St. Pete veterans restore European wood that survived World War II

Today, June 6, is the 81st anniversary of D-Day: the Allied landings in France during the Second World War. In commemoration of that event, the Catalyst profiled Three Forks Wood Reclamation, a local, veteran-owned business dedicated to cataloguing and preserving wood products from historically-significant sites.

There’s a little farm named for the Marmion family in Ravenoville on Northern France’s Cotentin Peninsula. Nestled amongst the bocage – a dense mix of pasture and woodland crisscrossed by hedgerows – Ravenoville is so small and obscure the French government removed its status as a town in 2019. Marmion’s farm, on the outskirts of Ravenoville, is indistinguishable from the outside from tens of thousands of others in Northwest France. Each grows corn or raises dairy cows, tended gently by an aging homesteader and their family, day in and day out, for a thousand years or more. On almost every day of those thousand years Marmion’s farm has been – with all affection – utterly ordinary.

But not on June 6, 1944. Only a few miles away 21,000 men of the US 4th Infantry Division sprinted out of their small Higgins boats onto a rural beach, code-named Utah, while from the sky tens of thousands of paratroops of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions leapt from their transports. Together they anchored the right flank of the D-Day landings, the final push by the US, UK, and Canada to liberate France and Western Europe.

That was the plan, anyway. But the airdrops – the largest in history to that point – were chaotic, with many units scattered miles off course and forced in the early dawn to land and rally wherever they could. The paratroopers, tossed hither and yon among the hedgerows, instead looked for targets of opportunity. They were ordinary people, much like those of Ravenoville – but that morning they were called upon to do the most extraordinary thing: Liberate Europe. Protect democracy. Save the world.

Starting with units of the 82nd and 101st Airborne at Marmion, that’s exactly what they did. In less than a year, Germany would be defeated, Hitler dead and Western Europe liberated.

Now, thanks to a pair of St. Petersburg veterans and entrepreneurs, many of the places – and people – involved in that day are being preserved and remembered here, half a world away.

Marmion Farm: Knutzen, left, and Kelley. Photo provided.

As he thinks about the path in life that led him to ancient barns and farmhouses across the Old World, Christian Knutzen thinks about intangibles of it. A sense of history, and artistry. Craftsmanship, and what it means to preserve it.

Sacrifice, too. It’s a topic he and Chris Kelley know well.

Knutzen and Kelley combined for nearly six decades in service, much of it as elite special operators (Knutzen an Army Green Beret; Kelley a Navy SEAL). After calling time on their careers, they wanted to utilize the best parts of their time in the military – the places they’d seen, the cultures they’d experienced, and the connections they made. They loved the shared experiences with their brethren – not just Americans but the many allies they met and made along the way.

What could be better, they figured, than finding and creating living monuments: the physical examples of the places Americans and their allies fought in and for. In particular, Knutzen noted, wood has a deep connection with the US Armed Forces and people in general.

It was then that Three Forks Wood Reclamation was born.

“We wanted to find these locations that … have been there since the 1600s and 1700s. For them to still exist is a miracle,” said Kelley. “And they have these massive oak beams that you can’t get anymore.”

Their mission secured, Kelley and Knutzen quickly found an enthusiastic, albeit picky, client base. “We’d do all the photography, get all the documentation, bring it back, put it on our website, and a lot of people said, ‘That’s amazing … but what I really want is this.’”

“We thought we’d develop a catalogue,” Knutzen agreed. “But it turned out that people would get their own creative juices going.”

One of these early commissions led them to La Poterie, a farm in Normandy not far from Omaha Beach. They were joined by Peter Dayton, who has a background as both woodworker and shipwright: his shop, Arotza Woodworks, hosts Three Forks Wood Reclamation on 13th Avenue SE in St. Pete’s Salt Creek district.

