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In an unenlightened age - say 10 years ago - the vacant Corriher Mill in Landis would have met its demise by wrecking ball and sledgehammer, most chunks headed into a stinky pile beneath the ground.

Instead, a new company has contracted to deconstruct the 96-year-old textile mill and transform the old-growth lumber into new floors, cabinets, molding, doors and furniture.

A handful of workers on Tuesday pried hundreds of maple floorboards from a gym-sized room. Others teased iron bolts out of 30-foot pine beams and sawed them into inch-thick boards, leaving only a thin crust to be discarded. By early 2010, virtually everything down to the concrete foundation will be recycled and reused.

Turning House Millworks, a subsidiary of Bassett Mirror Co. in Virginia, hopes to position itself as a leader in the Southeast for reclaiming and giving new life to rare and precious hardwoods - Southern Longleaf Pine, wormy chestnut, fiddleback maple - used in industrial buildings from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The company expects to recover roughly one million board feet of lumber out of the mill, enough to floor more than 650 homes and save 19,000 trees.

"We don't believe the economy will change the direction of our society," said Jerry Dodson, president and chief operating officer of Turning House Millworks and sister company, Turning House Furniture. "The green building movement is long term. We are well-positioned to ride that wave."

Dodson, a Greensboro resident, estimated that roughly 20 million board feet of lumber exist to be reclaimed from industrial buildings with no historic value within 500 miles of Landis. Thus, company executives expect most of their sourcing and distribution of wood to occur in North Carolina and surrounding states.

Turning House Millworks bases its operations in a warehouse at the Corriher Mill and trucks in lumber from deconstruction projects in Bessemer City, Lawrenceburg, Ky., and Greeneville, Tenn. Turning House Furniture will debut a line of furniture made from the wood at the High Point Furniture Market in April, company executives said.

"We have so much to do right in this area," Dodson said. "Our goal is to look in our own backyard and revitalize what is around us."

The practice of reclaiming wood began as a cottage industry in the 1970s, but the green building movement has added credibility and demand for wood products that don't come from living trees, said Rick Guynn, sales manager with The Woods Co. in Chambersburg, Penn. The company was one of several to attempt several years ago to create national standards for the reclaimed wood products.

"It is unusual now when you use the words reclaimed wood or antique wood that people don't know what you're talking about," Guynn said.

Other trends have provided social pressure and economic incentive to recycle more waste. These include sustainable forestry practices, government bans or limitations on landfill waste, increases in disposal fees and a boom in reuse materials stores, such as the Habitat for Humanity ReStores.

However, southern states have trailed the West Coast and Northeast in adopting more progressive building and demolition practices and a lot of industrial materials still end up in burn piles or the landfill, said Brad Guy, a deconstruction consultant and former president of the national Building Materials Reuse Association.

The life span of the reclaimed wood industry itself is limited by history: Industrial buildings after the early 20th century utilized a lot of refined and chemically-treated materials, such as pressure-treated lumber and particle board. For example, materials covered with asbestos or lead-based paint are costly to treat and dispose of; Guy said he expects fiberglass insulation could one day be banned because of its respiratory health risks.

Buildings of the future will likely be constructed using only reusable and environmentally-friendly components, Guy said, but that trend is in its infancy.

"We are kind of using up the old resources that are not infinite, the barns and warehouses," Guy said. "We are going to have to develop, unfortunately, some new technology to deal with the materials we have now."

Still, Turning House Millworks expects the hundreds of century-old buildings in the Southeast will keep the practice of recovering precious wood alive for some time.

"We estimate from a sustainability standpoint that there's enough old buildings standing and going to waste," Dodson said, "that we'll be able to draw on this as a business."

Contact Morgan Josey Glover at 373-7078 or morgan.josey@news-record.com.