Former employee: 'Good times and good, real people'

MeadWestvaco has played a big part in the weave of the Lowcountry.

Generations of local residents have worked for the paper company, either at its North Charleston paper mill or its Summerville lumber mill, both of which are being sold to an Illinois-based company.

The fuming smokestack of the North Charleston plant, the tucked-away sawmill in Summerville with its wood stacks just across the fence from neighborhood homes, helped make the city and the town.

The North Charleston plant's distinctive odor used to be so pervasive that longtime maintenance metal worker Edwin "Sparky" Greer would hear about it as a regular jibe from his neighbors. "Oddly enough, sometimes you didn't smell it when you were in there," he said.

The company is woven so far back into the area's heritage that Allan Luke, a grandson of its founder, was mayor of Summerville a half-century ago.

The story is told that Westvaco was brought in as a partner in 1937 to build the 23-mile-long Edisto Water Tunnel that still partly supplies the city of Charleston and the North Charleston plant, because the company had better credit than the city, said Chuck Koches, retired as a technical and resources development director for the company.

To many longtime residents, the sale of the two plants is one more sign of the end of an era that began to disappear with sales of its huge pineland tracts to developers over the past decade.

"I guess Westvaco's presence here will be the town of East Edisto," said Harry Avant, 64, of Summerville, with a laugh. East Edisto refers to the proposed company development tract along the Edisto River.

Greer worked for 46 years as a maintenance metal worker in the North Charleston plant before retiring in the 1990s. He got his nickname from co-workers kidding about his military buzz cut.

"It made me a good living. It was good times and good, real people," he said. One tale he likes to tell is when he was working under the wood conveyor and the old equipment truck used to haul wood across it started up — suddenly and without an operator. "We thought it might have been one of the ghosts of the old workers."

George Seago managed the Summerville sawmill from 1952 to 1983, working through two owners before Westvaco bought it in 1969. He goes back to the days when logs were cut on an old-fashioned carriage band and the steam that powered the mill came from burning slabs of its log wood.

"In my team it seemed like a team effort," he said. Not only did it employ 125 people at its height, with 40 more for the double shifts, but it bought lumber from landowners within a 100-mile radius.

"I know this much from my 40 years with the company: Their business ethics were pretty much untouchable," Koches said. "You do have a reliable income and a reasonable income, and there aren't too many places in the South where you can say that. There's no question the plant and the Navy base were the two things that built this end of the county."

Reach Bo Petersen at bpetersen@postandcourier.com or 745-5852.