The three of them, plus an ex-Army Ranger cameraman, treated the effort like a mission, and they weren’t looking for any old souvenirs. Both before and during the trip they meticulously researched local landmarks, and historical buildings, and cross-referenced them with the movement of American forces advancing off of Omaha Beach – the bloodiest of the five landings, whose first wave was memorably depicted in the first scene of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.

“It was really a story of planes, trains, and automobiles,” said Kelley. “There was not a lot of sleep.”

Wood beams were numbered by the original builders of 18th century French structures to indicate where different pieces should be used. This numbering is original to 1792. Photo by Peter Wahlberg.

But after many days of searching they found La Poterie – a farmhouse liberated shortly after D-Day by a detachment of soldiers led by 1st Lt. Kermit Miller. It was the first building in the town of Colombières to be liberated; a monument to Lt. Miller, killed in action a few days later, and his men remains in the front yard.

But they didn’t have a way in. So the four of them drove up to the farm and knocked on the door.

As luck would have it, the farmer was a French Navy veteran with whom Kelley had a personal connection – they had both served on the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga, albeit a decade apart. Knutzen himself had served in the Army as part of the 29th Infantry Division, whose soldiers, including Lt. Miller, had been the ones to liberate the farm.

They were awed by what they found.

“It’s just the level of craftsmanship,” said Kelley, admiring the large beams that remain from Poterie, somehow towering even though they were laid on their side. “This was built in 1792 – I imagine it was thatched roofs then, and it was metal when we found it – but all of the beams and timbers stayed and didn’t need to be replaced.”

They set out to document the wood, sourcing workers to salvage the beams, trusses and anything else they could save – hiring locals – and proceeding through the customs process to import the materials. The USDA requires kiln-drying the wood prior to shipping it to the US and ensuring the containers and that they are not contaminated by foreign microbes. They’ve since covered the cost of the trip through commissions – with beams to spare – and conserved their own piece of hidden history.

Following their work at La Poterie, Knutzen and Kelley were approached by a donor to the Curahee Military Museum in Toccoa, Georgia. Dedicated to American paratroops and located near the base where the men of the 82nd and 101st trained starting in 1942, Curahee had found and shipped an entire barracks where paratroops were billeted in Southern England, prior to D-Day. Their question to Knutzen and Kelley – Do you have anything from where the paratroops landed at Utah Beach?

They did.

US soldiers of the 101st with a captured Nazi flag at Marmion Farm, Ravenoville, France. Photo: Peace 101.

Unlike La Poterie, whose history had been obscured by time and the many dramas of the Omaha landings, Marmion was etched even into the storied history of D-Day. The landings at Utah Beach had not faced the fierce opposition of Omaha, and the soldiers and paratroops had combat cameramen with them. Marmion farm was a hinge-point in the story of the men of Easy Company, 506th Infantry who were profiled in the book and subsequent miniseries Band of Brothers. They and other units of the 101st Airborne rallied at Marmion, driving off German troops and securing roads north to the crucial ports of Le Havre and Cherbourg.

“They killed a bunch of Germans and stole their flag,” Knutzen noted. “It was on the cover of Time in 1956.” Surely any artifacts from Marmion would be in high demand.

But relationships matter – it was one of the things that drew Knutzen and Kelley to this work in the first place. And they already had a connection to Marmion: the farmer from La Poterie. He made the introductions, and not long after, Knutzen, Kelley, and Dayton were examining the farmhouse there.

Even now that piece of history is preparing to be loaded into a container in Antwerp. A 22-foot beam from Marmion will be shipping directly to Savannah for the Curahee Museum. The remainder is available to designers, architects, and developers who have both a vision for their work and a keen sense of history.

Next, they expect their journey to go into Italy and Japan, both on commissions from local clients. Wherever that work takes them, their future is in Tampa Bay.

“The hard part is expanding connections into architects and designers,” noted Kelley. “We’ve figured out everything else.

“Whatever the history, culture, and geography is that resonates, we’ll find it.”

Three Forks website.

Learn more about Arotza Woodworks here.