10/30/2026
That’s cool!
Every one of these trees has a reputation somewhere. Ask an old farmer about hedge and he'll tell you about fence posts his granddad set that are still standing. Ask a carpenter about pignut hickory and he'll show you a hammer handle that's outlasted three hammer heads. This chart puts some numbers behind those stories.
The numbers come from the Janka hardness test. They take a little steel ball and measure how much force it takes to press it halfway into a piece of wood. The more force it takes, the better that wood holds up to dents, dings and wear. For comparison, red oak, which a lot of us have on our floors, comes in around 1,290 pounds. Eastern white pine is about 380. Live oak at the top of this list is roughly twice as hard as red oak and seven times harder than pine.
That's no accident. Live oak was so tough that the U.S. Navy kept its own stands of it for shipbuilding, and the frame of the USS Constitution, the ship they nicknamed "Old Ironsides," was built from it. Osage orange is the old homesteader's fence post. Sink a hedge post in the ground and you might not have to think about it again for the rest of your life. Hickory is why so many ax, hammer and shovel handles are made the way they are. It's hard, but it's also got some give, so it takes a beating without snapping.
A few on here might surprise you. Persimmon was once the go-to wood for the heads of golf club drivers, which is why old-timers still call them "woods." Flowering dogwood, the pretty little tree in the yard every spring, was used for textile mill shuttles, mallets and tool handles because it wears so smooth. Ironwood, or hophornbeam, and American hornbeam, which a lot of folks call musclewood, were turned into mallets, wedges and tool handles back when people made their own. Mesquite is a favorite for furniture and turning out in the Southwest, and pecan shows up in a lot of good flooring.
A couple of things to keep in mind, though. This chart sticks to the hardwoods most of us know, the ones you might actually have growing on your place or find at a sawmill. There are a few native trees that test even harder, mostly down in South Florida and out in the Sonoran Desert, but you're not likely to run into them unless you live there. The numbers are also approximate, measured at about 12% moisture, and they can shift a bit from one source to the next. Shellbark hickory is a good example. You'll see it listed at 1,821 on some charts and around 1,810 on others. That's normal. Two boards from the same species can test different depending on where the tree grew and what part of the trunk they came from. Hardness is also just one thing. It tells you how well a wood resists dents, not how strong it is, how well it bends, how it burns or how easy it is to split. Some of the hardest woods on this list are also the ones that'll dull your saw blade and burn out the motor on a cheap drill.
If you've got any of these growing on your place, it might be worth taking a second look before they end up in the firewood pile. That crooked hophornbeam at the edge of the woodlot could be your next set of tool handles.
