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Mystery tree ID...

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BowEd:
Ironwood/musclewood aka hornbeam as we call it here.Excellent bow wood.Thinner bark on it compared to hard elm.
A fella a couple miles north of me has some I'm going to take a look at soon.He treats it as a nuisance tree....ha ha.I'll take some pictures then too.

Eric Krewson:
In N Alabama, American hornbeam (blue beech) has slick bark with muscle like veins running up the trunk, hop hornbeam has hairy bark not smooth.

I think your tree is an elm of some kind, I cut its twin a few days ago when I was bush hogging and got my bush hog jammed between it and another tree, there was no going forward or back so the tree had to go. It was just like yours and had mostly sapwood with a small center of dark heartwood. I thought about making bow staves out of it but with a lifetime supply of osage put back I trashed it instead. 

Here is the hop hornbeam bark



American hornbeam AKA muscle wood

Digital Caveman:
What Eric said.  I have found that very young stems have smooth bark like young cherries or birches, middle age trees have grey bark like what you showed, and older trees (though not a lot bigger) can have the shaggier bark.  All the HHB I've seen has finer bark scales than elm.  Some of the HHB I've seen has dark heartwood, but much of it has none.  Elm is ring puros and HHB is diffuse porous, that should help distinguish them. 

organic_archer:
Wow. Didn’t know HHB grew here! I’ve always wanted to try it out, and have seen some beautiful bows from it on PA. The young shoots had smoother bark. The one pictured is about 5-6” diameter and pipe straight. I didn’t see many growing bigger than that, and they were often twisted and knotty.

Thanks everyone. I’ll have to turn one into a bow.

superdav95:
I say it looks like hhb like others have said.  The bark is sort of soft and breaks in the hand easily.  Mine here looks like what you’ve got there.   It looks fairly straight in photo.  One thing I’ve done with mine is take a good look and inventory the bark as they can sometimes telegraph the twist of the wood underneath.  I’ve passed up some mature hhb as they were very twisty.  Excellent bow wood if you can find a straight one.  It ends up quite thin at the finished bow due to it’s dense nature. Makes great  candidate for heat treatment also.  Best of luck and great find. 

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