had labeled in 1974, and the air filter cleared of a wasp nest that had apparently been there since the previous summer, the Husqvarna started on the third pull.

Caleb cut down 11 trees that afternoon. He did not tell his father what had happened. Emmet found out anyway. Fathers always do. And his response, delivered at the dinner table that evening without looking up from his plate, was four words. Good work this afternoon. That was the beginning. Let me tell you about what Caleb Dykstra did with the next 10 years.

Because this is the part that most people in Hardin County either don’t know or have chosen to forget. After the Husqvarna incident, word got around the way word gets around in small counties. Slowly, through the specific channel of men talking to other men at the co-op on Tuesday mornings. By the time Caleb was 16, neighbors were bringing him small engines to look at.

A lawnmower here, a water pump there, a generator that hadn’t run since the Carter administration. He fixed most of them. The ones he couldn’t fix, he kept. With the owner’s permission, which was almost always granted, because a broken engine sitting in a boy’s shed is worth more than a broken engine sitting in yours.

 By the time he was 18 and graduating from Eldora-New Providence High School, Caleb Dykstra had a shed of his own behind his parents’ house that contained, by rough count, 23 chainsaws in various states of disrepair, 14 small engines of assorted types, three portable generators, a walk-behind brush mower with a cracked deck, and parts enough to rebuild most of them twice over.

His classmates were talking about college. Caleb was talking about wood. Let me tell you about the wood. Because this is where the story takes the turn that nobody in Hardin County saw coming. Caleb had been cutting trees on the Dykstra farm since he was 14. And somewhere in the process of cutting them, he had started looking at what he was cutting and thinking about what it could become.

 A silver maple that came down in a windstorm in 1989 was 32 inches across at the base and had a figure in the grain, a ripple and shimmer that caught the light when you cut across it, that Caleb had never seen in any board at the lumber yard in Eldora. He cut a slab from the base with a chainsaw and carried it to the shed and set it on the workbench and looked at it for a long time.

Then, he drove to the Iowa State University Extension Library in Ames and spent an afternoon reading about portable sawmills, lumber drying, wood figure, and the economics of the hardwood lumber markets. He was 17 years old. He drove home and did not say anything to anyone for 3 days. What he had learned in Ames was this.

The hardwood lumber market in 1989 was paying between $4 and $12 per board foot for figured maple, walnut, and cherry at the retail level. The trees on the Dijkstra farm and on every farm in Hardin County were being cut down and either burned as firewood or left to rot because the cost of milling them was assumed to be prohibitive.

A portable sawmill capable of cutting logs up to 36 inches in diameter cost, new, somewhere between 8 and 14,000 dollars in 1989. That was more than Caleb had. But, a portable sawmill was also, at its core, a relatively simple machine. A band saw blade mounted on a carriage that ran along a track powered by an engine guided by a human being.

Caleb Dijkstra had 23 chainsaws in a shed full of parts and 10 years of mechanical education in the lean-to behind his father’s barn. He started to think. Now, let me pause here and ask you something. Have you ever watched someone solve a problem that everyone else had decided was unsolvable? Not because they had resources nobody else had, but because they were willing to look at the problem differently than everyone else.

Because that is exactly what happened in the equipment shed on the Dijkstra farm in the summer of 1989. And it happened so quietly that almost nobody noticed until it was finished. Caleb spent that summer building a sawmill. Not from a kit, not from a set of purchased plans, but from a combination of salvaged steel, repurposed chainsaw engines, and a set of principles he had worked out on a yellow legal pad over the course of about 3 weeks.

The carriage he built from angle iron he bought at the scrapyard in Iowa Falls for 60 cents a pound. The track he fabricated from fence posts and salvaged pipe. The cutting head, this is the part that made it unusual. He powered with two Husqvarna chainsaw engines running in tandem, driving a band saw blade he had ordered from a mill supply catalog in Oregon.

