POWERGRAMS

20 furniture and floor coverings along with the hardware. Although there were other furniture stores in town, the added business did so well that Arnold decided to ditch the hardware sales. Arnold's Furniture has been the only home furnishings business in Abbeville the past 15 years. Arnold Jr. bought Baker Furniture in Eufaula in 1987 and still runs both stores. It's been a decidedly different path than expected for the 1976 Auburn University Building Sciences graduate who worked for about 18 months with Daniel Construction while it was building Farley Nuclear Plant near Dothan. "I never planned on being back in the furniture business," he says, referring to growing up making deliveries for his father. "In 1978, my father had a little health problem, so I came back to help for a while." The son has modeled his furniture sales career after the father, continuing Arnold's hallmark free delivery, credit options, lean staff and old-fashioned hard work ethic. "My father basically built this business on his back, had just one employee for many, many years," Arnold says of one of Abbeville's oldest continuously operating businesses. "He had high school guys working on weekends who helped with the deliveries. He always had a sales lady or two during holiday sales. Father built this business on great service and great values, and I think that's still a key to our business." Arnold Jr., 68, has one full-time sales employee, Dawn Selva, and two full-time workers who make deliveries for both of his furniture stores. A pair of rocking chairs on the sidewalk offers passersby a chance to sit a spell, but Arnold isn't slowing down. His children live in Atlanta and are successful in their own right, so he doesn't anticipate handing Arnold's Furniture over to a third generation. "I don't have an exit plan," he says. "I'd like to just keep the business going and be here on a limited basis in the years ahead." REPLACING A LEGEND U.S. Highway 431 used to go through Abbeville, then it was routed outside of downtown. West Point-Pepperell was the place where most everyone worked, then the textile company left Abbeville in 2008. People wondered how the town could survive both blows. Jimmy Rane bought the long-vacant Pepperell plant in 2013 and tried for years to attract a tenant but had no luck. It seemed no company was interested in starting anew on the factory site, which had also been the location of Alabama's first peanut oil mill, which burned to the ground in 1921. "Jimmy Rane asked, 'Is there any reason you couldn't put a sawmill in that building?'" recalls Michael Lancaster, an industry veteran who wasn't sure it could be done. Lancaster accepted the challenge and crews began removing rows of steel shelves in a 300,000-square-foot former storage building with a 32-foot-high ceiling. All of the buildings were gutted as equipment was purchased across North America for transport to Abbeville. The industrial saws and conveyor belts arriving were so huge and heavy that moving them inside required more than 40 major revisions of the textile mill and took a year to accomplish. Despite already having 8-inch-thick concrete floors, the renovation required drilling 3 feet deep to place steel support beams the length of the new sawmill equipment. "If I had put this equipment on the bare concrete, it would have just fallen in," says Lancaster, an Oklahoma native who is now Great Southern's vice president of sawmill operations. "We added a lot of steel support throughout these buildings. We managed to get all of it to fit." The $40 million initial business investment for Abbeville Fiber was the largest in Henry County history. Log trucks continue pulling into the sawmill late into the afternoon each day, driving onto a massive scale that calculates the weight to provide payment to vendors. Each load is lifted out by heavy equipment sporting hippo-like steel jaws. Forklifts of every size are parked in the plant ready to renew the work that runs round-the-clock four days a week with two daily shifts. "We can purchase as many as 100 loads of logs daily," Lancaster says. "Most of it comes from 15 to 20 crews from this area, so that's additional jobs. We provide an opportunity for landowners and truck drivers. It's a big deal for us to help the local economy." Nothing goes to waste at Abbeville Fiber. Residuals such as sawdust, bark, chips, and green and dry shavings are marketed for uses including paper manufacturing, wood pellets, power generation and poultry farm bedding. Tree tops are used to make fence posts. The mill is state-of-the-art in virtually every respect, with computers directing the cutting and sorting that in the past required the expertise of mill workers. The result is production capabilities in excess of 100 million board feet with flexibility to "fill the gaps" of the supply chain created by volatility in the lumber market. Lancaster says Great Southern's treating plants are the exclusive customer for products produced at three of their four sawmills, while the fourth mill manufactures items not typically sold by Great Southern treating plants. Six years after joining Great Southern, Lancaster used the experience of managing the company sawmill in North Carolina to open the newest Abbeville plant. Gov. Kay Ivey cut the ribbon with PHOTO COURTESY GREAT SOUTHERN WOOD PRESERVING In 2019, Gov. Kay Ivey helped open sawmill in a former textile mill.

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