POWERGRAMS

28 Old Hudson Flooring CEO Thomas Bush, at left; heart pine beam shows centuries of growth; below, bricks piled on floor of mill building being demolished. are lined up on logs sunning in a shallow stream leading from the old mill to the river. A man, his wife and two kids are fishing on one of the two piers, while a solitary woman tosses a worm-baited line from the other platform. There is a boat ramp between them, plus picnic tables, a pavilion and a vintage stone barbecue pit. For a century and a half, coon mills dominated life along the banks of the Chaahoochee River, each plant using that valuable waterfront territory to power their weaving looms and for cheap, immediate transportation of textiles on boats. Valley people see a day soon when the waterway will open up to restaurants, recreation and restoration to make their town a more valuable destination for visitors. Old Hudson Flooring While the walls of Valley's old factories continue to fall, the heart of those buildings lives on through the work of Old Hudson Flooring. John and Thomas Bush formed their enterprise nearly four years ago aer the opportunity arose to purchase languishing Riverview Mill, built 150 years earlier with heart pine timber and handcraed mud bricks. It was a bold undertaking for the identical twins from Georgia, whose previous business experience was in restaurant management and their family hunting lodge dating to 1792. Suddenly they owned millions upon millions of board feet of wood, bricks, steel beams and other old building components. "All of this has been trial and error," says Thomas, the CEO, who owns Zaxby's restaurants in Opelika and Valley. "We had not been in manufacturing or demolition previously. We didn't buy Riverview thinking we were going to end up on a demolition journey." Thomas and COO John learned on the fly as they tackled their first new, old coon mill building, "deconstructing" what had been so well-built in 1866. Starting with a few workers and eventually employing about 30 locals, they tore off roofing, knocked down walls, piled brick, lied flooring, pulled nails and moved lumber to warehouses across town. "We literally unbuild," Thomas says. The diamond in this rough is the ancient heart pine that rarely exists now in nature. Bush found at least 300 growth rings on some boards, indicating the pines began growing around the time Columbus came to America. Huge, 3½-inch- thick, 7½-inch-wide beams sawed nearby in the 19th century are now lied by cranes to be used again in construction across the country. "This was from the local virgin forest," Thomas says. "This is about as good as it gets in the timber business." Boards oen weighing 250 pounds each are stacked one on top of another reaching high above the floor in chamber aer chamber of the "Rusty" and family

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