The total material cost, not counting the engines he already owned and the steel he sourced from salvage, was $412. He finished it in September of 1989, just after his 17th birthday. And the first log he ran through it was the silver maple that had been sitting in the shed for 2 years. The board that came off that mill was 30 in wide and 2 in thick and had a figure in the grain that made Emmet Dijkstra set down his coffee cup and walk across the shed and pick it up and turn it in the light without saying anything for

almost a full minute. Then, he set it down and picked up his coffee cup and said quietly, “What are you going to do with it?” Caleb said he was going to sell it. Emmett said, “How much?” Caleb said he thought maybe $60 for that board alone. Emmett looked at the board again. He said, “Huh.” That was, in Emmett Dykstra’s vocabulary, the equivalent of a standing ovation.

Let me tell you about Dale Crowley because you need to understand Dale before you can understand what happened next. Dale Crowley was 53 years old in 1989 and had been the manager of the Hardin County Farm Bureau Co-op for 19 years. He was a large man with a large voice and the particular confidence of someone who has been the most knowledgeable person in every room he has ever entered for two decades running.

He knew seed varieties, equipment prices, commodity futures, soil amendment schedules, and the credit history of every farm family in the county. He held court at the Co-op counter every Tuesday morning from 7:00 to 10:00 dispensing advice that was usually correct and always delivered with the certainty of someone who has never been wrong in a way that mattered.

 He was not a bad man. He was a man who had confused being consistently wrong with being incapable of being wrong, which is a different thing entirely and a more dangerous one. Dale Crowley had opinions about lumber. Specifically, he had the opinion that small-scale hardwood milling was not economically viable for individual farm operations in Hardin County.

And he had arrived at this opinion through a combination of genuine knowledge. He had read the extension service reports. He understood the capital costs. And the particular blindness that comes from knowing something well enough to stop questioning it. When Caleb Dijkstra, 17 years old and carrying a maple board under his arm, walked into the co-op on a Tuesday morning in October of 1989 and told Dale Crowley he had built a sawmill and was planning to start milling farm timber for sale.

Dale Crowley looked at the board, looked at the boy, and laughed. It was not a cruel laugh. That is important to understand. It was the laugh of a man who believes he is doing someone a favor by saving them from an embarrassing mistake. It was the laugh that says I have already thought through this problem and arrived at the correct answer.

And I’m amused that you think you have found something I missed. The men at the counter, there were six of them that Tuesday, Caleb would remember the number for the rest of his life, did not all laugh, but none of them said anything either, which in a small county co-op amounts to the same thing. Dale Crowley told Caleb three things.

 He told him that the capital cost of a real sawmill was beyond what a farm operation could justify. He told him that the hardwood market required volume and consistency that a one-man operation could never produce. And he told him, not unkindly, that he ought to think about going to Iowa State and studying agriculture business before he spent any more time on ideas that sounded better than they were.

 He said it the way adults say things to 17-year-olds when they want to sound helpful rather than dismissive, which is to say that it was both of those things at once. Caleb Dykstra did not argue. This is the detail that the men at the co-op counter would remember later when they were trying to reconstruct the story in a way that made sense to them.

He did not get red in the face or raise his voice or try to explain the mill or show anyone the board he was carrying. He set the maple board on the counter quietly so that the figure in the grain caught the fluorescent light from above and he said, “Thank you, Mr. Crowley.” And he picked the board back up and walked out.

He drove to Iowa Falls that afternoon and sold the maple board to a furniture maker named Hendricks for $75. Let me tell you about the two years that followed because they are the engine of this story and they run quieter than you might expect. Caleb Dykstra did not go to Iowa State. He graduated from Eldora-New Providence in the spring of 1990, turned down a partial scholarship to study agricultural business, and spent the summer improving the sawmill.

He added a log deck, a set of rollers that let him move logs without help. He rebuilt the carriage drive with a salvaged hydraulic pump from a combine header that had come to him in pieces from a neighbor’s burn pile. He built a solar lumber kiln from plans he found in a forestry journal at the Ames Library, a greenhouse-style structure that dried green lumber in 6 to 8 weeks instead of the year or more that air drying required.

