Hancock Mill Provided
Jobs for 82 Years
by Tom Perera

The Hancock Plywood Mill had provided jobs for as many as 180 people and high quality plywood for the world during its 82 years. Founded in 1925 as the Blair Veneer Co. it was operated under many different names including Owens-Illinois Plywood, Roddis Plywood, Weyerhauser, Chesapeake, and Vermont Plywood.

The mill produced plywood by making what former employee Chester Baxter described as a "sandwich." A sheet of wood called the "center" had thin veneers," consisting of various kinds of wood glued to its top and bottom sides to form a completed sheet of plywood.

The center of the "sandwich" came from several suppliers over the years, but most recently it came all the way from Indonesia. The veneers were at first made locally and then trucked in from various places, most recently Canada.

In the early days, local logs were immersed in a heated pond in back of the mill to allow the bark to be easily removed. Then they were spun on a huge lathe that peeled their wood off into thin sheets. When the sheets began to come in from other parts of the country, the big lathe was sold.

The process of making the plywood was quite complex. First, a sheet of wood called the center was run through a 10-ft. glue roll that applied glue to the top and bottom surfaces. Then thin veneers were manually placed over the top and under the bottom of the center.

These wet "sandwiches" were placed into a pile of as many as 160 sheets and inserted into an immense Globe hydraulic press. The press applied many tons of pressure to the "sandwiches" for about 10 minutes, squishing the glue evenly along the entire surface of the wood like a child squeezing a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

The wet "sandwiches" were then manually inserted into the 24 openings of a huge hot press. Steam from the mill’s boilers heated each of the metal plates between the "sandwiches," then pressure was applied to the entire stack of metal plates and "sandwiches" for about five minutes to solidify the glue.

After the now-completed plywood was removed from the hot press, the sheets were sanded, inspected for flaws (that were patched when possible), graded, and stacked for shipment. In addition to being used for construction, the mill’s plywoods had been used by various purchasers to make chair backs and even checkerboards.

The mill was heated by two huge boilers that provided steam heat and steam for the hot press. The boilers were fired with wood chips produced by a large wood chipping machine that turned all the scrap wood into chips, and another machine that blew the chips into the fireboxes of the boilers after a magnetic separator had removed any nails or other pieces of metal from the chips.

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