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In a city and county that relies heavily on the manufacturing industry, the expansive flooring mill near downtown has been Scott County’s industrial lifeblood for more than a generation.
“If Hartco ever closes, this county’s going to be hurting.” That statement, or similar variations, have been repeated hundreds of times over the years: a scenario that all could imagine but none wanted to dwell upon. But, as the years have passed, other companies came and went while Hartco has remained a mainstay in local industry.
That changed last week, at least to some degree, when Armstrong World Industries—Hartco’s parent company—announced that it was “idling” production at the Oneida plant’s strip mill and lumber yard in response to market conditions, a move that will cost 260 of the plant’s 370 employees their jobs.
While Armstrong will continue to manufacture parquet flooring at the Oneida facility, resulting in continued operation of the East Plant, chemical plant and warehouse, the work force of 110 will be a skeleton of the Hartco operation at its prime, when the company provided well over 500 local jobs and pumped tens of millions of dollars into the local economy.
Whether the job cuts are permanent seems to be open to interpretation. No one has said the strip mill is closing. The wording in an official statement by Armstrong—company spokesperson Beth Riley said strip mill and yard operations were being “idled”—leaves the impression that the cutback is temporary, a sentiment expressed by some employees and at least one supervisor at the plant. But still other employees said they fear the cutbacks are permanent.
As a major player in Scott County’s economy, Hartco got its start in 1946—though it wouldn’t be known as Hartco for several years to come. But the roots of the company stretch all the way back to 1923, when the father-son duo of Emmett and Price Pearson—natives of Winchester, Tenn.—teamed up with other businessmen to establish Pearson Wood Flooring Co.
Production at the Pearson mill had ceased by 1946, when Columbus, Oh., native Todd Tibbals met JP Pearson—then the owner of the flooring company—while on a lumber-buying expedition to the local region.
Tibbals had aspirations of building pre-fabricated cottages to fulfill a post-World War II housing need. He convinced his mining engineer brother, Charles Tibbals, to leave the West Virginia coalfields and join him in Oneida, where the two purchased the Pearson mill and established the Tibbals brand.
As demand for prefab housing slowed, Charles Tibbals began refurbishing the wood flooring machinery from the Pearsons’ operation and the manufacture of hardwood flooring soon began anew.
Over the next decade, Tibbals Flooring Company provided a boost for local jobseekers and timber companies alike. But by the late 1950s, the demand for strip flooring was on the decline. Tibbals discovered—and patented—a method for manufacturing parquet flooring using pieces of wood that were previously considered worthless. A new division of Tibbals Flooring Company was established to manufacture the product: Hardwood Tile Company, or Hartco for short.
By 1962, employment at Hartco—as the Tibbals company was gradually becoming to be known—had increased from less than 50 to more than 220, according to a June 1963 article in the Scott County News. Total payroll was approaching $1 million annually. And more than three million square feet of the Hartco brand flooring had been sold—enough to stretch from Oneida to the coast of California if laid end-to-end. Hartco was on its way to becoming a household name.
By the mid 1980s, Hartco had survived a couple of deep economic recessions and housing slumps—the latter of which left nearly 25% of Scott Countians unemployed in the early ‘80s. Employment had increased to more than 520, and the Oneida flooring mill was pumping nearly $30 million into Scott County’s economy on an annual basis.
The Independent Herald’s February 1987 “Progress” edition noted, “There’s a little bit of Scott County, Tennessee, all over America. Because almost any place you go in the United States, you can find Tibbals Hartco Flooring that was made right here in Scott County.”
At the time, hundreds of millions of feet of Hartco had been laid in homes, offices, gymnasiums, stages, retail stores and shopping malls across the nation. The Hartco brand had become one of the most recognized and most respected brands of hardwood flooring in the industry.
In 1988, Charles Tibbals’ son, Howard Tibbals, and other shareholders sold the company to Premark International.
In 1996, Triangle Pacific Corp.—the parent company of Bruce Wood Flooring—purchased Hartco from Premark. Two years later, Armstrong acquired the Triangle corporation and all its brands.
Things continued mostly unchanged through the first part of the new decade. But as the housing market began to slump and construction of new homes slowed, Armstrong made the first of what would become several mass layoffs at the Oneida facility. Three shifts were cut to two. The Industrial Lane and West plants were closed.
As recently as December, Armstrong informed the local unemployment office that it had recalled all eligible workers from the pool of unemployed created by the company’s most recent layoff—which impacted just over 100 jobs in early 2008—and would be needing several additional workers.
However, news of a plant-wide meeting circulated on Wednesday evening. It was expected that the meeting—which would begin with salaried office workers and continue with hourly production workers—would be to announce that Armstrong was closing all or part of the Oneida facility. That was confirmed Thursday morning when company officials called together production workers just as the second shift was ending and the first shift was set to begin work.
Although it remains to be seen exactly how far-reaching implications of the Armstrong layoffs will be, many in the community appeared to be bracing for the worst late last week.
Scott County Mayor Rick Keeton may have said it best when he told a Knoxville TV station that there was a sense of panic in the community.
On the popular social networking website Facebook, local users sounded off, ranging from an expression of concerns over the lack of local industry to requests for prayer requests for the families involved in the looming layoff.
At the least, it seems likely that Scott County’s unemployment rate will drastically increase. The layoffs won’t be felt in the official unemployment figures until the April rate is reported in June. However, assuming no major changes in the current rate of 18.8%—which includes 1,550 persons without work, the affect of the Armstrong workers (and other recent layoffs) entering the unemployment pool would send the jobless rate to 22%, a level not seen in Scott County since the early 1980s.
