"I held on to my 18c axe and adze collection for a project I am working on. Guess what, all the handles are hickory. Handmade of course. Shaped and sized to fit the guy who used them. "Used them" are the key words here, not collected and discussed to death.
This instant internet expert thing with references to "expert" advise is starting to tick me off again. Respect and listen to history.
Signing off again.
Bernie Weisgerber"
This is called confirmation bias. You live in an area and time when hickory handles were dominant. The collected axes were also most likely from an area with hickory so it is obvious that would be the wood that was used in those axes. Other areas used different trees. The dominance of hickory in single areas or due to market reasons does not mean they are the best handles. It means simply that they were the most durable and could be manufactured at a rate to fulfill the needs of a growing industry. How could Canadian companies keep up with much bigger American companies? They couldn't, much of the forest industry was bought up by American companies, along with the axe manufacturers. And many of the largest companies were in areas with access to hickory, Plumb and Kelly being the obvious examples.
By your logic we can just say that fiberglass handles are dominant now, and therefore are better than hickory due to them being superior in the market, according to historical progression. Or even that Chinese axes are superior to American axes because they are more popular (and the Swedish ones too). See where that gets us? You're not respecting and listening to history yourself, only demanding that I adhere to your version of it.
It's pretty simple. Compare axes with a hickory handle and a birch or ash handle. Which one is lighter? Which one is better at shock resistance? You don't know? Well, I guess that makes you the Internet Expert.
Don't make assumptions about other people just because you had a bad day and people wouldn't get off your internet lawn. When I came home today I went out to my lawn and split wood for an hour and a half. But I guess that's not relevant to someone who has to resort to insults immediately.
You can't respect history if you look down upon knowledge and immediately become surly over a logical and historically accurate idea. You don't seem like the listening type, to be frank. Guess I'll go back out to the lawn now. In the meantime here's a similar idea written by someone with practical axe knowledge (no doubt you'll have proof of your sixteen hours and 4 cords cut today as a rebuttal):
"I have heard that White Oak was once the preferred handle material (from an axe historian specializing in the late 1700s until around 1900). It was cut for ships and tool handles, presumably, and this was when population and consumption was way lower. In the absence of oil-driven machines, which is an inevitability, the supply of hickory and ash will probably drop like a brick."
http://axeconnected.blogspot.ca/2013/03/weak-handles-revisited.html
