King for a century

Since the early twentieth century, High Point, N.C., has been the state’s furniture city, garnering the highest profile and largest markets. But vibrant manufacturing bases also rose up in Western North Carolina’s Catawba Valley, with some of the country’s most elite furniture names hailing from Lenoir, Hickory, and Morganton as industry men were drawn south, motivated by a vast supply of hardwood lumber and cheap labor. 

“Although by no means the only contributing factors, the profitability of furniture manufacturing over lumbering, the time in which North Carolina manufacturers entered the market, the availability of a trainable work force, and the low wages those workers could be paid relative to competitors in both the North and the South gave North Carolina industrialists an extraordinary and consistent advantage,” wrote Michelle Kilbourne-Minor in a 1991 master’s thesis on the Catawba Valley furniture industry.

{module Share this!|none}Furniture from North Carolina traveled across the country. In 1889 John Mathias Bernhardt organized a company in Lenoir building furniture out of native white oak; he shipped sturdy chests and tables to distributors and merchants in Chicago and New York by train, at prices less than $4 per piece. The 1890 census counted six furniture plants in the state employing 182 men, and by 1903 Drexel Furniture was established in Morganton.

Towns flourished around this burgeoning industry, with furniture families playing fundamental roles in the development of key infrastructure and community amenities. J.M. Bernhardt and other furniture makers were instrumental in the expansion of railroads across the area. Thomas Broyhill, brother and business partner to J.E., helped build Lenoir’s first hospital, and the Broyhill family opened the city’s municipal golf course.  

Come 1918, Norman Austin was two weeks shy of his sixth birthday when a shrill whistle screeched out across Lenior and plumes of steam shot skyward and billowed up into the crisp November air, as furniture mills joined the tintinnabulation of church bells and sound of sirens. 

“Back then, that furniture factory a’running, they had big whistles on their engine inside…these were steam. You could hear ‘em for six miles,” said Norman Austin, now a centenarian. “Every furniture factory in Caldwell County, I reckon, blew their horn one hour and never even stopped. We didn’t know what had happened.”

The din was a joyous nation spreading the news—the war was over. However, as the bombs fell silent, the industry, like the U.S. stock market, plunged. Quality and style suffered. 

“About 1924 a bedroom suite then like most of the small furniture stores sold was made out of gum and poplar lumber and, well, if it lasted ten years, that was doing well,” said Ralph L. Bowman, a Hickory Chair Company retiree, in a 1979 interview. “If you happened to drop a chest or a large dresser, it would just about collapse.”

The furniture industry was hit like every other. At Bernhardt, the company was forced to use “script” with promises to pay employees after banks reopened.

“‘Mr. J.E.,’ as many knew him, worked hard and struggled financially in those early days,” remembered Paul Broyhill, son of Broyhill founder J.E. Broyhill and longtime president of the company. “Certainly, he did not have excess money for luxuries. I remember that on Sunday mornings my dad and I would go to the post office before we went to Sunday school. We would open all the envelopes addressed to his business looking for checks. He needed those checks desperately to cover bills and expenses the next week, especially payroll.”

“It never got any better until after President Roosevelt got in,” Austin said, of the 32nd president who ushered in the New Deal and then in 1941, following the attack at Pearl Harbor, led the nation into war. “It took World War II actually to get it really going, booming again.”

The state’s furniture mill whistles blew again in 1945 when Germany surrendered and months later as Japan followed suit. As soldiers returned to take jobs in the factories, they found themselves for the first time working alongside women who had joined the labor ranks to keep production going through the war years.

After World War II, manufacturers struggled to keep up with the greatest demand for furniture the country had ever experienced. Home building had increased threefold: “There were millions of new families who suddenly wanted homes,” wrote Allen Irvine in a history of Drexel Furniture. “This meant more furniture. But what kind? The day of servants was passing. The combined living-dining room was in demand. The younger generation was interested in modern design, encompassing clean lines, function and utility, and light, cheerful finishes.”

Broyhill Furniture’s workforce increased tenfold after World War II, from 750 to 7,500. By the early ‘50s, the company had more than 10,000 accounts across the country, and its army of salesmen grew from 28 in 1948 to more than 300, according to figures from Paul Broyhill in his 2010 memoir.

Jobs weren’t difficult to come by then. Austin had three offers when he returned home from a WWII shipyard. “You could quit Kent Coffey’s and go down to any Broyhill plant and get a job—the same day,” said Danny Wyke, Austin’s son-in-law and a mill worker for much of his life, mostly at Broyhill.

