What type of wood? Different woods take different stains...open pore like oak =can take a pigmented stain, sometimes tight grains like maple do better with a gel stain. Sand all surfaces to remove any burnished areas and to get all grain evenly "scratched". Here's a teak butcher block I made a while ago: Is this the color family you're looking for?

We did oak on our island and stained it dark (Early American mixed with a little Jacobean from Minwax) and then wiped on several coats of Old Masters finish. It looked great - for years. We ate at it, rolled dough on it and generally used it the same as a table top (because essentially that is what it was). We are also in the middle of nowhere (just north of you) and had a carpenter make it for us. I think it cost $500 but that was 12 years ago. Our recent island is made with maple butcherblock and I didn't want it stained so I left it natural but finished it in Osmos instead. I might sand it down and do the Old Master's again as I prefer that finish but the Osmos was easier to do. ETA: We thought we would not finish the new maple top at all and just oil it periodically. That turned out to be a PIA and so we did the Osmos after a few months of trying the oiling.

I’m just worried I’ll mess up the nice rounded inside corners. The sander is too big to fit in the curves anyways. Yea, I’ll stain the top and put on the Watco. I already finished another piece of butcher block for the other side of the kitchen so I kind of have to keep going. Then, I guess I’ll make sure to have cutting boards for any food prep I do, which I was planning on anyways so the counter didn’t get too scratched. Maybe in another couple of years I‘ll redo it with something better if it turns out a complete disaster.

Amy, use a magnet to make sure no metal is inside just to make sure and you can cut it if there is no metal. Most cutting boards you find in-home use, held together with food-safe glue. The heavy-duty butcher blocks you see inside meat markets, or butcher shops, on which they use mallets to pound meat or a cleaver to chop through bone, ribs, etc these butcher blocks are reinforced and held together with metal rods that run through them. But these butcher blocks are heavy, and usualy anywhere from 8-18" thick.