Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 11, 1994 TAG: 9404110031
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SANDRA BROWN KELLY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: STANLEYTOWN LENGTH: Medium
Sunday, the manufacturer threw a party to show off the $12 million replacement plant and to celebrate the company's 70th birthday. Somewhere around 6,500 guests came, based on a count of those who went on plant tours.
In addition to the chance to see how furniture is made, guests got to eat and drink and hear two performances by Roanoke singer Jane Powell and her band. They also contributed $4,630 to the Martinsville-Henry County Red Cross by buying dollar tickets for a chance to win a roomful of Stanley furniture.
The celebration was in a 60,000-square-foot shell building put up as a temporary plant after the February 1993 fire.
Prillaman, who also is chief executive officer of Stanley Furniture Co. Inc., was a smiling one-man receiving line; other employees assembled hot dogs, poured sodas and led tours of the production areas.
Guide Jean Basconi, a 10-year quality control inspector, noted that when the company began in 1924, it had 150 employees who could produce up to 200 pieces of furniture a day.
Stanley now employs 1,300 in Stanleytown and another 1,700 at three North Carolina plants, and its production of living room, dining room and bedroom furniture accounted for $167.1 million in net sales last year.
The fire that began Feb. 12, 1993, affected only 12 percent of the company's production facilities, but its potential to have spread throughout the 60-acre complex added to the tension that surrounded it.
It was a bitterly cold February, recalled Chief Jerry Hopkins as he walked the new plant Sunday with other members of the Guilford County (N.C.) Fire Department.
Guilford was one of 20 Virginia and North Carolina localities that sent help to the Henry County community when Plant No. 1 burned. Before the blaze was finally out, more than 24 hours after it started, 300-plus firefighters and an army of support people had participated.
Samuel Lowery, a member of the Bassett Rescue Squad, said Stanley was generous with its thanks for the aid. Sunday, the squad's new crash truck was parked at the party entrance. Lowery said the truck the squad used to support firefighters last year had been 25 years old and poorly equipped for the situation.
The squad had been in the process of raising money for a new truck when the fire happened. Lowery wouldn't say how much Stanley gave, but he said the furniture company "owns a good portion" of the new $140,000 vehicle.
The blaze destroyed the factory's personnel and accounting offices, its clinic, and a large inventory of chairs and occasional tables waiting to be shipped.
But nobody got hurt, and "nobody got laid off" or lost any income, said Steve McDaniel, superintendent at Plant No. 1.
Hourly workers who couldn't make furniture while the plant was disabled cleaned and overhauled plant machinery damaged by fire and water. Only 30 percent of the equipment in the new plant is new, he said.
Pictures of employees scrubbing down machines were part of a video and photo display set up in the party building to tell the story of the fire.
A picture of the new plant, dated March 1994, carried this caption:
"Within the span of one year, Stanley Furniture Co.'s Plant #1 went from ashes to assets."
"The fire was a disaster, but it gave us an opportunity to do things we never would have done," said McDaniel. "It made it easier for us to make furniture."
For one thing, he said, the assembly line flows better than it did in the old plant.
"But I wouldn't want to never see another fire," McDaniel said.
by CNB