Factory Man : How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town (9780316322607) Read online

  While Alexander’s oldest son, Woodson, owned nine slaves, J.D.’s father, John Henry, owned just two boys, ages fourteen and eight. He relied mainly on family hands, claiming ownership of two horses, five milk cows, three sheep, seven swine, and considerable stores of wheat, rye, oats, corn, and tobacco.

  J.D.’s mother, Nancy Spencer Bassett, was thought to be the brainy and driven one; John Henry, a Civil War veteran turned gentleman farmer, “sat around and grinned a lot,” said Spencer Morten, who married into the family in 1949 and become a company executive. A former journalist, Morten was eighty-nine when we first met, but his memory was razor sharp. And after sitting on the family’s periphery for so many decades, he was ready to describe all the dramas he’d witnessed in the boardrooms, in the factories—and behind the scenes at family dinners.

  John Henry was ill prepared for Reconstruction. He had general knowledge of farming and had ridden horses across his estate, but the social whirl of antebellum life had taken precedence over learning to reap profits from his land. Now, he mostly walked, routinely visiting his brother, who lived eight miles away. After his wife died, John Henry walked to court a woman who lived two miles down the road. He was eighty-five at the time, and his daughters weren’t pleased at all, often sending a relative or friend to fetch him home.

  That’s a story you’ll find more than once in this family saga, with one generation after another running a critical eye over potential spouses—the aristocracy’s number one tool for protecting the family fortune. The women may not have held titles to the businesses or the land, but they had subtle ways of exerting power.

  After the war, much of the South was in chaos, and those who had been prosperous before it were now land-rich and cash-poor. John Henry’s sons had little choice but to work. They took care of horses and cattle, cut wood, and harvested crops, which they sent to market with the help of former slaves turned farmhands. J.D., the oldest, quickly emerged as their leader.

  As a granddaughter would gush much later: “Could these adversities have planted the seed of ambition to succeed and make something of his life?”

  J.D.’s first job off the farm was pinhooking, or speculating, on tobacco. He bought the crop directly from the farmers, then sold it at auction in Martinsville, which was fast becoming the plug-tobacco capital of the world. Tobacco was second only to moonshining, the county’s other big cash-making enterprise.

  He worked twelve-hour days, and he was good with people. When it came time to marry, he didn’t chase the daughter of a wealthy landowner. He went after his former teacher, who was just three years his senior and every bit as hardworking. With his wife, Pocahontas, he started a small grocery on the family farm along the Smith River.

  Chickens sold for eight cents apiece, a pair of shoes for fifty cents. Miss Pokey, as she was called, minded the store while J.D. hopped onto a mule-driven carriage and sold their goods on the road. Other than the family home place, the store was the first building erected in the area, and before long it housed the first post office. In need of a postmark, “the government agent asked what we would name the post office,” J.D. recalled. Not so modestly, he told the agent, “My name is Bassett, so why not call it Bassett?”

  The location was ripe for expansion, with the rushing Smith River right there to generate power, not to mention all of J.D.’s inherited land along the Blue Ridge foothills. After the war, the extended Bassett clan owned 21,197 acres in Henry County, most of it thickly forested with walnut, oak, maple, hickory, and other valuable trees.

  The fledgling Norfolk and Western Railway was building a new line, called the Punkin Vine, from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to Roanoke, Virginia. And J.D., itching to help restore his family’s fortune, dreamed of getting a sawmill up and running before the new tracks being laid reached Henry County, the halfway point between the two stations. The wheeling and dealing commenced: to persuade the railroaders to run their tracks through Bassett instead of Ferrum Summit, just north of his family’s farm, as was originally planned, J.D. offered them free right-of-way through his property. One account has him secretly traveling on horseback to meet with the railway president to convince him to change the route. In another version, memorialized in a romanticized woodcut print that was part of the company’s thirtieth-anniversary promotion, a twenty-one-year-old J.D. wearing a dapper three-piece suit called on the railway president in his office.

