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NEWSFEED
PRICE KEPT EXPANDING HORIZONS
J
ohn Porter Price, a patent inventor of the rotary drum debarker for debarking treelength logs and who developed a highly successful business on the concept of starting up and operating independent chip mills to supply contract chips to paper companies, died October 13 in Biloxi, Miss. He was 80. The second son of Olyn Stephens and Helen Morrison Price, Price was born in Monticello, Ark. His older brother Ben taught him the love of the outdoors and hunting, hobbies that subsequently led him to the timber industry, following in the footsteps of his father. Price grew up working at his father’s transportable sawmill in the woods. After putting himself through college at Arkansas A&M by cutting pulpwood, Price served a stint in the Air National Guard before returning home to work for L. D. Long, first as a logger and subsequently to build a hardwood sawmill. Price later purchased the sawmill in 1965 and started his own company at the age of 25 as J. P. Price Lumber Company. Price often commented that although he had a college degree in forestry, he learned more about the timber industry from watching and working for his father and L. D. Long, as well as working among the loggers deep in the woods of southeast Arkansas. By the late 1970s, in addition to producing lumber he had pieced together a chip mill and become a major chips supplier to the International Paper plant in Monticello. But as bark requirements became more severe, he realized conventional debarking wasn’t going to do the job. Then, as Price said, “Necessity got us 6
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John Porter Price, 1978 Price drum debarker, 1988
Price, left, and Dick Carmical at the grand opening of Gloster Chips in Mississippi, 1988
into the drum debarker business.” In 1981 he started up a drum debarker built mostly with parts Price fabricated himself. The 9 ft. diameter by 60 ft. long debarker operated with hydraulic drive and was mounted on truck tires. The setup also enabled more efficient merchandising of the sawlog butts off larger pulpwood logs. Always the entrepreneur, Price saw an opportunity to market the design, fabrica-
Price formed Firehunt Duck Club in the 1960s.
tion, erection and installation of chip mill equipment. He formed Price Industries, Inc. and sold his first drum debarker in 1983. By the late 1980s he had sold 30 drum debarkers and related chip mill machinery. “We’ve made improvements to every one of them,” Price said, pointing to modifications to the bark chute and infeed hopper and also building drums as large as 12x90 ft.
Price’s visionary thinking did not stop there. He believed the paper companies would move from their own chipping operations to outsourcing the wood yards and chips production, just as the industry had shifted from company logging crews to contractors. Price formed The Price Companies, Inc. and in 1988 started up his first two chip mill operations: Coastal Chips in Fernandina Beach, Fla. as a supplier to ITT Rayonier, and Gloster Chips supplying James River in Gloster, Miss., the latter also where Price provided his first rotary log crane. The Price Companies ultimately became one of the largest chip producers in the world. In 2007, Price retired, handing over the reins to his right-hand man, Dick Carmical. Price created a culture in the company that still bears his name to always take care of the customer. Price went on his first duck hunt when he was 11 years old and never lost the love of seeing mallards land in the green timber. In the 1960s, he formed Firehunt Duck Club, which is well known today for its management programs for wildlife and for always leaving the land “better than you found it.” He had an incredible sense of humor and once he gave you a nickname, it would stick to you for life. He was a prolific reader of
“It is an object of the invention to provide a method and apparatus for continuously debarking treelength logs in a rotating drum debarker, by continuously feeding groups of treelength logs generally axially into the drum with a continuously driven main conveyor, and along a low friction region or auxiliary feed means between the discharge end of the main conveyor and the inlet of the drum.”
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