Our History

It all started when young Dale Carlisle visited a local sawmill and ran across a stack of wide Eastern White Pine boards — the kind used for flooring by the early New England colonists. Dale liked what he saw, and though money was tight, he bought them and put an ad for them in the local paper.

The boards sold immediately, and Dale made a small profit. Having found his supplier, he used more of them to floor the new house he was building for his family, and as his spare time permitted, he filled a few local requests. He milled each floor by hand, delivered the floors in his truck and personally installed them. It was a labor of love. A love for the forests, a love for the board-by-board crafting of a floor and a love for the families who would eventually enjoy them.

Before long, Dale had earned the reputation of being the go-to guy on wide plank flooring: an expert on tree selection, harvesting, drying, milling and all of the other painstaking processes necessary to create the unique character and enduring beauty of these floors. As his hobby evolved into a full-time business, he continued to maintain personal relationships with each new customer to make sure they all got exactly the floor they wanted.

This is how we got our start. As Dale Carlisle’s reputation began to grow throughout New England, he soon found himself getting whole flooring projects for historic homes, museums, old government buildings and landmarks of all kinds. Dale not only knew wood, but also knew how to create custom surface treatments and stains that would match boards 300 years old.

The original name of our company was “appropriately” Carlisle Restoration Lumber, which spoke not to the restored wood itself, but rather to the “restoration” of the spirit and tradition of the original wide plank floor. Several years ago, we made the decision to change our name to Carlisle Wide Plank Floors in order to better represent the true nature of what we make—traditional, custom-crafted solid wood flooring in a variety of pines, hardwoods and reclaimed woods.

Today Carlisle has grown from a small family-owned business to the premium purveyor of the finest wide plank wood floors available, but the one thing that hasn’t changed is our commitment to the satisfaction of each and every customer. And so the way that Dale treated his neighbors and friends back then, is the same way we treat every customer now.