Milan Lumber has announced a $10 million to $12 million modernization project its owners say will make it safer, more efficient and, ideally, more profitable.
The company plans to begin work in April that will include revamping the planing mill and getting an additional drying kiln in operation by the fall, said Steve Halle, the mill’s general manager. Nobis Engineering has been retained to represent the mill in the local and state permitting processes.
The facility is owned and operated by the Richard Carrier Group of Skowhegan, Maine.
The current Milan Lumber is the successor of a mill built in the 1950s on the same 26-acre site on New Hampshire Route 16, a couple miles north of Berlin, along the west bank of the Androscoggin River. From 1972-1985, the mill, then named Milan Industries, was owned by Halle’s father, Rejean, who sold it to Paul Vallee, who ran it for the next 23 years, before selling to Carrier in 2008.
Carrier bought the mill at the height of the Great Recession, when buying a mill in northern New Hampshire did not seem like a good idea at all, said Sales Manager Jethro Poulin.
The company has invested millions to make Milan Lumber a recognized provider of eastern spruce, balsam fir and Norway spruce to customers in the Eastern United States, Canada, and, most recently, Texas. Milan Lumber has served customers down into the Carolinas, but the three truck loads that went down recently to the Lone Star State were a first for the company, Poulin said.
Poulin and Halle said the coronavirus pandemic has made 2020 and, so far, 2021, anything but typical years at Milan Lumber. The pandemic never closed the U.S./Canada border for commercial vehicles from businesses that were deemed essential by the governments, Poulin said, so Milan Lumber was neither prohibited from receiving raw material from Canada, nor from sending finished products back up north.
But from March until July, leaders in Canada, as well as in the states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts and New York — from which Milan Lumber gets its raw materials — were figuring out how to limit the spread of the coronavirus outbreak.
As that process went on, an industry-wide paralysis set in, and mills filled with lumber, Poulin said, while wholesalers, trying to gauge the market, held off on ordering from them.
“At the beginning of the year, we were selling at cost if not below,” Poulin said, adding that profitability returned to Milan Lumber in the fall, and the long-term outlook is positive.
Contributing to that view is what Halle calls “an expansion, but more of a modernization” of the Milan Lumber mill.
The mill is made up of an expansive lumber yard, where a steady stream of trucks is offloaded; a sawmill, four kilns, a two-building planing mill and a truck scale. It has 82 employees, and the company would like to hire more.
The new work would entail adding a fifth kiln and a second scale and combing the two planing buildings into one, said Halle, as well as adding more equipment into the new space.
The improved planing mill will allow “many more sorts in cutting capability to maximize our raw materials,” Halle said, which translates into more of the raw material being used to make a sellable product.
A fifth-generation “saw miller” who has worked a quarter century for Carrier, Halle added that the above represents the third phase of what has been a six-year long improvement of the Milan Lumber mill.
“People have started putting money into their homes,” both in remodeling them and building new ones, said Poulin, which means good things for Milan Lumber.
He noted that a big factor in Milan Lumber undertaking the improvements in the planing mill is a scarcity of employees to run it.
Across the country, “Everybody has trouble finding labor,” Poulin said, despite the fact that “mills are paying decent money,” and like Milan Lumber, are offering extensive benefits packages that include health insurance and retirement-investment programs.
