EAST PERRY LUMBER KEEPS AMERICA IN WOOD

FROHNA -- Hardwood lumber grown, harvested and processed by East Perry Lumber Co. provides wood used in everyday life, in death, in Navy minesweepers, and even helps preserve a historic Navy warship.

The mill is on a winding ridge at the west side of Frohna, providing a scenic view of the rolling fields and forests of east Perry and Cape Girardeau counties. Like the mature trees it processes, East Perry Lumber has grown since its beginnings almost 50 years ago. Today the plant employs 75 full-time and 25 part-time workers.

Stan Petzoldt, chairman and chief executive officer of the company, said the company was founded in 1945 by his father, M.F. "Tom" Petzoldt. The elder Petzoldt is now retired, and the mill is operated by Marvin P. Petzoldt Jr., president of the company, and Stan Petzoldt.

Stan Petzoldt said: "My father was working for a farm implement company in the area at the time. The implement company traded some equipment for a tract of land. They opened a small sawmill, and put my father in charge of it. It was really a very simple operation: They cut wood for railroad ties and to manufacture lumber."

The mill continued to operate on a small scale until the mid 1950s. Between 1955 and 1960, the first dry kilns were erected, and the lumber company began supplying lumber to furniture and flooring plants.

After modernizing the mill between 1960 and 1964, production was significantly increased as a result of automation.

Today, East Perry Lumber manufactures 12 million board feet of kiln-dried, finished lumber, mostly red and white oaks, poplar and ash.

In the late 1970s to early 1980s, the company pioneered the use of byproducts from the lumber it manufactures.

"About one-half of the weight of the log ends up in byproduct, which is 100 percent usable," said Stan Petzoldt. "All of the bark is sold to companies that turn it into wood products for landscaping and plant potting.

"The wood slabs from the log are taken to the Westvaco paper plant in Wickliffe, Ky., where they are made into wood chips for the production of paper. The sawdust and wood shavings are used for fuel, livestock bedding and liquid smoke for barbecue grills.

"It's the same as butchering a hog: We use every part of the hog except the squeal," said Petzoldt.

During the 1970s East Perry Lumber established its own 10,000-acre hardwood timber farm in east Perry County. It also buys timber from landowners within a 100-mile radius of Frohna in Missouri and Illinois.

The company also began planting young hardwood trees by machine in the 1970s. "We've always planted new trees to replace those that are harvested, but it was done manually," said Petzoldt. "By doing it with a machine we can plant more trees; we now plant approximately 25,000 trees each year on our own land."

In the mid 1980s East Perry Lumber increased the lumber yield from each log, improved the quality of the lumber, and modernized the lumber handling and drying processes.

The company has three foresters on its staff. They work with landowners to help them develop stands of timber and do research and experiment with different methods of tree planting.

"Forestry in a hardwood forest is different than that of a softwood forest," said Petzoldt. "Very little clear-cutting is done. It is very selective; you design your harvest to remove only the mature hardwood trees from the forest. That makes room for the younger hardwood trees and seedlings to grow and develop into mature trees. These young trees must have sunlight and room to grow.

"If the mature trees are not harvested, they eventually die. It's a fact that trees, like humans, are mortal. They will continue to stand long after their economic value is gone. But they also rob the younger trees of the soil nutrients, moisture and sunlight they need to grow."

Lumber manufactured by East Perry is used in the building of furniture, cabinets, flooring, doors, moldings, pallets, pool tables, truck beds, stairs and handrails, fencing, handles and is sold in retail hobby stores. Some of the poplar is sent to a casket manufacturer in Mississippi to make burial caskets. Until recently, East Perry supplied customized white oak to a company that laminates it into planks for Navy minesweepers. The minesweepers have wooden hulls to avoid detection by magnetic mines.

"Our shipments have really cut back from what they were a few years ago during the Persian Gulf crisis," said Petzoldt. "At that time the Navy was updating its minesweeper fleet, and they were buying a lot of white oak to upgrade the minesweepers."

East Perry continues to supply white oak to a Wisconsin company that customizes it for use in restoration of the Navy's man-of-war sailing ship, the U.S.S. Constitution, better known as Old Ironsides. The ship is still commissioned as an active Navy vessel, and is permanently docked at Boston, Mass.

"We ship the white oak to Wisconsin, where it is fashioned into planks for the wooden hull, deck and different parts of the ship," said Petzoldt. "They bend the oak planks in large jigs under steam pressure, and use them to replace wooden timbers of the Constitution's hull."

Petzoldt said East Perry Lumber was selected to provide the white oak for Old Ironsides because it was already working with the Wisconsin company."