  We do know he promised that railroad construction workers could rent rooms in the back of his store at a low rate, a business model that would become part of his family’s philosophy: offering incentives to the other guy is a good idea, as long as you end up getting more from him in return.

  Already a commanding presence at six two and two hundred pounds, young J.D. kept a cigar in his hand or in his suit jacket pocket, hoping it would make him seem older than his years. When he wasn’t working, he was thinking constantly about ways to reap benefits from the new transportation boom. He rearranged the store as a gathering place, stocking it with goods for not only the usual farmers and townsfolk but also the railroad men, engineers, and workers who would do most of their trading at the store. He would make it their store—and make their money his, even during the panic of 1893. Customers came in as late as midnight, and J.D. was usually the last in town to go to bed.

  J.D. had more cash on hand than most people in Horsepasture, and, as storekeeper, he was privy to the financial affairs of his neighbors; if he paid attention, he was privy to their private affairs too. So the young J.D. Bassett became friend, adviser, creditor, and commissary general of some one hundred folks, including the railroaders.

  But he wanted to be more than an innkeeper and merchandiser. He wanted to sell the N&W wood for its bridge timbers and railroad ties. To pull off the sawmilling that would require, he needed more than moxie. Before he could become Mr. J.D., what he needed most was cash.

  The first time I met Spencer Morten, at the Bassett Historical Center, he brought along a yellowed newspaper clipping that explained the genesis of that critical cash infusion. It described how “Uncle Billy” Law had saved J.D.’s hide after J.D.’s own father turned him down for a business loan. A few years earlier, J.D.’s pinhooking partner in Martinsville had swindled him. Together they’d earned what was considered a bundle at the time—$450—but when J.D. went to the bank to withdraw his share, he found that his partner had absconded with the haul. He owed his innkeepers six dollars for room and board, and, tail between his legs, he’d gone to his father and asked him to loan him the money.

  John Henry refused to give him a loan and instead made his son dig out the season’s potato crop and sell that to pay off his debt.

  When his father refused him a loan again, this time for the sawmill, family tensions flared.

  “Someday I’ll buy and sell you,” J.D. snapped.

  Bassett blood may have been thicker than Smith River water, but not by much. J.D. traveled to neighboring Patrick County and borrowed the money from his wealthy uncle William J. Law instead.

  Not long ago, at a cousins’ gathering of third-generation multimillionaires in Hobe Sound on Florida’s Jupiter Island, where several Bassett relatives, including John Bassett III, winter in neighboring homes, Spencer Morten offered a toast to Billy Law. Few had even heard of Uncle Billy, and none of them seemed to care about his role in the family fortune.

  “Spoiled brats,” Spencer fumed, later, to his wife.

  By the time the iron horse of the Punkin Vine first rattled the floors of Bassett Mercantile, in 1892, J.D. had paid his uncle back, with interest, from his sawmill proceeds. The train rolled past the fledgling town of Bassett atop oak ties made in the Bassett sawmill. J.D. then set about wheedling the railroad into building a depot across the tracks from his store.

  Several people in town told me in hushed tones—as if protecting a century-old secret—that J.D. sold the railroad buyer lumber and then, the next day, sold him some of the same pieces again. Purchased lumber was marked with whitewa
sh at the ends of the logs, but J.D. simply sawed off the painted part and then, the next day, trotted out the same pieces of wood. If the buyer had actually gotten out of his carriage to look at the wood himself, he might have noticed the scam. A century later, JBIII still abides by that old Bassett Furniture principle, insisting that every piece of lumber delivered to his factory be counted by a lumberyard employee.

  J.D. may have been a country boy educated in a one-room school, but he had the sense to marry a brainy woman. When J.D.’s first sawmill partner disappeared from town with a chunk of the profits, just as the pinhooker had done, J.D. tasked Miss Pokey with handling the books. He also made a vow that would both enrich and complicate things for his extended clan: the Bassett company would henceforth be a purely family affair.

