Sunken treasure: a Wilmington company gets top dollar for centuries-old wood it salvages from the bottom of the Cape Fear River.

• Author: Elmore, Cindy J.
• Position: FEATURE - Cape Fear Riverwood Corp.

On a sultry August day, Pete DeVita and his colleagues down sandwiches and salads under the awning of a restaurant along Wilmington's waterfront. Here they can keep an eye on procurement for their company's production line. They're probably the only ones paying attention to the growling motorized crane and grapple on the flat-topped derrick barge a few hundred yards away on the Cape Fear River.

"It's a big one! It's a big one!" DeVita calls out as a dripping, 30-foot-long black piling, which once shouldered a railroad pier on the far side of the river, is pulled from the water. "There's probably 100 feet of flooring in that. It'll probably retail for about $700."

That's how Wilmington-based Cape Fear Riverwood Corp.'s product starts. DeVita, 61, is president and CEO of Riverwood, which recovers centuries-old wood for use in flooring and furniture, finding profit in the Cape Fear's muddy waters.

On a typical day of salvaging, the company recovers about 35 to 40 logs. It processed 1,600 in 2003, yielding 75,000 square feet of flooring. The flooring sells for $5 to $9 a square foot, plus installation, DeVita says. "That's a couple dollars a square foot more than oak." Special cuts, such as wide planks, are priced by the job but generally run $12 to $14 a square foot.

For more than a century, loggers cut the forests near the Cape Fear and hauled timber to the river, which meanders from the state's center to the ocean, south of Wilmington. At the river's edge, workers lashed the logs into rafts and used the current to float them to sawmills that lined the lower Cape Fear.

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Upon arrival, the logs were kept in small, partitioned shore-side lagoons until sawyers could slice them into lumber. Some sank there or during the making of the rafts. Others went down in the river's bends. Riverwood estimates that 18% of the logs sent downriver in the 1700s and 1800s sank. Because of the Cape Fear's turbidity, sediment covered or continually washed over many. The lack of oxygen helped preserve them.

The "sinkers" weren't cause for worry. "It was just, 'Let's just go get some more slaves and a mule team and cut down some more,'" says Pete's brother, Chip DeVita, 46, head of Riverwood's nonflooring division. Few were recovered. "I think it's fair to say there are thousands and thousands of logs down there," says Steven Anderson, CEO of the Forest History Society, a Durham-based nonprofit that collects and studies...