Crossing intersections on the main highways in Caldwell County required great patience most mornings after the post-war boom, except Sundays. Traffic was bumper to bumper as thousands and thousands of workers traveled daily to their jobs in the furniture factories, and they came from all over, from Wilkes County, from Boone, and even from Johnson City, Tenn. Some enterprising folks made a living shuttling workers to and from the job. “They’d (own) big ol’ cars and load it up, start at four o’clock over there and come to work,” Wyke said. One man from Watauga County who Wyke knew hauled eight to twelve people a day to the mills.

“If it wasn’t for the boys in Wilkesboro, and Boone and Blowing Rock and Tennessee, the furniture factories wouldn’t run, ‘cause that was half the employees,” Wyke said.

Most employees put in 45 to 50 hours a week, though some would work as many as 60; “A lot of times, we’d go home and eat supper, come back at 4:30, and work ‘til nine o’clock, four nights a week,” Wyke said. “In 1962 they started giving us breaks.”

By 1963, Morganton-based Drexel’s sales exceeded $61 million, the company had a payroll of more than 5,000, and Drexel ranked as the ninth largest employer in the state. “The company is believed to be the third largest manufacturer of household furnishings and other wooden products in the nation,” Irvine wrote. 

Furniture bosses boasted about treating employees like family with such benefits as retirement pensions, profit-sharing plans, bonuses, and holiday parties and dinners. Every Fourth of July, Broyhill hosted a huge barbecue for employees’ families at the local fairgrounds, with food, carnival rides, and fancy door prizes. 

When Broyhill created a division of middle- to high-end furniture in the early ‘60s, it partnered with daytime game show “The Price is Right.” Bob Barker and Rod Roddy gave away countless bedroom and dining room suites over the years. The company unveiled a sprawling and expansive showroom and corporate headquarters on U.S. Highway 321 in Lenoir in 1966; a headline on the Charlotte Observer business page read, “Furniture Industry Now Has Its Own ‘Parthenon.’”

North Carolina’s furniture gentry traveled the world; they owned private planes, yachts, swimming pools, Cadillac limousines, and Rolls-Royces; they glad-handed with presidents, senators, and celebrities.

The Germans started making a product called particleboard in the mid-‘70s; stateside furniture companies again followed suit. “If you go in any department store today…it’s pressurized pasteboard,” Wyke said. “Now, it’s alright, ‘til it gets wet.” 

North Carolina’s furniture industry weathered the 1970s recession and energy crisis and continued to grow at a rapid rate. “For a number of years, we even had our own construction crew,” noted Paul Broyhill. “We had the ability, literally, to tear down a plant a little at a time and keep production going. We could not afford to let production stop, so we built roofs over tops of roofs, floors over tops of floors, moved machinery from one side to the other side, and somehow were able to keep the factories running and producing.”

To help boost morale, Broyhill published in-house magazines for its workers, recognizing employee achievements, explaining benefit plans, and sharing information about industry innovations. The October 1978 edition of People Today at Broyhill featured a letter to employees from astronaut Frank Borman, a question and answer with racecar driver Richard Petty, a kudos to the Occasional No. 1 plant for being the first to break $1 million in a week and photographs from the recent Independence Day festivities. “Consumption was the order of the day,” read the report, noting that the event dispensed 6,500 hamburgers, 3,700 hot dogs, 2,900 candy apples, seven hundred snowballs and 9,580 soft drinks. “Everyone went away a winner,” the article said. “In a brief speech, Paul Broyhill, chairman of the board, praised the employees and further added, ‘You’re the best I’ve seen, anywhere in the world.’”

Under Paul’s leadership, the family company’s annual sales grew from $15 million to more than $300 million in 1980, when he made the decision to sell to Interco, now known as Furniture Brands International. The state industry would go on to peak in the 1980s, employing 90,000 North Carolinians and producing approximately one-half of the furniture sold in the United States. Broyhill reached $700 million in annual sales.