  While photographs show a formal Mr. J.D. sporting a mustache, bow tie, and derby hat, Miss Pokey was rarely seen without an apron. With hammer and nails stuffed in her apron pocket, she didn’t mind measuring lumber or tacking down a loose floorboard. The town of Bassett was little more than a building, a river, and a set of train tracks flanked by dirt roads. People traveled mainly by wagon, and when the rains pushed the Smith out of its banks, the carriages were often bogged down in mud and dependent on mules to pull them out.

  Once the rail line was built, J.D. took his horse and carriage on the road to rustle up new customers, selling his timber to casket companies and small furniture factories from High Point, North Carolina, to Lynchburg, Virginia. For a time he and his brother C.C. built and sold caskets themselves. He told an interviewer in 1958 that he had routinely split four hundred rails a day and was not above polishing shoes or making communion wine for churches when business was slow.

  The big daddies of furniture-making were still in places with large immigrant populations, such as Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Jamestown, New York; the recently arrived craftsmen turned out high-quality designs in the traditions of Sheraton and Duncan Phyfe. J.D. would take off for points north and be gone for weeks, selling the furniture manufacturers on the value of Henry County hardwood—and poking around their factories.

  The official version of what happened next, printed in the Bassett Furniture corporate history, has Mr. J.D. outplaying the factory owners in Grand Rapids in 1902 to bring the heart of American furniture-making to the South. Most people say the scheme was actually hatched by his wife. “Miss Pokey had a good business mind, and she’d tell him what to buy and what not to buy,” said Bassett librarian Pat Ross, whose grandmother knew the woman well.

  The story goes that the couple had ridden the train to a factory in Michigan. While her husband was making his lumber pitch, Miss Pokey coyly asked a secretary for a tour of the plant, during which she took copious mental notes. “I think we can do this ourselves,” she said to her husband on their way out of town.

  At the time, the Southern economy was still recovering from the Civil War, and the Bassetts knew little about making furniture—or “fu-ni-cha,” as they pronounced it then and still do now. But the savings in freight alone would give them an edge over the Northern manufacturers. They had plentiful Henry County woods on Bassett-owned lands—and lots of small-time farmers, sharecroppers, and moonshiners eager to come out of the hills and escape pauperism. Why not make the furniture in the same place they milled the lumber?

  The industry had already shifted from New England to Michigan, and now it was coming to the South, predominantly to small towns in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Nearly a century before the first container of furniture was shipped from China to the United States, J.D. Bassett joined the flow of entrepreneurs hoping to capitalize on cheap, hungry labor and all those tree-stocked hills.

  A handful of North Carolina sawmillers in Lenoir and High Point had already proved it could be done. “There was a lot of fine timber in those days,” J.D. recalled, but no real roads yet for moving it out. “We had to go by horseback any distance at all.”

  In one photograph, J.D. sits astride his horse in front of the old family home place, a surprisingly ramshackle affair. The house was clapboard with crooked posts supporting the front porch, which held a lone, wobbly-looking chair. Wearing a rumpled suit and tie, he poses with his teenage daughter, Anne, on the horse next to him.

  Hardwoods dot the foothills in this sepia-toned scenic backdrop—though some are chopped and lie scattered on the ground.

  Down the hill, out of the camera’s view, sat the seeds of the family’s growing fortune.

  J.D. had built a factory in his front yard.

  He’d mapped it out first in a drawing, based on the Northern factories he’d been selling to, showing everything from the rough end, where the lumber was measured and cut, to the finishing room. Then he called a meeting of his sawmill partners—his brothers, C.C. and Sam, and his brother-in-law Reed Stone. Smoke would coil from boiler chimneys and steam would hiss from vents, he told them. Imagine the quiet wilderness filled with the slapping of leather belts on flywheels and the screeching of saws.

  Careful management would be vital, and salesmanship was so important that he would personally see to that himself. He asked his brothers to “abandon the foolishness of sawing all our good timber and shipping it north” and instead visualize trains loaded down with Bassett beds and Bassett dressers.

  From day one, he was the self-appointed brains and boss of the operation. He once ordered his brother-in-law to “run down there” and fetch him some supplies.

