When Cantex Inc. announced in July that it was planning a $120 million plant in one of the outdoor equipment factories Husqvarna once operated in Nashville, the Fort Worth company expected to be making fittings and boxes for PVC electrical conduit there by the end of the year.
So Whispers reached out to Nashville Mayor Larry Dunaway for an update on Cantex’s progress at the vast 352,000-SF site, which will eventually employ about 140.
“They have actually hired a crew, and they’ve been running,” said Dunaway, who’s been working hard to fill the three sites where Husqvarna once employed more than 700 workers before an efficiency push idled its Howard County operations in 2024. “They’ve been assembling product for the last four weeks or so, and they’re moving in machines as we speak.”
Cantex, which bills itself as the “largest manufacturer of PVC electrical conduit, fittings and boxes in the United States,” is steadily gearing up to use all of the space at the site, Dunaway said.
“The word that I’ve gotten is probably that in March, April, they’ll start full production.”
Husqvarna removed all equipment from its three facilities in Nashville, which totaled close to 900,000 SF. “Cantex is going to gear up to bring in raw material at one end of the plant and send it out as product,” said Dunaway, whose town has a population of close to 4,200. The surrounding region is home to about 12,000, he said.
For now, nobody is reaping power from the 1.3-megawatt solar field at the former Husqvarna site on Old Airport Road, Dunaway said. “The solar field is up at the old plastics plant. The building that [Cantex] bought is the main plant on the south end of town. There’s no solar involved there.”
Dunaway is working with the Arkansas Economic Development Commission to entice businesses to the solar-equipped site. But he clearly sees getting jobs back in the main plant as a victory for Nashville and Howard County’s economic development team, including Vanessa Weeks.
“A lot of people were involved in getting Cantex here, and it’s been a focus of our whole economic development effort since the Husqvarna announcement,” Dunaway said.
Weeks, who grew up in De Queen and graduated from Southern Arkansas University in Magnolia, became Howard County’s first director of economic development in 2023.
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