What the heck kind of wood is this?

In the pics below are of a piece of wood I cut from a standing dead tree out back of my house in the woods. The odd thing about this tree was that when I found it there was not one piece of bark on it and there was no rot or holes from Woodpeckers. The wood is heavy yet it is very dry and it's solid as a rock. The trees here are mostly red & white oak, maple (not sure which kind but I think suger or silver), white, yellow & black birch, a little beech (but not usually where I found this), poplar and of course the pine trees. This wood is very stringy as you can see in the pics, more than most of the wood I've cut around here. The wood burns hot, long and leaves little ashes. Region is south east Maine. Anyone have any idea what this wood is? I know it may be hard to tell with no bark and there were no leaves near it since I suspect it was dead for several years. Thanks!

John the Painter said:

Looks like poplar to me.Have you tried burning any yet?

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That's funny because Poplar was the last thing I though it would be because it's heavy and very dense. There are quite a few dead poplars around and they are all full of holes from woodpeckers and half fallen down on the ground. This tree didn't have on woodpecker hole and no rot. I've burned quite a bit of it and it burns great - hot, long and not much ash. Not at all like the poplar I've burned in the past.

Jack Straw said:

Looks like Elm to me, was it really hard to split?

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Very hard to split, the wood is hard as a rock. I don't really know what an elm looks like so I'm not sure if there are any around here.

LLigetfa said:

Ja, that thin line of heartwood and wide growth rings say Poplar.

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Can poplar be really dense and heavy when dry? I've cut and burned some poplar in the past and it's usually pretty light when dry. The weight and density is what had me scratching my had at first.

Jack Straw said:

Elm is the hardest thing I've ever split. That looks exactly like the elm I cut. Did your maul bounce right off of it?

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That is exactly what happened. After I cut it I wanted see the grain so I gave it a nice wack with the maul and it bounced off it! I tried a few more times and gave up because of how stringy it was. I ended up putting it through the splitter.

So elm sounds very likely. I'll looks at some pictures of elm and see if I remember seeing any around here.

The other thing that I just remembered when I put the wood in the pics into the stove is that it takes a little longer to catch than my other dry wood does but once it does it burns very well and provides great secondary burn.

Never heard of swamp maple but there is a lot of maple here and I found the tree not far from a large swamp. The wood does have sort of a sheen to it like some of the maple I have does. In my experience maple isn't stringy and hard to split like this stuff though.

Tony H said:

The splits do not look like the grain of an elm too straight and not poplar too heavy and dead poplar falls over easily .
Elm will stand when dead and the bark will fall off . I have a bunch like that but the grain is much rougher . Looks a little more like some type of maple to me.
Was it a single trunk or did it go up a couple feet and split into four or more trunks ? Elm splits out into multi trunks very low 1-4 feet and the maple about 5-10 feet up I don't thinks poplar splits off as much and higher in the tree.

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I don't remember exactly but I know it didn't split real low. The bark was kind of peeled off at the bottom.