WILLOW CREEK — Stu Peller began work this week as a floor sweeper at Willow Creek Custom Flooring, LLC — the successor to the Willow Creek Hardwood Flooring Company, which closed in 1972 and will reopen next year after an extensive renovation.
Peller, 22, is the first employee hired for the new operation. “I grew up hearing my father talk about the mill,” he told the Gazette. “He worked there for 34 years. When it closed, he didn’t know what to do with himself. I think a part of him never got over it. So when I heard they were hiring, I walked down to River Road and asked for a job. Any job. They said I could sweep.”
The mill’s reopening, scheduled for June 1990, represents the most significant economic development in Willow Creek since the original mill’s founding in 1903. The new company specializes in quarter-sawn white oak and hard maple for the historic restoration market — a niche that never existed when the original mill closed.
“Historic restoration is a growing field,” said the mill’s general manager. “Churches, courthouses, historic homes from the Victorian and Colonial Revival periods all need hardwood flooring that matches the original. Southern mills don’t produce the tight grain that northern white oak provides. We do.”
Peller, who has no experience in the woodworking industry, said he is optimistic. “I start at the bottom. That is fine with me. There is nowhere to go but up.”
He will sweep floors for six months, graduate to the sorting table, advance to the planer, become a shift supervisor within five years, and eventually become general manager. He will never work another day outside the mill.
“The sound of the planer has returned to River Road,” Clara Winslow wrote. “It is a sound that many in this town feared they would never hear again.”
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