September 2025 Manning, SC— Ken Holladay founded Santee Pole & Piling Inc. in 1989 after leaving the pole mill business to build his own hybrid operation. He had spent years buying poles in eastern South Carolina’s coastal plain before purchasing a smallscale pole...
August 2025 FRANKLIN, Ky. — Larry Wood, 70, has been around long enough to remember when sawmill safety was more suggestion than standard. His grandfather, who was born in 1898, logged the hills of northern Tennessee with mules and crosscut saws. Back then, the rule...
July 2025 JACKSONVILLE, NC — Once upon a time, and perhaps it doesn’t feel like it was so long ago to those who were involved, there were as many as 11 different Goodson family logging businesses, each one a separate and independent company, operating in this part of...
June 2025 WESTMINSTER, SC — The world might not have enough wood products if all the loggers’ sons had listened when their fathers told them to go to college instead of going to the woods. Thank God for that. “Somebody’s gotta do this work,” observes C.D. Laws, 27,...
May 2025 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,...
April 2025 WASHINGTON, GA — “Walk softly and carry a big stick,” the old adage advises, as articulated by our 26th President, the Rough Rider himself, Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt. Down in Georgia, where Roosevelt’s mother spent her childhood, the Thornton boys—brothers...