  “Aye, God, J.D., I’ll walk but I’ll not run,” Reed Stone replied, in what became a long-standing family retort.

  The year was 1902. Cuba had just broken from Spain, Teddy Roosevelt became the first president to ride in a motorcar, and J.D. Bassett was about to build himself a company—as well as a proper town.

  Together, the four men begged, borrowed, and scraped up $27,500. The first Bassett factory began a stone’s throw from the post office in a two-and-a-half-story wooden shed next to the river, a site the people of Bassett still refer to as Old Town. Horsepasture was now far out thataway—in the Henry County foothills—as the Industrial Revolution arrived and began shaping the narrow riverside town.

  The men employed fifty workers at the start, Scots-Irish mountain men and black sharecroppers, rugged farmers and moonshiners, all of whom were happy to work for five cents an hour. Like most refugees, the first generation of Southern mill hands were known for their patience. Desperate to feed their families, they brought with them an individualism nurtured by solitary life on small farms—a trait that would make them putty in company owners’ hands, especially when union organizers came to town. (They may not have loved their bosses, but they trusted them more than they trusted the outsiders.)

  They had lived in coves, distant from the cash economy. Now they traveled to work on foot, carrying lanterns in the predawn, some from as far as eight miles away. For one hundred dollars, J.D. hired a traveling furniture designer he’d met in Grand Rapids to develop blueprints, beginning with bedroom furniture because that was simplest to make. Built of Henry County oak, the beds wholesaled for $1.50 and were Victorian in design. When the first piece of furniture came off the new Bassett Furniture Company line—a chest of drawers with a carved mirror held up by ornate curvy arms—it sold for $4.75.

  Never one to hide his light under a bushel, J.D. began to imagine that one day he just might swipe Grand Rapids’ “Furniture City” nickname. He talked it over constantly with his wife.

  As people moved away from the extended-family farms and built homes in cities and towns, the demand for mass-produced furniture soared. By 1905, just three years after forming the company, Bassett Furniture was entirely debt-free, partly because J.D. was paying himself only seventy-five dollars a month. By 1907, the town was so full of new arrivals that he opened a bank.

  By 1918, he was shipping furniture to every corner of the country as well as Canada. He owned a bank and held stock in several other furniture factories, from Galax, Virginia, to Lexington, North Carolina, all of whic
h allowed him to set aside one million dollars for each of his children, according to Spencer Morten, the equivalent of fifteen million dollars today.

  Virginia didn’t have the immigrant craftsmen from Germany, Poland, and Lithuania that Grand Rapids claimed. But J.D.’s hardscrabble lot was willing to figure out how to make the basic forms with minimal carvings and overlays. When special knowledge was required, J.D. thought nothing of venturing to a competitor’s factory and hiring its foremen away. He’d already swiped their ideas; he would steal their people too. By 1924, he had five hundred employees, many of them North Carolina natives.

  His goal was nothing less than to establish the South as the dominant furniture-making region in the United States.

  If everyone in the family could just get along, there was no telling how far the company would go.

  By the time most people switched from driving horses to driving cars, Mr. J.D. had settled on being driven—in his Cadillac—by a chauffeur, first Pete Wade and later James Thompson. When his grown sons teased him in later years about never learning to drive, he shot back, “I pay Pete twenty-five cents an hour to drive me around, and I sit in the passenger seat thinking about how to make more money. If you boys want me to pay you twenty-five cents an hour to drive me around, that would be fine.”

  Decades later, John Bassett III would grow up thinking of his grandfather’s methods as Bassett 101. Cash is power; avoid all but necessary debt. Buy the best machinery and run the hell out of it. Hire smart people who think like you (but not too much), reward the best ones, and work the hell out of them. And by all means, pay somebody else to do your e-mailing and iPad-ing if it frees you up to do the heavy lifting of moneymaking.

  Above all, when you see a snake’s head, hit it. He liked that problem-solving mantra so much that when someone made him a cross-stitch of it, he hung it on his office wall.