By the fall of 1990, he was milling timber from the Dijkstra farm and from three neighboring farms whose owners had agreed to let him take down problem trees in exchange for a share of the lumber revenue. The numbers were not dramatic at first. In 1990, his first full year of operation, Caleb Dijkstra milled approximately 4,200 board feet of hardwood lumber, primarily walnut, maple, and cherry, and sold it for an average of $6.

40 per board foot, generating just under $27,000 in gross revenue. His costs, blade replacement, fuel, equipment maintenance, and the 30% share he paid to landowners, came to roughly $11,000. His net was $16,000. He was 18 years old. For comparison, the average farm laborer in Hardin County was earning about $12,000 a year in 1990.

Word travels in a small county, but it travels on its own schedule. The men at the co-op heard about the numbers by the following spring, and the response was not admiration, not yet. The response was skepticism of the particular variety that greets early success in a community where everyone knows everyone.

It was a good year. It won’t last. He got lucky with the timber. Wait until he has to compete with real mills. Dale Crowley, when someone mentioned Caleb’s numbers at the Tuesday morning gathering, said that he was glad the boy was doing well and that he hoped he had put some of it aside for when the market turned, which was the kind of thing you say when you want to acknowledge a fact without revising your opinion of it.

The market did not turn. Let me tell you about what happened instead. In the summer of 1991, a furniture manufacturer in Cedar Rapids named Garrison Woodworks put out a request for your figured hardwood lumber, specifically walnut and maple with strong grain figure, in quantities of at least 500 board feet per species per month.

They were building a line of high-end dining tables and needed consistent figured stock that they could not source reliably from commercial mills, which tended to cut for volume rather than character. The request went out through the Iowa Forestry Association newsletter, which Caleb Dikstra received because he had joined the association in 1990 for the cost of a $12 annual membership.

He called Garrison Woodworks on a Monday morning, drove to Cedar Rapids on Wednesday with samples, and had a contract by Friday. The contract was for $9.80 per board foot for figured walnut and $7.20 for figured maple with a minimum commitment of 500 board feet per species per month and a term of 2 years. That contract changed the arithmetic of everything.

In 1991, Caleb Dikstra’s gross revenue was $74,000. His net, after landowner shares and operating costs, was $48,000. He was 19 years old and he had not spent a single day in a college classroom. Now, let me pause here and ask you something again because this is the moment the story pivots on, and I want you to feel the weight of it.

 How many times in your life have you watched someone be told they were wrong? Told publicly by someone with authority and certainty. And then watch them go prove it without making a sound about it. Because that is what Caleb Dykstra was doing. He was not posting his numbers at the co-op. He was not driving past Dale Crowley’s house slowly.

He was not telling anyone anything. He was working. And the work was accumulating the way compound interest accumulates. Quietly, invisibly, and then all at once. Let me tell you about the chainsaws, because this is where the story gets the texture that makes it worth telling. By 1991, Caleb Dykstra’s reputation as a small engine mechanic had spread well beyond Hardin County.

Farmers from as far as Franklin County to the north and Hamilton County to the south were bringing him broken equipment. But the specific category of equipment that found its way to him most reliably, and that would eventually become the most important part of the story, was chainsaws. Dead chainsaws, seized chainsaws, chainsaws with cracked cases and bent bars and stripped clutch drums and carburetors so gummed up with old fuel that they looked like they had been packed with caramel.

Chainsaws that had been declared unfixable by dealers and left to sit in sheds for years. Chainsaws that farmers were ready to throw away. Caleb asked for them. This is the detail that everyone who tells this story gets wrong, or leaves out, or fails to understand the significance of. He did not simply receive broken chainsaws as payment for other work, though that happened, too.

He actively asked for them. He went to neighbors and asked if they had any broken saws they were done with. He asked at the co-op, not on Tuesday mornings, but on quieter days when Dale Crawley wasn’t holding court, whether anyone had equipment they wanted hauled away. He asked at the hardware store and at the feed supply and at farm auctions when the lots of miscellaneous equipment came up.

