Page 10 - Georgia Forestry - Issue2 - Spring 2018

“I can’t describe what that felt like. It was something to marvel at. The trucks were lined up all the way down the road backed up into another piece of land. They were bringing in logs, beautiful, beautiful logs.” — Jenny Brown Reville, Forester
it was building a $120 million sawmill in Washington, 30 miles north of Warrenton.
The wood market in east Georgia, which has not rebounded from the 2007-08 recession, is about to be transformed. That’s what the optimists insist anyway. The concrete hasn’t been poured, but the foresters refuse to believe this isn’t a done deal and providence. Lewis Brown, 77, is in an orange vest and looks ready to stomp out in the woods. His daughter, Jenny Brown Reville, another forester, is on the edge of her chair talking the timber life. Bounds, 24, a fifth-generation timberman, manages around 10,000 acres with his father, Lincoln Bounds, 65. These three are ambassadors for forest folks who live in the 30-mile stretch from Washington to Warrenton, and 100 miles in all directions.
“This is epic for our community,” Reville said. “We have always considered ourselves a sawmill town.”
Canfor expects to start construction on the Washington mill in 2018. When it is running full tilt, the mill will have a production capacity of 275 million board feet. It will be built alongside a rail line, which adds to the value.
Georgia-Pacific expects a spring 2019 startup and plans to hire 30-40 additional workers. GP operates a chip and saw mill in Warrenton, but the new building is a state-of-the-art facility and will replace the old mill. Where the GP mill took in 85 trucks daily, it is expected to welcome 185 trucks a day when the new mill is online.
“We had the supply, and finished lumber was selling, and the mills are making money,” Brown said. “I thought
we would get a mill here eventually. Somebody was going to recognize that we’ve got the wood.”
The new Canfor mill will be built across State Spur 44 from the old mill, which was owned by International Paper when it ceased major operations in 1997. It was a hub of the community, a source of pride and then it was gone.
“I started working in the woods with my father when I was 11 or 12,” Reville said. “When I started driving, I would get out of school, take my Bronco and go down the road across from the old mill when it was running just to see how far the log trucks were backed up.
“I can’t describe what that felt like. It was something to marvel at. The trucks were lined up all the way down the road backed up into another piece of land. They were bringing in logs, beautiful, beautiful logs.”
The False Alarms &
Then the Real Deal
The landowners have had the welcome mat out for years for a new mill. Over and over the prospectors would show up, or call. They had some capital. They were going to be ready to harvest timber when the housing market regained strength.
“For several years we got calls that basically said the same thing ‘We’ve got a group coming, they are thinking
about putting in a sawmill’ and then nothing would happen,” Reville said. “We would come up with sites with a rail line and then poof, like smoke, they would disappear.”
She shook her head while looking back in her mind’s eye at rumors that churned through town. There are just two mills within 100 miles that will take big wood — in Madison and Augusta — and the quotas were stifling. Loggers would hit their limit by mid-week.
“As mills have become more special- ized and use less manpower, they don’t need as big of a log,” Reville said. “It has changed our spectrum for how we grew timber. Our rotation is getting shorter and shorter. We have this capacity of big timber. We’re growing it because we haven’t been cutting it. We’ve got this timber we have been holding 40-plus years and you see it fall down. It’s $20 a ton, $22 a ton.”
Bounds said that land owners had uncomfortable decisions to make at that low price.
“They would just as soon see it die off than sell it,” he said.
Then, as quick as a lightning strike, the forecast changed. Reville’s father walked into her office one morning and said he talked to a county commissioner and Canfor was on the verge of making a deal. “This thing looks good, Lewis,” commissioner Sam Moore told him. “I think they’re coming.”
8 | GEORGIA FORESTRY
Lewis Brown started his forestry consulting business in 1996 after a 32-year-career as a forester for a large paper company in Georgia. He now runs the firm with his daughter Jenny Brown Reville.