MO PAC Lumber strives to be the gold standard for black walnut hardwood
by Jim McCarty | jmccarty@ruralmissouri.coop
It starts with a squirrel burying nuts in the forest. Some of these are dug up for food in the wintertime. But others are forgotten and grow into tall walnut trees. The landowner decides to thin the mature trees so sunlight can reach the new ones sprouting below. The tree is cut by a local logger, sold to Missouri-Pacific Lumber Co. and hauled to the state-of-the-art sawmill in Fayette.
Then begins a process of sorting, debarking, sawing, steaming, drying, grading and straight-line ripping that might end more than two years later. The result will be crafted into beautiful boards highly prized for the rich beauty and luxurious patina by woodworkers the world over.
MO PAC Lumber, the name it does business under, got its start accidentally. Its founder, Louis Pescaglia, shoveled coal for home heating in the 1930s. One day a truck ran a stop sign and slammed into his coal truck. The driver didn’t have insurance, so he offered to pay for the damage with his load: timbers destined for the Illinois coal mines.
Louis decided it was easier supplying lumber than shoveling coal. He bought a small sawmill in 1935 and began cutting timbers. In 1960 his son, Jim, joined him in starting Pekin Hardwood Lumber Co., which specialized in lumber for industrial purposes. This changed when Jim convinced his dad to let him saw some furniture-grade hardwood. He hauled the boards to Chicago and returned with a new direction for the business.
“That completely changed the trajectory of the business,” says Jim’s son, Bucky, now president of the company. “We were trying to expand in Illinois. We cut every species of wood in the forest because there’s not that much forest in Illinois. It was my dad’s idea to focus on just one species, walnut. Hardly anyone was cutting it at the time in large volumes.”
Jim’s younger brother, Jerry, joined in 1970. As the business grew, it became apparent the supply of hardwoods in central Illinois wouldn’t keep up with the demand.
When Bucky left home to learn the trade, the family business moved to New Franklin, Missouri. With the move came a new name — Missouri-Pacific Lumber Co. — and a new focus on black walnut production.
Missouri ranks first in the nation for black walnut trees, and the move put the mill close to the supply. “Missouri has more walnut trees than the next two states combined,” says Bucky. “It’s definitely the walnut mecca of the world.”
The Howard County location also provided easy access for shipping to the West Coast, hence the Pacific in its name. The move to Missouri proved to be a good one — until it wasn’t. The company thrived until the Missouri River almost destroyed it.
Its location 2 miles from the Missouri River should have been enough distance to keep its lumber high and dry in the worst of floods. “We’d had floods in the first several years we were there,” Bucky recalls. “Just a little backwater from the creeks behind us.”
But the Great Flood of 1993 caught the business by surprise and drowned it under 14 feet of water. Virtually the entire stockpile of logs floated away, along with pallets of finished lumber. Employees took to johnboats and searched the river for the missing wood.
“We took rope, and we took fence staples, and we’d go out and hammer the rope into the logs,” Bucky says. “We’d make a train of those logs and try to pull them to shore. The lumber was everywhere for miles and miles.”
With the business underwater for 30 days, employees stayed busy rescuing its products and cleaning the thick mud from what they found. They worked for 100 days straight to put the business back on its feet.
Despite their efforts, a move back to Illinois seemed inevitable, taking 40 good jobs away from an area that desperately needed more employers. That’s when Howard Electric Co-op stepped in. Its manager at the time, Richard Fowler, and Operating Superintendent Don Frevert stopped by to see what it would take to keep the business in Howard County. They learned Jim Pescaglia was frustrated with a search for land out of the flood plain.
Compounding the problem, another flood hit the business in 1995. There was no flood insurance to cover the losses from the floods. That prompted Howard Electric’s board to offer the business a $150,000 loan. They spearheaded an effort to find suitable ground for the move and found it at a former airfield just south of Fayette.
Howard County received a grant from the Missouri Department of Economic Development to buy the land. A Community Development Block Grant was used to add water and sewer. The U.S. Small Business Administration chipped in a $1.5 million loan, and the deal was made.
“My dad sat in his pickup truck with a napkin and drew out what it would look like,” Bucky says of the new location, now served by Howard Electric. “This will never flood. And if it does, Noah will be coming by. We were in a good area. We had great employees, so we wanted to stay here.”
In 1996 the first board came off the high-tech bandsaw at the new location. Its capacity expanded by 25 percent, with plenty of room for future growth. Today more than a million board feet of lumber is ready for shipment at any given time. Walnut only grows in the United States. MO PAC Lumber ships 50% to 60% of its products overseas, including destinations as far away as China and Germany. It’s sold in bundles of 1,000 board feet.
“Walnut is known as the aristocrat of hardwoods,” Bucky says. “There is this level of respect in the marketplace that if you are using walnut you are using one of the finer hardwoods that’s available.”
The best walnut, he says, grows north of the Missouri River. While MO PAC Lumber does source logs from the Ozarks, the wood tends to have more defects so north Missouri trees are preferred.
Once the logs are delivered to the mill, they are sorted into piles based on the expected quality. The best logs are resold to veneer mills. Forked logs, which tend to produce highly figured wood, might go to gunstock makers. Everything else goes into one of 13 piles destined for boards.
The bark is ground off and the log passes through a metal detector to prevent damage to the 14-inch-wide, 42-foot-long bandsaw blade. “We want to make sure there’s no wire, nails, rifle bullets,” Bucky says. “The weirdest thing I’ve ever found is an entire framing square. But we’ve seen all kinds of things. There’s this myth that if you hang a horseshoe on a walnut tree it’ll produce more walnuts.”
Armed with 43 years of experience, Missouri Pacific’s sawyer Scott Schrader runs the computerized bandsaw that scans the log and determines how best to cut it into pieces. He often uses his wisdom to override the computer’s directions using two joysticks with 14 buttons to manipulate the log.
Once cut, the boards are carried down the line where they are cut to uniform length, stacked on carts and moved to a building where the wood is steamed for 84 hours to give it a uniform color.
Now saturated with water, it goes into huge stacks outside where it dries naturally for a period of time based on its thickness. This drying can take up to two years for thicker boards.
Then it’s moved into huge kilns, where air heated by burning sawdust and woodchips dries the lumber to 7% moisture. From there it will be sorted into different grades by highly experienced inspectors.
While business is booming for MO PAC Lumber, it faces many of the same issues that plague the rest of Missouri’s forest products industry. Competition from wood substitutes like vinyl flooring, concrete railroad ties and plastic pallets has led to a push from the Missouri Forest Products Association to encourage consumers to use real wood.
Despite the challenges, Bucky sees a bright future for MO PAC Lumber. “I’ve got all three of my boys working in this company,” he says. “If I wasn’t convinced there’s plenty of resources out there, that the trees are growing way faster than they’re being harvested, that our products are quality and sustainable, I wouldn’t be encouraging them to work in this company. We make a great product. The world has a desire for these products. We just have to educate them and inform them about the benefits of using real hardwoods.”
For more information on MO PAC Lumber, call 800-279-7997 or visit www.mopaclumber.com.