“Our decision to sell may have been a little premature, but it turned out to be much better than selling too late, especially in light of the devastating consequences of overseas imports in subsequent years,” Paul surmised. Others would follow. American Drew and Kincaid were acquired by La-Z-Boy. In addition to Broyhill, St. Louis-based Furniture Brands now owns the Thomasville, Drexel, Hickory Chair, and Henredon brands. “Over the years,” said Paul, “the large outside companies gradually took over the furniture manufacturing industry, and the original families mostly have disappeared.” Bernhardt is the exception. The company remains among the oldest family-owned businesses in America, handed down through four generations. Furniture manufacturing and affiliated industries—including trucking, machine shops, and others in the supply chain—came to comprise about half of Caldwell County’s employment base. In 2000, the jobless rate was below 2 percent. 

That’s when things changed.

“Whenever Clinton signed this fair trade agreement, then they opened the doors,” Wyke said. “First thing you know, Singer’s went, Broyhill’s went, Henredon. Everything that they’re making is coming across the water.” The first wave of job losses and plant closures began in the early 2000s, and the process sped up around 2005, explained Paul Teague, marketing and business development coordinator for the Caldwell County Economic Development Commission. The Wall Street Journal reported that wooden furniture factories in the U.S. lost roughly 30,000 jobs between 2000 and 2002. “Fueled by cheap labor and newer factories, China is cranking out higher-quality and more-competitive goods,” the article said. “As many as 30 Chinese workers can be hired for the cost of one cabinetmaker in North Carolina.” The state’s furniture jobs declined 28 percent between 2001 and 2006, and the 2008-09 recession brought yet another wave of layoffs.

Two summers ago, a “For Sale” sign was hammered into the immense front lawn of the Broyhill headquarters building, the once-magnificent Parthenon. 

Forging New Identity in a Global Market

As it happened in so many other cities across America, businesses left the downtown districts of Lenoir, Morganton and other furniture towns in the late twentieth century for the areas’ suburbs and highway corridors. Downtown revitalization movements have begun in recent years, and efforts are ongoing.

“At one time it was a booming town,” Danny said about the Lenoir of his youth. “When I was a kid, ten years old, on Saturday morning, you couldn’t walk down through town without bumping into people. I mean it was just like ants crawling going in and out of stores.”

“Things have changed,” lamented Norman. “The bank used to stay open on Saturday ‘til one o’clock, and people would gather ‘round and just chow-chow, trade knives, and chew tobacco, and stay out there all day long. And now, I’m afraid to go through town unless I had a gun,” he laughed, only half serious. 

Reliance on a single industry that for so many years represented strength and power ultimately left the local economy reeling and rendered vulnerable. “I think it was bad for especially this area in here, for that’s all they had to depend on,” Norman concluded. “I know it hurt Caldwell County. On Saturday nobody hardly goes to town; you don’t ever see nobody.” Paul Teague acknowledged this, too. “It’s more painful when a lot of things are tied into a particular industry,” he said. “But this industry had weathered all kinds of storms—the Great Depression, World War II. You never really know until the music stops, and no one really knew when that was going to be.”

But local leaders have taken efforts to right the ship—to diversify the area’s portfolio of industry and jobs. Google’s opening of a data center in Lenoir in 2008 was widely publicized, followed in April of this year with an announcement the internet behemoth will invest an additional $600 million to expand the site. Economic development officials have also targeted pharmaceutical companies with some success, and this spring Exela Pharma Sciences announced plans to purchase the former Broyhill headquarters building. “It’s great to see that building that so many people recall so fondly being put back into service, kind of signifying the diversification that we’ve been looking for,” said Teague. “One of the things the furniture certainly gave us was a fantastic infrastructure…(and) a power grid second to none.”

And as for the region’s storied age of furniture, no one’s writing an obituary just yet. 

“If you look in the past year, there’s probably not another company that hired more people than Bernhardt,” Teague noted. “Broyhill is still a very large employer in this county. Furniture still remains a very viable part of our economy; it’s just not going to be that overall dominant, dominant role.” While case goods (non-upholstered wooden furniture) are largely gone, area businesses have seen growth on the upholstery end, and in niche and boutique markets. Another company, Idaho-based wood moldings maker Woodgrain Millwork, is rehabbing an old factory facility in Lenoir with plans to open in the next year.

“Are you going to fully replace the 5,000, 6,000, 8,000 furniture jobs that left? Not on that scale,” Teague said, “but there are some areas where people can find some success.”

Although many are no longer actively involved in the business, the state’s furniture families have left an indelible mark on the region, with legacies cemented by innumerable gifts to arts, education, recreation, and medical facilities and programs.

“It’s certainly a part of our heritage,” said Teague. “Furniture is always going to be a part of this county’s DNA.”