By 1992, he had accumulated 61 chainsaws in various states of disrepair. By 1994, the number was over a hundred. People thought it was eccentric. Dale Crawley, when he heard about the chainsaw collection, and he heard about it because in Hardin County everything gets heard about eventually, said that the Dijkstra boy had always been a little unusual and that collecting broken chainsaws was at least harmless.

He said this at the Tuesday morning gathering in the spring of 1993, and the men at the counter mostly agreed in the way that people agree with things that seem obviously true and not worth arguing about. What Dale Crawley did not understand, and what none of the men at the co-op counter understood, was that Caleb Dijkstra was not collecting chainsaws.

He was building an inventory. There is a difference, and Clyde Dijkstra had explained it to Emmett, and Emmett had explained it to Caleb in almost exactly the same words. Junk is something you can’t fix. Everything else is just something you haven’t fixed yet. Caleb had been fixing chainsaws since he was 14 years old.

He understood their anatomy, the way a surgeon understands a human body. Not just what the parts were, but why they were arranged the way they were, what they were trying to accomplish, and what happened when the arrangement failed. And he understood something else. Something that he had been working toward for 5 years without quite articulating it to anyone, including himself.

He understood that a chainsaw engine is a portable power source, and a portable power source, properly harnessed, can run almost anything. Let me tell you about the sawmill expansion of 1993, because this is where the mechanical ingenuity of the thing becomes almost difficult to believe. By 1992, Caleb’s original mill was running at capacity, about 6,000 board feet per month, and the Garrison Woodworks contract was pushing him to produce more.

A new commercial portable sawmill of the size he needed would have cost $22,000 to $28,000. Caleb Dykstra did not spend $22,000 on a sawmill. He spent $1,400 on steel and hardware, and used 18 chainsaw engines, rebuilt from his collection, running on a common drive shaft he fabricated from salvaged truck axle components, to power a second mill head that he had designed himself on the yellow legal pad that had become, by this point, the most important document on the Dykstra farm.

The second mill was wider than the first, capable of cutting logs up to 48 in in diameter, and it ran on the power of engines that the county had collectively decided were garbage. The first log through the second mill was a black walnut that had come down in a fence row on the neighboring Gustison farm in 1991 and had been sitting in a ravine for 2 years because nobody had the equipment to move it.

It was 51 inches across at the base. Caleb had to cut the base section down to 47 inches to fit the mill and even then the carriage groaned when it hit the first pass. But, it cut. The slab that came off the first pass was 44 inches wide and 3 inches thick and had a grain pattern. A cathedral figure that rose and fell across the width of the board like a range of dark hills that Emmet Dykstra, who had by now seen a great many impressive boards come out of his son’s shed, described as something he had never seen before in

his life. That walnut slab sold to a woodworker in Minneapolis for $340. It was one board. It weighed 87 lb. Let me tell you about the year 1995 because 1995 is when the story stops being about one farm and starts being about the county. The Garrison Woodworks contract had been renewed twice and expanded.

 Caleb Dykstra was now sourcing timber from 11 farms across Hardin County, employing two part-time workers, both local men who had learned the mill operation from Caleb himself, and producing approximately 9,000 board feet of hardwood lumber per month. His gross revenue for 1994 had been $218,000. His net, after all costs and landowner shares, had been $141,000.

He was 22 years old, and he owned his equipment outright, had no debt, and had begun paying his parents a lease rate for the land the mill occupied that was, by Emmett’s private accounting, more than the land had ever generated in corn revenue. But, the number that mattered most in 1995 was not Caleb’s revenue.

It was the number of broken chainsaws that had found their way to the Dijkstra farm by that point. The answer was 147. Caleb had rebuilt and pressed into service 63 of them. He had used parts from another 41 to complete those rebuilds. The remaining 43 sat in various states of disassembly in the expanded equipment shed, waiting.

He had paid nothing for any of them. The combined retail replacement cost of the engines he had rebuilt, if you priced them as new units, was approximately $31,000. [snorts] He had acquired them for the cost of hauling them away. Dale Crowley came to the Dijkstra farm in the spring of 1995. Let me tell you about that visit because it is the scene that everyone in Hardin County who knows this story remembers most clearly, even the ones who weren’t there and are working from what they’ve been told.

