Wood Heating Handbook by Charles Self has a whole chapter listing which trees are easy and hard to split and good and bad for burning.  I've reproduced a small subset here including most of the common trees in in our area.  Note that resinous woods aren't good for burning because they can create a chimney fire --- bad news.

Species	Ease of splitting	Good for burning?
American Beech	hard	good (slow burning)
Wild Black Cherry	easy	good
Black Gum	awfully hard	fair to good
Black Locust	easy	great
Black Oak	easy	great
Black Walnut	easy	good
Box Elder	easy	fair
Eastern Hemlock (very relevant now the hemlock woolly adelgid is killing them all)	moderate	good (fast burning)
Ironwood	usually doesn't require splitting (but hard)	excellent (slow burning)
Eastern Red Cedar	easy	fair (resinous)
White Oak	easy	excellent (slow burning)
Northern Red Oak	moderately easy	good
Ohio Buckeye (Sweet Buckeye is harder to split and makes a poor fuel)	easy	fair
Pines	easy	fair (resinous)
Red Maple	easy	good
Slippery Elm	hard	good
Sourwood	hard	excellent
Sugar Maple	easy	good to excellent
Tulip-tree	easy	fair

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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