Scott Cummings wasn’t home the night of the fire. He was at a conference in South Carolina, so it was his wife, Robyn, who took the call at 11:56 p.m. on Tuesday, June 25, 2024, telling her that Cummings Lumber was burning. It was a long way from funny then, but she can laugh a little now when she tells how many times she called her husband to tell him what was going on, and how many times he didn’t answer his phone. She finally gave up, deciding that this might be the last night for a while that he would be able to sleep. In the interim, she called Norm Steffy, Cummings Lumber Company vice president, Scott’s father, Roy, and Cassy Dygert, director of finance and human resources for the Troy-based business. Cassy remembers wondering, “Why is Robyn calling me at midnight?”

She found out.

“My heart immediately sank,” Robyn remembers. “I felt overwhelmingly sad and a bit nauseous. Then you’re in go mode.”

Over seventeen emergency departments responded to the blaze. It was about 5 a.m. in the morning when it was deemed under control, and several hours before Route 14 would be reopened. It was about 6 a.m. when Robyn was finally able to speak with Scott, and his first question was, “Is everyone okay?” They were. He then rearranged his flight schedule and was back home by about 7 p.m.

There have been a number of investigations regarding the cause of the fire that damaged or destroyed about 20,000 square feet of the business, but nothing definitive has resulted. Kevin Morgan, graphic designer for Cummings Lumber Company, can pull up dozens of security camera pictures from that night, including footage showing an area of embers, a hot spot. But there’s been no conclusive answer to the question of what made that spot hot, or even if that spot was the culprit.

“I don’t think I’ve heard what exactly started it,” Robyn says.

It would be nice to know, certainly, but maybe at this point what matters more is what’s next.

“When something so devastating happens to your business, how do you move forward?” Robyn muses. “Through the fire, our primary focus was how do we keep everyone, as best we can, employed? How do we rebuild as quickly as possible?”

She says that one of the things she has discovered over the years about her husband is that he has a “we can fix this” attitude.

It’s true. Scott comes from a family of can-doers.

A Few Branches on the Family Tree

In 1929, Lee William Cummings, Scott’s great-grandfather, moved to Troy from the Wellsboro area. He’d been a cook in a lumber camp, Scott says. Here in Troy he started L.W. Cummings and Son Lumber. They skidded logs with horses. There was no electricity in Troy at the time, so they used steam engines for power at the mill. Logs were shipped by rail.

In 1942, Roy Cummings Sr., Scott’s grandfather, began his career at what was now Cummings Lumber Company. Over the next couple of decades, he tried his hand at a few other successful endeavors, including a sawmill in East Troy and one in Ralston (that one closed in 1980). In 1964 he oversaw the construction and installation of a lumber slot sorter, which is an automatic system for sorting and processing based on size, grade, and other factors.

Roy Cummings Jr., Scott’s father, started at CLC in 1968. In 1980 he opened a sawmill in Monroeton (it closed it 1988). In the late 1980s, a car hit the CLC office, and in 1988 the CLC mill burned; in 1989 a new office and new mill were built.

Barefoot Flooring Inc., a separate company owned by the Cummings family, started in 2001, followed in 2005 by Barefoot Pellet Company. Both of those enterprises are important links in the “we use every part of the tree” credo that goes a long way toward making CLC a leader in sustainable forestry.

Scott hasn’t been working at the mill quite since he was born, but started when he was fourteen during summers and when he wasn’t in school. He went full time in 1995 and became CLC president in 2014. Robyn, an unabashed fan, says Scott can handle “any aspect of the business.”

“Scott knows how to do every single job—stacking, grading, working on the equipment—he can step in and fill the role. That’s what makes him a successful president and leader.

“He excels in business, but his heart is so big. He cares very much about the community.”

Scott’s a member of community-based organizations, including the Troy Fire Department (and would have responded to the fire at his own business had he been home), the Troy Lion’s Club, Alparon Park board of directors, Troy American Legion Auxiliary Unit 49, and the Armenia Debating Club. At the state and national levels he is a member of Pennsylvania Forest Products Association, Hardwood Manufacturers Association, Appalachian Hardwood Manufacturers, and the Hardwood Federation.

Robyn, the executive director of the Bradford County Tourism Promotion Agency, is as busy as her husband. The two married on September 21, 2018, at Belhurst Castle in Geneva, overlooking Seneca Lake. Their wedding date is also the same day Scott’s grandfather, Roy Cummings Sr., married Scott’s grandmother, A. Margaret, “affectionately called Peggy,” Robyn relates. Though they were “busy then, being involved in many civic organizations and work related functions,” they did manage to squeeze in a ten-day honeymoon to Tuscany.

