about Salvage Nation in Lexington Herald Leader Aug 2007
Warehouse being recycled
Lumber from West Main Street structure heading to Oregon
By Jim Warren
The old Vaughan Tobacco Warehouse on West Main Street is slowly disappearing as work crews disassemble the sprawling structure piece-by-piece for recycling.
David Ponder, whose Lexington company, Salvage Nation, is doing the work, said yesterday that up to 3 million board of feet of lumber could be reclaimed from the warehouse before the project is finished sometime early next year. The original building was seven-tenths of a mile long, Ponder said. Four railroad cars loaded with wood from the warehouse will head for Oregon, where the lumber will be refinished for use in upscale new homes. Many more shipments will follow before the job is done, Ponder said.
Derek Vaughan, who has owned the warehouse since 1985, said he has no plans yet for what will be done with the site once the old structure is gone. "Whatever we do, it should be nicer than what is being taken down," Vaughan said.
Many burley tobacco warehouses have been disappearing across Kentucky because the need for them largely ended when the federal tobacco support program was phased out in 2004. Some, however, are being converted for other uses.
Not far from the Vaughan warehouse, a former Southwest Tobacco Co. processing plant on Price Road has been converted into condos and now is called Lorillard Lofts.
The Vaughan warehouse was built in the 1930s by the American Tobacco Co., then the country's largest tobacco firm.
According to Ponder, the building originally consisted of 21 sections of about 106,000 square feet each, separated by brick fire walls. But Vaughan said the warehouse was constructed as a single project, not a series of additions.
"We have old pictures of it, and it was there before any houses or anything were built in that area," Vaughan said. "Some of the old sales warehouses were just kind of thrown up. But when American Tobacco built something, they used only the best wood and the best construction available at the time."
Vaughan noted that the property once boasted a billboard that became familiar to generations of Lexingtonians: "Quiet. Tobacco Sleeping."
According to Ponder, most of the wood in the warehouses is southern pine, including 8-by-12 foot timbers that are 20 feet long.
"There's a voracious appetite for this kind of wood for new houses out west," he said.
Ponder said the warehouse could have been simply demolished, but that Vaughan "didn't want it to just go to the dump."
Reach Jim Warren at (859) 231-3255, 1-800-950-6397, Ext. 3255.
