Old barns don’t die here

It started with a neighbour’s shed

In 1999, a young craftsman was building small furniture and other crafts in his spare time when he asked a neighbour whether he could use the lumber from a shed the neighbour had just torn down.

He said yes. Those reclaimed boards became the first few styles of what grew into a full line of birdhouses, planters, benches and more — all made from wood somebody else had finished with.

That shop became Summitville Woodworking. Today it runs a drop-off site where fence companies, decking companies, and anyone else in the community with unwanted rustic tin or old lumber can bring it in rather than send it to a dumpster. A crew of workers and subworkers turns it into things that go back outside.

There is no shortage of material. The EPA estimated 600 million tons of construction and demolition debris generated in the United States in 2018 — more than twice the amount of household garbage — with roughly 144 million tons of it going to landfill. Some of what would have been in that number is now a birdhouse on somebody’s fence post.

What Plowcraft actually is

It was started by a Lancaster County craftsman who had spent years making sought-after pieces in a small craft shop next to his house. Like most shops of that kind, his main outlet was wholesale — the work turned up on Wayfair, on Etsy, on Amazon, with somebody else’s name on the invoice.

Plowcraft exists so those shops can sell directly to you instead. Every piece ships from the individual shop that built it. There is no central warehouse and no middleman taking a cut of the craftsman’s work.

That is 146 pieces in total, across seven outdoor collections. Twenty-five of the listings describe their maker as Amish.

Why this happens here

Lancaster County is not an accident. Small family woodworking shops are the economic backbone of the craft trade in this part of Pennsylvania.

The Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College — which is in Lancaster County itself — puts it this way: “In recent decades, hundreds of Amish-owned shops have sprung up in some communities. Most of these are small family businesses with fewer than ten employees. The bulk of these businesses produce wood products—household and outdoor furniture, gazebos, small barns, and lawn ornaments.”

Plowcraft’s shop is registered in New Holland, Pennsylvania, in the middle of it.

What things are made of, and why

Three material families, each doing a different job.

Reclaimed wood and rustic tin. Sixty-four of the 146 listings describe reclaimed wood; 59 mention tin. This is old barn siding, fence board, decking and roofing. It has nail holes. It has weathering. It has grain that does not match the board next to it. That is the point — and it is why the site tells you up front: “Since these items are made with reclaimed materials, each piece is unique. Expect slight variations!”

Pine and MDO plywood. Twenty-four listings use pine, six of them rougher head pine; 45 use MDO or plywood. This is where the mailboxes, martin houses and whirligig bodies come from — pieces that need dimensional consistency more than they need character.

Poly. Twenty-seven listings use poly or maintenance-free poly material. The lighthouses and the Dutch windmill live here — the pieces that stand outside all year and are never brought in.

Poly is not a compromise material. Structural recycled plastic lumber was developed at Rutgers by materials-science professor Thomas Nosker, from HDPE milk-jug plastic blended with polystyrene. It has since gone into roughly 1.5 million U.S. railway ties, diverting about 300 million pounds of plastic from landfill, and into bridges rated to carry a 73-ton M1 Abrams tank. Unlike treated wood, it needs no preservatives that can leach into soil and groundwater.

Wood durability, meanwhile, is less uniform than people assume. The USDA Forest Service’s Wood Handbook classifies cedar heartwood as resistant or very resistant to decay — but the Forest Products Laboratory is careful to add that resistance varies by species and even by where in the tree the wood came from, and that resistance to one organism does not predict resistance to another. Which is a long way of saying: ask about the specific piece.

You can. Questions about the construction or material of any product are answered directly by the builder of that item. Not a call centre. The person who made it.

How we do business

In practice that means:

• A 14-day return, no reason required. Contact us within 14 days of receipt and you get a free return label and your purchase price back. A 10% restocking fee applies to most returns, and it is waived if the item was defective or if we got the size or colour wrong.
• Custom work is normal. Buyers have had a well cover built to an unusually large wellhead, a rear door added to a barn mailbox for a small extra charge, and one-off pieces made on request. Ask before you order.
• We tell you which pieces are made to order. Each listing shows either Quick Ship — 2 to 3 business days — or Ships in 15, meaning within 15 business days because it is being built for you at one of the shops.
• And when we get it wrong, we fix it. Buyers have described exactly that happening. We would rather you knew that than assumed nothing ever goes wrong.

What customers say

1,724 orders since 2021, and a 4.8 rating across 458 reviews.

Careful packaging comes up in seven separate reviews. So does the shop matching its own photographs.