Robyn thinks they might be even busier these days.

Lots of Moving Parts

Even operating at just partial capacity, the Cummings Lumber Company sawmill is busy—sprawling and noisy, with enormous, serious-looking, and definitely very sharp and pointy pieces of equipment moving logs and boards, cutting them, peeling bark off, slicing them, chewing them up, and spitting out the scraps.

“Don’t stand there,” Scott cautions, indicating a spot near the end of a conveyor belt that seemed like a likely place to take it all in safely and not be in anybody’s way. But it’s where a log would be coming out of something called the Wood-Mizer, one of the pieces of equipment used to trim and shape logs. “If they hit the wrong button…”

Advice heeded.

There is quite a bit of activity throughout the expansive work area, yet it all seems orderly despite the ongoing reconstruction and machine installation.

“We’re trying to keep it as neat and tidy as we can,” Scott says. Pallet lumber is one of the cash crops. The raw material for that is slab wood—as Scott has stressed, they use every part of the tree at CLC. It has to be cut to size and bundled, then it goes to Towanda to a pallet factory there—one or two tractor trailer loads a week.

Some sections are still under repair, nearly a year after the fire, and in others the wait for the return to pre-fire production is based on equipment that hasn’t been replaced, repaired, or completely set up yet. In the new Cleereman control booth (just for fun, check out cleereman.com for a fascinating look at equipment you probably never knew existed), an operator will use what looks like joysticks to control the carriage that carries logs for their “primary breakdown.”

The Cleereman’s job, Scott explains, “is to get the log squared to four sides for the re-saw to handle.”

Working nearby in the tangle of new and refurbished electrical components, a man responds to greetings from Scott and Robyn. He’s a cousin who has an electrical contracting company.

“That’s helped,” says Robyn.

The fire destroyed the head saw—that’s the saw that makes the initial cuts on a log—and in the new saw shop, Duane “Bucky” Buck, a saw filer who’s been with CLC for twenty-seven years, has been restoring and refurbishing some of the damaged equipment. The old shop was part of a wooden building, and it burned. The new shop is “Bucky’s idea of how to set everything up,” Scott says. This morning he’s sharpening some pretty fearsome-looking saw teeth.

There are twelve kilns on the premises; the boiler that heats them burns sawdust as its fuel, which, ironically, has to be purchased at this point because the mill’s production isn’t sufficient to produce enough of the stuff.

“When we get going again, we’ll be cutting 40,000 board feet of logs per day,” says Scott. “Now it’s about 6,000 feet per day. We were shipping thirty to forty shipping containers per month.”

One recent shipment was eight containers, but the amount varies month to month, he adds.

Before the fire, production at CLC was 8 to 10 million board feet of logs per year. Close to 50 percent of the lumber they process is exported. China is a big importer of lumber from Troy.

Standing in one of the kilns is kind of like being in a sauna—it’s warm and humid, and the air has a pleasant woody fragrance.

“We can dry 700,000 board feet at capacity,” Scott continues. The amount of time it takes to dry boards depends on the type of wood and the thickness. It ranges from fourteen to thirty-five days.

Scott estimates the fire caused over 5 million dollars in damage.

Trees for Now and for the Future

Pennsylvania leads the nation in the production and exportation of hardwoods, and lumber is the number one agricultural industry in the state. Thankfully, the days of denuding entire mountainsides are gone.

In Pennsylvania, according to recent statistics from the United States Department of Agriculture, forest-based employment stands at 72,173. There are over 2,000 hardwood-related businesses spread across all sixty-seven counties.

Scott says probably close to 50 percent of the lumber processed at CLC is exported. At one time, one in every four boards in the country went to China.

The state has over 16 million acres of forested land, with about 70 percent of that being privately owned. One hundred percent of the forestland where CLC cuts is either privately owned (not by CLC) or state owned. Property owners can request a free CLC appraisal of their forested acreage.

“We look at it, come up with a price, then typically enter into a two-year contract [if the property owner decides to sell the timber],” Scott says. Trees with a fifteen-inch or greater DBH, which is diameter at breast height, are the ones usually cut.

“By harvesting larger trees, we open up the canopy to the forest floor to let the smaller trees grow,” he explains. “It’s almost like pruning.”