 He did not call ahead. He drove out on a Wednesday afternoon in April, when the mud in the farm lane was just beginning to firm up after the spring thaw, and he parked his truck and walked to the equipment shed where Caleb was running a log through the second mill. He stood in the doorway for a while, watching.

The mill was loud. The chainsaw engines made a sound like a sustained mechanical argument. And Caleb didn’t hear him come in. When the pass finished and the mill went quiet, Dale Crowley said Caleb’s name. Caleb turned around. He was 22 years old and he had sawdust in his hair and grease on his forearms and the particular calm of someone who has been doing exactly what he intended to do for 6 years and has arrived at a place where the work speaks clearly enough that he doesn’t need to.

He said, “Hello, Mr. Crowley.” Dale Crowley looked around the shed at the two mills, at the rebuilt engines mounted on their frames, at the stacks of drying lumber visible through the open door of the kiln, at the shelves of chainsaw parts organized with the same logic his great-grandfather Clyde had applied to the original lean-to in 1938.

He was quiet for longer than was comfortable. Then he said, “I told you this wouldn’t work.” Caleb Dijkstra looked at him. He said, “You told me the capital cost was too high for a farm operation to justify.” Dale Crowley said, “Yes.” Caleb said, “My total capital investment in this mill is $6,200.” Dale Crowley said nothing.

Caleb said, “You told me I couldn’t produce the volume and consistency the market required.” Dale Crowley said, “Yes.” Caleb said, “I have a 2-year contract with Garrison Woodworks in Cedar Rapids and I’m currently producing 9,000 board feet a month.” Dale Crowley said nothing again. Caleb said, “You told me I should go to Iowa State and study business.

Dale Crowley said, “Yes.” Caleb said, “I think I’ve been studying business.” He said it without any particular edge in his voice. He said it the way you state a fact that doesn’t need emphasis because the emphasis is already in the fact itself. Dale Crowley stood in the doorway of that shed for a long moment.

His voice, when it came, had lost most of the certainty that had made it the authoritative voice at the co-op counter for 20 years. He said, “I came out here because I’ve got a neighbor, not going to say who, who’s got a stand of walnut on his property he’s been trying to figure out what to do with, about 40 trees.

I told him I didn’t know anyone who could handle timber that size without a commercial mill. He said he’d heard about you. I told him what I knew. He said he wanted to come out and look at your operation. I said I’d come first and see if it was worth his time.” Caleb Dijkstra looked at Dale Crowley for a moment.

 Then he said, “Send him out.” He turned back to the mill and loaded the next log. Dale Crowley stood in the doorway for another few seconds. Then he walked back to his truck and drove down the farm lane and turned onto the county road and was gone. He did not apologize. Some men don’t, and that’s the truth of it. But he came.

And in the particular language of Hardin County, Iowa, where a man’s willingness to drive to your farm and stand in your shed and look at what you’ve built is the closest thing to a formal acknowledgement that you’re ever going to get, that was enough. The neighbor with the walnut stand came out the following week.

 His name was Lyle Sorenson, and he had 63 walnut trees on a 40-acre wood lot that he had been managing since his father had planted them as seedlings in 1952. The trees were mature, most of them between 18 and 24 inches in diameter, and the stand had been appraised by a timber buyer from Des Moines who had offered Lyle $4,200 for the entire lot, which worked out to about $67 per tree, which was the going rate for standing walnut sold to a commercial buyer who would mill it for pallet stock and low-grade lumber.

Caleb Dijkstra walked the wood lot with Lyle Sorenson on a Thursday morning in April and spent about 2 hours looking at individual trees. Then, he sat down on a log at the edge of the lot and did some arithmetic on the yellow legal pad he had brought with him and told Lyle what he thought the trees were worth as figured hardwood lumber sold direct to furniture makers and woodworkers.

