CHICAGO — Ever see a mountain of firewood?
If you drive north on Canal Street and look east near 17th Street, you'll spot one:
Welcome to A-1 Country Firewood, 1635 S. Canal, one of Chicago's oldest wood dealers, selling about 10 million pounds to restaurants and residents all over the city and beyond.
In towering piles stacked around A-1’s South Side yard, you’ll find most types of wood for sale. Chopped down and processed by loggers in rural parts of the Midwest, the wood selection includes white oak, apple, beech nut, cherry, hickory, grape vines, sugar maple, hackberry, mulberry and walnut.
The only popular cooking wood A-1 doesn’t carry on the regular is alder, used to smoke fish. No worries, though. If you really need some alder, these guys know who to call to get it.
A-1 provides wood to more than 80 Chicago restaurants and 1,000 city residents who heat their homes with wood furnaces in the winter.
“I’d like to become a utility,” said A-1 owner John Goodale, sitting in a tiny trailer office outfitted with its own wood-burning heater.
The outdoor wood store opened its first yard under the Ohio Street Bridge in 1979.
The late Bob Goodale had just returned to Chicago from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where he lived in a cabin and burned wood to keep warm during the long, dark winters.
With a few years of experience procuring firewood for himself, he decided to start a wood dealership to help city folks do the same. He recruited his brother, John, to help.
In the beginning, there wasn’t enough work to go around for both brothers. The business was seasonal, running between September and March. “Back then, during the summertime, there really wasn’t much going on,” Goodale said.
Then, about 15 years ago, more and more restaurants caught on to the barbecue cooking craze. Home Depot and other department stores began selling easy-to-build smokers, creating a large market for firewood.
“It’s going year around now,” Goodale said.
A-1 sells more than 10 million pounds of firewood a year, making weekly routes to homes and restaurants all over the city.
Most of the wood arrives already processed. On occasion, A-1 laborers must cut the wood even smaller, wielding chainsaws. If you want wood chips, A-1 will make you wood chips.
If you're willing to pay, A-1 will deliver just about anywhere.
Every few weeks, workers load a truck full of wood to travel almost eight hours north to Hayward, Wis., to drop off a shipment to the original Famous Dave’s.
The farthest A-1 has traveled with a truckload of wood? Key West, a 1,500-mile jaunt south.
You’ll find A-1’s firewood at stores like Cabela’s, WalMart and Home Depot.
The business of selling wood is pretty simple, according to Goodale: “Temperature goes up, the price goes down. Temperature goes down, the price goes up.”
During the winter months, a big chunk of A-1’s business is doing monthly deliveries to wood-burning homes all over the city. The company often gets phone calls from customers with furnace troubles who need wood to stay warm.
A-1 makes sure they get what they need — fast.
“We’ll bring them out wood within the next two to three hours,” said Jack Cunningham, who helps Goodale run the business.
“We always push them to the front,” Goodale said.
A-1 Country Firewood is open 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays and closed on Sundays.
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