He says the US Forest Service, which operates under the auspices of the USDA, conducted a study a decade ago on the forests in the 344-county Appalachian region, of which this area is a part. The conclusion then was that trees in the region are growing two and a half times faster than they’re being cut. Another study shows that the Keystone State’s forests have over five times more standing timber today than they did in the 1950s.

Hardwood trees tend to regenerate naturally, given the right conditions, of course, and responsible harvesting helps maintain forest health and wildlife habitat. Living trees capture carbon, and wood products store that captured carbon for the life of the product.

Use It All

Even at reduced production, turning logs into boards creates big piles of bark. What to do with it? At CLC, it’s ground up and used for landscape mulch. Chips and sawdust, the sawdust that’s not needed for the kiln boiler, are ground into pellets.

Barefoot Pellet Company (barefootpellet.com) is a separate company from CLC, but also owned by the Cummings family. The factory produces pellets for heating (pellets also make great cat litter!), and test their product weekly in their own lab for moisture content, BTUs, durability, bulk density, and other factors. Barefoot Pellets are classified as “super premium,” based on specifications from the Pellet Fuels Institute. The pellets are also periodically tested independently.

Sunfire Heating Blocks (sunfireblocks.com) are another value-added product—they’re made from compressed, kiln-dried material, and can be used in wood stoves, fireplaces, and campfires. They’re an easy-to-handle alternative to cutting and splitting your own firewood. And, they’re safe for cooking.

So are Barefoot BBQ Pit Pellets. They’re made with a “secret blend of Appalachian hardwoods,” and are, of course, food grade, and great for smokers or pellet grills.

Barefoot Flooring (barefootbrandflooring.com), a division of CLC, uses northern Appalachian hardwoods such as red oak, white oak, cherry, hard maple, and hickory to produce flooring that is world-class. Norm Steffy says the feedback he received during a trade show in the spring was “overwhelmingly positive on the quality of our flooring.”

“Distributors praised our grading…while installers raved about our exceptional machining quality.”

Barefoot Flooring is carbon neutral and made without toxic chemicals or carcinogenic formaldehyde.

It’s the People Who Make It Happen

CLC and Barefoot workers are here for the long haul. In the May issue of the employee newsletter, “happy May anniversary” wishes went out to several individuals, including Wendall Thomas for forty years, Angela Hall for twenty-two years, Chris Route for thirty-seven years, John Redell for forty-five years, Chris Benner for nineteen years, and George Hall for nineteen years.

“I’ve been part of CLC for fifteen years, serving as VP for thirteen of those years,” Norm says. “Before joining the company, I was a longtime customer and came to appreciate how deeply the Cummings family values its employees, community, and commitment to producing high-quality lumber. That strong foundation made my decision to join CLC an easy one. I take great pride in knowing that we are responsible stewards of our natural resources, ensuring that every part of a log is utilized—bark for landscaping, hardwood lumber and flooring, and sawdust and chips for heating pellets.”

He says that after the fire, “I initially approached recovery with optimism, believing we could rebuild within seven to eight months. However, about three months into the process, reality set in, and my optimism wavered. In hindsight, though, reaching full capacity within a year is an incredible achievement. I’m grateful for the steady progress in the rebuild and, most importantly, pleased that our employees have returned to full employment.”

Cassy, who fielded Robyn’s midnight call about the fire, says there were 100 employees at CLC up to the night of the fire—seventy at the mill/office/garage and thirty at Barefoot Flooring. Barefoot Pellets had seventeen employees. There are currently seventy-five employees at CLC and Barefoot Flooring, with the same seventeen at the pellet factory. After the fire, she says, “we kept people on throughout the summer to help with cleanup.” Some were laid off temporarily during the summer, but “we were able to bring them back by the end of the year.”

“With the goal of keeping the employees working, we pivoted a bit to ensure that we could still provide opportunity to them,” Scott says. “Rather than hiring external cleanup crews, they assisted with the cleanup. We also shifted some employees to the other facilities—flooring and pellet—allowing them to continue working and providing for their families. They learned new skills and stepped up to the challenge, knowing they’d get back to their ‘normal’ jobs as soon as we could continue the rebuild and safely allow them to do so.”

“We haven’t replaced retirees, summer help, and those who left for other opportunities,” Cassy says. For those who might be interested in working for a company that cares about its people and its resources, the good news from Cassy at HR is that “we will ramp up hiring soon.”