The number he arrived at was $31,400. Not for the lot, per tree averaged across the stand. For the lot, the total was just under $198,000. Lyle Sorenson looked at the number on the legal pad for a long time. Then, he looked at Caleb Dijkstra. He said, “That’s not possible.” Caleb said, “It is if you cut for figure instead of volume.

” He explained it the way his grandfather would have explained something, directly, without condescension, as if the information was simply available and he was making it available to someone who wanted it. He explained that commercial timber buyers cut for yield, maximum board feet per log, regardless of grain character.

He explained that the furniture and custom woodworking market paid a premium, sometimes three to five times the commodity rate, for lumber with strong figure, consistent color, and the kind of character that comes from slow-grown farm timber, rather than plantation-grown commercial stock. He explained that the 40 walnut trees in Lyle Sorenson’s woodlot had been growing for 43 years in Iowa black dirt, and were, by any reasonable assessment, among the finest raw material for figured hardwood lumber that he had ever

seen. He said all of this without raising his voice or using a single word that Lyle Sorenson didn’t already know. Lyle Sorenson signed an agreement that afternoon. The terms were the same Caleb used with all his landowners, 30% of net revenue to the landowner, milling and marketing handled by Dijkstra Hardwoods, which was the name Caleb had registered with the county in 1991, with a complete accounting provided at the end of each quarter.

The Sorenson walnut took 14 months to mill completely because Caleb refused to rush it. Each log was evaluated individually before cutting. The best pieces, the ones with the strongest figure and the most unusual grain patterns, were set aside for direct sale to furniture makers and woodworkers who paid the highest prices.

The rest went to Garrison Woodworks. The final accounting, delivered to Lyle Sorenson in June of 1996, showed net revenue of $187,400, not quite the had estimated, but within 6% of it. Lyle Sorensen’s share was $56,220. He had been offered $4,200 for the same trees 14 months earlier. He told everyone he knew, which in Hardin County, Iowa, meant everyone.

Let me tell you about the Tuesday morning in September of 1996, because this is the scene that closes the circle and opens the next one. Caleb Dykstra walked into the Hardin County Farm Bureau Co-op at 7:30 in the morning, which was the first time he had been in the building during the Tuesday morning gathering since he was 17 years old, and had set a maple board on the counter and been told his idea wouldn’t work.

He was 23 years old, and he was wearing the same kind of clothes he always wore. Canvas work pants, a Carhartt jacket with a tear in the left elbow, boots that had seen about 4 years of daily use. He had sawdust in his hair. He was carrying a yellow legal pad. There were nine men at the counter that morning, including Dale Crowley.

 The conversation stopped when Caleb walked in, which is the kind of thing that happens in small places when someone enters a room, and the room already knows the story of what they’ve been doing. Caleb said, “Good morning.” Several men said, “Good morning” back. Dale Crowley said, “Good morning” and then was quiet.

Caleb set the legal pad on the counter. On the top page, he had written a single table. 12 farm properties in the Hardin County, the timber revenue each had generated through Dykstra Hardwoods between 1990 and 1996 and the comparable revenue each would have received from a commercial timber buyer at commodity rates.

The total commercial value of the timber milled $89,400. The total revenue actually generated $612,000. The difference $522,600 that had stayed in Hardin County instead of going to a commercial mill in Des Moines or Cedar Rapids. He did not say anything about the numbers. He just set the pad on the counter and let the men look at it.

 Then he said, “I’ve got capacity to take on four more farm properties this year. If anyone’s interested, I’ll be at the farm on Thursday afternoons.” He picked up the legal pad, said goodbye to the room, and walked out. The silence lasted about 10 seconds. Then Dale Crowley said quietly to no one in particular, “I should have gone out there sooner.

” All four available slots were filled by the end of the week. Let me tell you about what happened over the next decade because the story doesn’t end in 1996 and it would be wrong to let you think it does. Between 1996 and 2006, Dykstra Hardwoods expanded its sourcing to 31 farm properties across Hardin, Hamilton, and Franklin counties.

