Suzanne Stewart
Staff Writer
It was announced, earlier in August, that Beckwith Lumber Company, Inc., had received a $1,030,900 USDA Forest Service Wood Innovations program grant to install a vertical line resaw system.
This grant couldn’t have come at a better time for the Pocahontas County company, which recently reopened after nearly a year of inactivity due to an electrical fire.
On May 31, 2025, a short from a power pole connected to the sawmill caused an electrical box to explode and set fire to an oil tank.
“We’d already been planning on doing this major rebuild of the sawmill,” company president Daniel Woods said. “The actual fire was going to have us down for a month and it was going to be fairly expensive, but at that time, we decided – or I decided and just sold everybody that needed to be on the same page – that we were going to build it back.”
The employees got to work cleaning up the sawmill and demoing everything that was to be replaced. Contractors came in and helped get the sawmill back up and running. The sawmill was back to work on May 6 this year, nearly a year after the fire.
Now with phase one of the rebuild and refurbishment done, the grant will be used for phase two – an addition to the existing mill to house a new vertical line resaw system.
“We’re putting in a resaw system that should at least double production,” Woods said. “It’s another saw line, but all the logs have to go through one saw before they can go over to the other machine. You can keep turning the log and peeling the grade off the outside of the log when you’re doing that. A lot of mills that we looked at are set up that way.
“We went with this vertical line bar system,” he added. “We’re pretty excited about it.”
Since it was founded in 1961 by Ralph and Glenda Beckwith, the company has seen many changes through the years and Woods has been there for everything that has happened in his lifetime.
Woods admits he was like a shadow to his Grandpa Ralph and learned the ins and outs of the business from a very young age.
“I lived for it,” he said. “When I was a kid, me and Grandpa would go and look at land he was looking to buy and timber. When I was eight, nine years old, that’s what I wanted to do with my weekends. I didn’t want to hunt. I didn’t want to fish. I wanted to go look at logs and log jobs, timberland and to the sawmill auctions and equipment shows. Everything you could think of that had to do with forestry products.
“This is home,” he continued, meaning the business. “When I talk about home, I’m usually talking about Pocahontas County and the sawmill.”
Woods literally grew up in the business and most school projects he did were centered around forestry and the sawmill itself. There was no question that he was going to follow in his Grandpa’s footsteps, as long as the mill was there when he was ready.
“I wasn’t always sure it was going to be there for me when I got there, so I had to have a backup plan, but I always wanted to be here,” he said.
Beckwith’s has seen a lot of change, with the current mill – the third since its inception – being built in 1992.
Woods took over as president of the company in 2016 and worked alongside Ralph until his passing in 2023. Ralph continues to watch over Woods from a portrait hanging behind his desk.
“Grandpa was my hero,” he said. “Normally I was two steps behind him. When I was a kid, I didn’t want anybody between us.”
When the 2025 fire happened, Woods said he thought about what Ralph would have done and knew immediately that the only answer was rebuild. There was never an option to give up and close the sawmill.
“Still to this day, I still work for Ralph and Glenda,” Woods said. “That’s the way I feel, anyhow. He would have never wanted that. I watched when we had the mill fire back in 1992. They had the blueprints and drawings out that night. Just instantly, they started working on it.
“That’s the way I knew how to do it,” he continued. “My Uncle Ralphie, they had just gotten the [2025] fire out and he was in his office and already had the blueprints out. It was not a question. There wasn’t an option. They were already working on it.”
There was a time about a year-and-a-half ago when the question about the future of the business arose and Woods had to really consider what he wanted to do. The timber and forestry industry in West Virginia wasn’t what it used to be, and he had to really think about what was best for Beckwith’s.
“I was completely disgusted with some of the machines that we could not keep running,” he said. “It was just, every time you turned around, something was going wrong. I’d already discussed it with a lot of key employees here. It had already been discussed in the board meetings.”
At one point, Woods said they considered shutting down the mill and just being a land and timber company.
But he knew, that’s not what Ralph would want, and a higher power had a say, as well.
“We decided we were going to revamp our saw-mill,” he said. “We were making plans, trying to figure out the layout we were going to do just a couple weeks before [the fire]. We had just finally figured out the direction that we wanted to go with the mill layout, and I wanted to do it last summer and God forced my hand on it.
“Right there, the 31st day of May, he threw me a curve ball,” he continued. “He forced my hand, which He’s forced my hand the right way. He makes the plans and I’m just the worker.”
Now with the first phase of the remodel done and the funds to support the second phase, the mill is back in action and ready to continue the family tradition.
“It’s working really nice,” Woods said. “We’re still on a learning curve with the sawyer to some degree. They told me that would happen. We’re about three months in. We’ll probably work on putting this equipment in next spring.”
Woods said he is grateful for the grant from the USDA and said it hasn’t fully sunk in that it is real.
“I guess to some degree, I just feel like it’s kind of surreal,” he said. “People are asking about it. We’ve been working on it, and it hasn’t sunk in, I don’t think. It’s day to day business for me.”
Woods said he learned about the grant from Greenbrier Valley Economic Development Corporation Executive Director Ruthanna Beezley who helped him with the grant process. Woods and Beezley met with Lynn McCreary and Patrick Rappold with the Forest Service and worked out which grant was right for the sawmill.
With the mill back up and running, and the addition on the horizon, Woods and his entire crew at Beckwith Lumber Company are prepared to continue the vision that Ralph and Glenda had all those years ago.
“We’re committed to it,” Woods said. “We’re absolutely committed to it. We don’t know anything else. We don’t want to know anything else. It’s just the life.”
