I will tell you my feelings and they are the same as on the flooring forum, Douglas Fir.

I will tell you my feelings and they are the same as on the flooring forum, Douglas Fir.

I will tell you my feelings and they are the same as on the flooring forum, Douglas Fir.

Douglas fir has very straight narrow grain, which this doesn't. My flooring store said it might be regular fir but not DF. And I posted here to get different opinions not the same one three times.

Sorry, that wasn't very nice of me. If you look at this picture of the entire floor you can see some of them have the crazy wavy pattern of pine. This is particularly evident in the boards aligned with the heating vent. I think I just didn't choose a very good sample to sand.

Grain depends on what part of the tree the board was cut from and how big the tree was at the time. Patterns like this can certainly be found in DF vs "regular" fir (whatever that is).

There has been an issue with this forum auto-generating multiple posts, the support folks don't seem to know whats causing it. Millworkman probably knows what he is talking about.

Douglas Fir is not really fir. That was the point I was trying to make with "regular" fir. Real fir would be red fir, western hemlock, white fir.

Is it the pinkish color, or the grain that makes millworkman say it is DF? Was DF really used in NE 120-150 years ago? That's a western tree, seems kind of far to ship it back then.

Consider the location of the house, and its age when you are identifying wood. What was locally logged and inexpensive then?

Eastern White Pine? If it was a seaport town, lumber from Europe was economical to fill out a cargo, but it was usually not shipped very far inland.

Shipping Douglas Fir back east for use in flooring would have been stupid. If you look at the houses of that era here, the same floor would be Ponderosa Pine or spruce ... locally abundant. In the southeast ... Yellow pine.

My guess is eastern white pine based on location. I'm in MA, not coastal. However, the house is adjacent to the site of a former lumber and coal yard which was operating at the time it was built. The lumber yard owner owned the house, which was more of a cottage at the time. He lived in the fancy house down the street, not here. The railroad also went right by here and still does. The lumber yard closed in 1900. So maybe it could be DF but that seems unlikely.

When I look at boards from the basement, between the subfloor boards, they look surprisingly bright and light, like new wood.

Probably white pine. Sugar pine is too soft.
Could be VA red pine, since the east coast was rail-linked and a healthy interstate trade was flourishing from the 1850's forward.
If from the cellar side it looks creamy white, then it's not red pine.
Casey

I agree with sombreuil mongrel. I live in Maine in the southern part of the state near the coast in a 1937 cape. It has original Douglas fir floors in some rooms, with very straight grain, and no knots at all. Your floors look very much like white pine to me.

If this is an upstairs room, it could easily be pine, downstairs would normally have white or red oak, as my 1908 house does in Ohio.

Type of wood depends very much on what is local the older the house is; my suster's current house (a farm built around 1850 or so) has joists in the oldest parts that are half-trunks and a rubble foundation. She just told me that a previous owner had all the walnut woodwork removed some time ago, but here is the big surprise: the attic rafters and beams are all walnut! So are all the 12" or larger sheathing boards for the roof! Apparently that was the type of trees growing in the area at that time northeast of Columbus.