"The Southern Loggers Best Friend"

ROANOKE RAPIDS, NC — Ryan Medlin, 48, spent 15 years working as a procurement forester for Coastal Lumber Co., first at their pine mill in Suffolk, Va., then at their hardwood mill in Weldon, NC. That’s where Medlin served most of his 15 year Coastal career, other than a brief stint in 2004 in Columbia, SC, where he bought timber for Coastal’s Walterboro and Denmark mills. That was just too far from home for him, he says. “About a year of it was all I could take,” he laughs. He wanted to be near his own more familiar stumping grounds, and more importantly, near that special someone he’d only just recently met.