A tree, often 100° high, with a tall straight trunk 2°—3° in diameter, stout spreading branches forming a broad handsome head, and slender branchlets marked by oblong pale lenticels, bright green and covered more or less thickly with rusty hairs when they first appear, reddish brown and glabrous or puberulous during their first summer, reddish brown and lustrous during the winter and ultimately light gray, with small elevated obscurely 3-lobed obcordate leaf-scars. Winter-buds compressed, scurfy pubescent, bright yellow; terminal ⅓′—¾′ long, oblique at apex, with 2 pairs of scales; lateral 2-angled, often stalked, ⅛′—¼′ long, with ovate pointed slightly accrescent scales keeled on the back. Bark ⅓′—¾′ thick, light brown tinged with red, and broken into thin plate-like scales separating on the surface into small thin flakes. Wood heavy, very hard, strong, tough, close-grained, dark brown, with thick light brown or often nearly white sapwood; largely used for hoops and ox-yokes, and for fuel.
Distribution. Low wet woods near the borders of streams and swamps or on high rolling uplands often remote from streams, southern Maine to Quebec and Ontario, the northern shores of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, northern Minnesota, southeastern Nebraska, eastern Kansas, eastern Oklahoma, and southward to northwestern Florida, Dallas County, Alabama, and eastern Texas; generally distributed, but not very abundant in all the central states east and west of the Appalachian Mountains; ranging farther north than the other species, and growing to its largest size on the bottom-lands of the lower Ohio basin; the common Hickory of Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas.
A natural hybrid, × _C. Brownii_ Sarg. of _C. cordiformis_ with _C. pecan_, with characters intermediate between those of its supposed parents, occurs on bottom-land of the Arkansas River near Van Buren, Crawford County, Arkansas. Probably of the same parentage is the so-called Galloway Nut found in Hamilton County, Ohio. Another hybrid, × _C. Brownii_ var. _varians_ Sarg., probably of the same parentage also, occurs near Van Buren. × _C. Laneyi_ Sarg., a natural hybrid evidently of _C. cordiformis_ with _C. ovata_, has been found in Rochester, New York, and trees considered varieties of the same hybrid, var. _chateaugayensis_ Sarg., occur near the mouth of the Chateaugay River, Province of Quebec, and at Summertown, Ontario.