Caleb hired four full-time employees, all of them local men who learned the mill operation and the timber evaluation process from the ground up, the same way Caleb had learned it, by doing it, by making mistakes, by understanding the material well enough to read it before they cut it. He built a third mill in 2001, this one larger than the first two, and powered it with a combination of rebuilt chainsaw engines and a salvaged industrial electric motor he had acquired from a manufacturing plant in Iowa Falls that was closing its doors.

The electric motor alone would have cost $4,800 new. He paid $200 for it at the liquidation sale. The chainsaw collection grew with the business. By 2003, Caleb had acquired, rebuilt, or cannibalized for parts over 200 chainsaws. He kept a running inventory on a clipboard in the equipment shed, model, year, condition, parts used, parts available.

The clipboard was 37 pages long. Men who came to the shed for the first time and saw the rows of saws on the wall, some running, some in pieces, all cataloged, tended to stand in the doorway for a moment, the way Dale Crowley had stood in 1995, taking in something that didn’t quite fit the category they had prepared for it.

 Caleb’s employee, Merla Hassell, who had been with Dykstra Hardwoods since 1998, told people that the chainsaw wall was like a library, except that every book in it was also a potential engine. He said this was the most accurate description of it he could manage. In 2004, a timber buyer from Des Moines named Rick Prescott drove to the Dykstra farm uninvited, the second man to do so after Dale Crowley in 1995, and spent an afternoon walking the operation with Caleb.

He was representing a national hardwood distributor that had been watching the premium figured lumber market grow and wanted to discuss a supply arrangement. The arrangement he proposed involved Dextra Hardwood supplying figured walnut and maple to a national distribution network at volumes significantly higher than Caleb was currently producing.

The price per board foot he offered was $11.40 for walnut and $8.90 for maple, higher than anything Caleb had previously contracted. The volume requirement was 15,000 board feet per month. Caleb Dykstra listened to the entire proposal. Then he said, “I appreciate the offer. I’m going to decline.” Rick Prescott asked why.

Caleb said, “Because at 15,000 board feet a month, I start cutting for volume instead of figure. And the minute I start cutting for volume instead of figure, I’m competing with commercial mills. And commercial mills have capital and infrastructure I don’t have and don’t want. I built this business on the difference between what a tree is worth to someone cutting for volume and what it’s worth to someone cutting for character.

The minute I give up that difference, I’ve given up the business.” Rick Prescott looked at him for a moment. He said, “That’s a sophisticated position for a man running chainsaw engines out of a farm shed.” Caleb said, “My great-grandfather built the shed.” He said it without any particular pride, just as information, and went back to work.

 Rick Prescott drove back to Des Moines. He told the story at his company’s regional meeting that fall, and the story made its way through the hardwood industry in the way that unusual stories do. Not quickly, but persistently, the way water finds a path through rock. By 2005, Dykstra Hardwoods had been written up in two trade publications and one general interest magazine that ran a piece about small-scale figured hardwood operations in the Midwest.

The magazine sent a photographer who spent two days at the farm. The photo that ran on the opening spread showed Caleb Dykstra standing at the second mill with a walnut slab across his forearms, sawdust on his jacket, looking at the camera with the expression of someone who has been interrupted in the middle of something more important than being photographed.

Behind him, visible on the wall of the shed, was a row of rebuilt chainsaws. The caption read, “Dykstra built his mill from salvaged engines. The engines cost him nothing. The business they built was worth considerably more.” Dale Crowley retired from the Farm Bureau Co-op in 2002. At his retirement gathering, held at the Co-op on a Tuesday morning, which was the only appropriate time, Caleb Dykstra was there.

He did not make a speech. He shook Dale Crowley’s hand and said he had learned a great deal from their conversation in 1989. Dale Crowley looked at him and said, “I expect you learned it in spite of what I said, not because of it.” Caleb said, “I learned that the people who tell you something won’t work are sometimes the most useful people in the room, because they tell you exactly what you’re going to have to prove.

