From the Washington Post: link
There are plenty of ways to tell that the market for firewood has taken off here. Wood-burning stoves are selling out in stores, the price of split wood has jumped past $200 a cord and would-be woodsmen are filling up classes on lumberjack skills. ...
Chrisenton said he can barely stay ahead of the demand now -- as New Englanders stunned by the high price of oil flock back to a fuel source as old as the colonial forests. "The stuff I'm cutting today will either be delivered this afternoon or tomorrow," Chrisenton said. "We can't keep up with it." ..
In modern times, the last heyday of the New England firewood market was in the late 1970s, when oil shortages drove up the price of oil for home furnaces. Wood stoves and split logs sold like crazy. This year, as the region enters the traditional late-summer season when winter wood is laid up, the boom times are back. "It's becoming very much like 1979 again," said Richard Wright, a New Hampshire editor of a trade magazine for the business called Hearth & Home. ...
In New Hampshire, for instance, state figures show that a gallon of heating oil has jumped from $1.28 in late 2003 to about $2.67 today. ...
"All of them say the same thing, 'Oil is too high,' " said Wil Labbe, whose County Stove Shop in the far northern town of Caribou, Maine, has roughly tripled its stove sales of last year. "They don't trust the oil." The demand has meant big changes for the region's staid firewood industry, whose small-time operators customarily let their wood dry for months before depositing it on customers' lawns in late summer.
Suddenly, nobody has time to wait. Chrisenton, Maxine's owner, started cutting trees a month earlier than usual this season, and still couldn't keep up. Instead of three or four orders a week, he was getting 12 a day. "It's never been like that," said Ginny Chrisenton, his wife. For the first time in years, the couple stopped advertising their firewood in the state's larger newspapers, she said. "Now, it's just the local paper, because it's just too many calls."
Peter Lammert, an official with the Maine Forest Service, serves as a kind of unofficial Dow Jones for firewood, tracking the price per "cord" -- a stack four feet by four feet by eight feet. He said that, in the span of a year, the price of good-quality dried wood has gone up from $190 a cord to $205 and beyond, and even "green" wood, which is freshly cut and hard to burn, has jumped by $30 to $170 or more. ...
But the area's firefighters see a downside: They believe that an increase in wood burning will lead inevitably to an increase in people setting their homes on fire. ... "People are going to do funny things not to pay that money" for oil, said Raymond Parent, the fire chief in Sanford, Maine.