Six months after a rain-drenched grand opening, Dragon Woodland is on the brink of boosting the output of its Helena-West Helena sawmill facility.
Led by Yifan Kong and his wife, Erxin Zhou, the company also has quietly cranked up a complementary firewood operation at a dormant plywood plant seven blocks away.
The continued buildout of the sawmill and launch of firewood production coincide with Dragon Woodland moving from Memphis this year. The company’s investment in Helena is expected to top $11 million next year with the addition of a drying kiln.
The combined headcount of workers associated with the sawmill and firewood plant is 56. Of that total, 14 drivers transport trees downed by a logging crew of 10-12 in Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi within a 200-mile radius of Helena.
Mayor Kevin Smith views the scale of employment at Dragon Woodland as an important measuring stick to build the city’s industrial base as opposed to chasing much larger corporate prospects.
“If we can get several businesses with 50-60 employees that pay decent wages, that’s more sustainable,” Smith said.
The whir of hauling, debarking and cutting hardwood trunks into railroad crossties, flooring components and pallet pieces at the Dragon Woodland sawmill has brought commercial life to a historic industrial site not seen in more than 35 years. The 117-acre property is the remnant of the former Chicago Mill & Lumber Co. facility that at its peak employed 1,500 cutting wood and building crates during World War II.
The workforce dwindled to a tenth of that by 1982, when fire ravaged the facility and led to the mill’s closing after more than 65 years of operation. The decline of the Chicago Mill box plant was followed by the West Helena neighborhood that sprang up around it.
Talks with Dragon Woodland began with the idea of moving its Memphis log yard to town and blossomed into a full-blown sawmill operation. Smith believes the project will serve as a catalyst to help reinvigorate the neighborhood east of the mill.
“It’s created a lot of excitement and enthusiasm,” he said. “We don’t want to lose this chance to breathe new life into the neighborhood. We have a real opportunity for some real neighborhood revitalization here.”
Dragon Woodland already attracted a $589,000 grant from the Delta Regional Authority to improve Washington Street. The plan is to transform the road into the sawmill’s primary access to U.S. 49, so log trucks will have a better alternative than driving through the heart of the residential neighborhood.
Washington Street also serves as an industrial-residential demarcation between logs on the west and rooftops on the east. There are discussions afoot about replacing the mix of vacant lots, homes and abandoned houses along Washington with a quiet commercial corridor.
Among the reimagining possibilities are improving the housing stock with new single-family infill construction deeper into the neighborhood where several churches call home.
A redevelopment effort backed by the Arkansas Baptist Convention is in the works to transform Westside Elementary School into a community center. The project is considered critical to the neighborhood since the former school became a nuisance property after its closure in 2013.
Cutting Wood
While plans for neighborhood improvements are sorting out, Dragon Woodland is assimilating its Brewco B-1600 grade resaw system. The new sawmill equipment will expand daily production capacity to 55,000-60,000 board feet.
“The resaw system will give a better yield and produce less waste,” said Shane Martin, operating manager of Dragon Woodland. “For every three passes of the saw, we gain one more inch of board. The volume from this new equipment will add about 15,000-18,000 board feet to our daily production.”
After performing test runs on the new line that started during the week of Oct. 14, Martin hopes to have it fully operational by the week of the 28th.
“Everything is in place now,” Martin said earlier this month. “The electrical contractor is pulling power to the new equipment, and the equipment manufacturer is double-checking the installation. You gotta make sure everything works together or else it becomes a cluster.”
As many crossties as possible are carved out of each log for shipment to the Koppers plant in North Little Rock. There, the 8-foot pieces of milled hardwood join an annual stream of more than 1.5 million for chemical treatment and eventual sale to railroads that require more than 3,200 crossties to support each mile of track.
Wood pieces destined to become flooring are shipped to the Armstrong Hardwood Products plant in Warren. Other small cuts of wood are processed at the former McKnight Plywood plant in West Helena.
A Dragon Woodland affiliate bought the 12.7-acre complex in March for $200,000 and geared up to produce firewood bundles for retailers.
“It’s actually operational now,” Martin said. “A dry kiln was installed recently, and six workers are processing, packaging and shipping firewood out to retail vendors.”
For now, the limiting factor on firewood production is the kiln. While the plant can process 12 cords of wood an hour, drying takes 22 hours for six to eight cords of wood.
That’s about 510-680 cubic feet of kiln-dried firewood based on a 4-feet-tall by 8-feet-long by 4-feet-wide cord averaging 85 cubic feet.
A tangent to the retail market are sales to barbecue restaurants. The company began making weekly and biweekly deliveries of hickory to stoke the fires of Memphis restaurants earlier this year.
“We realized there was a shortage in that area,” Martin said. “Restaurants need a reliable source throughout the year, and we have the capacity.”
Sales to pulp mills provide the financial fallback for any wood that can’t be marketed elsewhere.
While the sawmill output is focused on domestic sales, some of the timber harvested is bound for export. That piece of the business has slowed amid tariffs and market conditions.
“We were shipping 80-90 containers per week,” Martin said. “We’re now shipping 10-20 containers a week. You typically take the high-grade logs and move them by rail out of Memphis and ship overseas, and you saw the low-grade logs for higher-grade lumber.
“We’re focusing on the industrial market because the market is still good and veering away from the lumber market because it’s horrible right now.”
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