” Dale Crowley was quiet for a moment. Then he laughed, a different laugh than the one 1989, shorter and without the certainty, and said, “I suppose that’s a generous way to look at it.” Caleb said, “It’s the accurate way.” They shook hands again and that was the end of it. Let me tell you about Emmett Dykstra because he deserves more than a mention and I have not given him enough of the story yet.

Emmett farmed his 640 acres until 2001 when his knees made the work impractical and he turned the farming operation over to a neighbor on a cash rent arrangement. He spent the next several years doing what he had always done in the lean-to shed, taking things apart, figuring out why they had failed, putting them back together.

He died in March of 2008 at the age of 79 in the farmhouse where he had been born. The obituary in the Eldora Courier ran four paragraphs. None of them mentioned the sawmill or the chainsaw collection or the $612,000 that had stayed in Hardin County because his son had paid attention to what he taught him. Emmett would not have considered any of that worth mentioning in an obituary.

He would have said that a man does his work and the work speaks or it doesn’t. And either way, the man is gone and the work remains. The lean-to shed that Clyde Dykstra built in 1938 is still standing. Caleb has maintained it the way Clyde maintained it and Emmett maintained it. Not as a museum, but as a working space because a shed that isn’t used is just a building, and a building that isn’t used falls down.

The original workbench where Caleb took apart the Husqvarna 61 in 1987 is still there. The parts bin that his grandfather labeled in 1974 is still there. Still organized in Clyde’s handwriting, supplemented now by Caleb’s own labels in a different hand. The chainsaw collection, which stands, as of the last accounting, at 231 units, of which 189 are operational, occupies an entire wall of the expanded equipment shed.

Visitors who see it for the first time tend to ask the same question. Why do you keep them all? Caleb’s answer is the same every time. He says, “Because someone decided they were done.” He says, “I’m not convinced they were right. Let me tell you about the morning in April of 2009 when Caleb’s daughter, Nora Dijkstra, she was 16 years old, which is the same age Caleb had been when he first started thinking seriously about the sawmill, walked into the equipment shed with a notebook under her arm and told her father she’d been reading about portable

solar kilns and whether the drying schedule could be shortened by optimizing airflow patterns based on lumber species and moisture content. And that she thought the current 6-8 week drying cycle could be reduced to 4 weeks for most species without compromising quality, which would effectively increase the mill’s throughput by 30% without adding any capital equipment.

 She had done the calculations. They were in the notebook. Caleb Dijkstra looked at his daughter. He looked at the notebook. He thought about a yellow legal pad and a librarian names and a maple board and a man at a co-op counter who had laughed. He said, “Show me the numbers.” She showed him the numbers. He looked at them for a long time.

 Then he said, “Let’s build the test kiln this summer.” She said, “Really?” He said, “You’ve done the work. We do the work. That’s how it goes.” She said, “Dale Crowley’s grandson works at the co-op now.” He said, “I know.” She said, “He told me last week that solar kilns aren’t efficient enough to be worth modifying.

” Caleb Dykstra looked at his daughter for a moment. Then he said quietly, “Good. That’s useful information.” Nora Dykstra built the test kiln that summer. The modified airflow design reduced the drying cycle to 26 days for maple and 31 days for walnut. The throughput increase was 34%. Slightly better than her projection.

She documented the results in the notebook, which she kept on the same shelf in the equipment shed where her father kept the yellow legal pad, which was on the same shelf where Clyde Dykstra’s parts bin label still sat in their original handwriting from 1974. Dykstra Hardwoods is still operating in Hardin County, Iowa.

The mills are still running. The chainsaws are still on the wall. The experts still say that small-scale figured hardwood milling isn’t a viable model for farm operations in the Midwest. The Dykstra family has been proving them wrong for 35 years, one board at a time, with engines that everyone else decided were finished.

Caleb Dickstra asked for your broken chainsaws. They laughed. He built a mill, the mill ran, the timber paid, the county kept the money. And somewhere in a shed in Hardin County, Iowa, a 16-year-old girl’s notebook is sitting next to a yellow legal pad, and both of them are full of numbers that someone at some point told their authors weren’t worth.