Sun sets on Lynchburg Foundry Company with Archer Creek closing

The last sparks are burning out at Lynchburg Foundry Company, one of the region’s oldest and largest industrial companies, as it officially closes today.

Two months ago Archer Creek Foundry, the company’s last operating arm, announced that it would close the day after Christmas, putting nearly 200 people out of work. Its parent company filed for bankruptcy last year, and an attempt to sell the factory to another operator fell through. The closure is expected to be permanent.

For the first time in 113 years, no one works for Lynchburg Foundry, which once employed thousands of people in Central Virginia.

Foundry timeline

• 1896: Lynchburg Plow Company chartered with capital of $25,000.
• 1910: Lynchburg Foundry produces pipes and fittings for Panama Canal.
• 1942: Foundry announces that for the first time it will hire women to work in its shop to replace men who were serving in the war.
• 1943: Lynchburg Foundry receives “M Award” from the United States Maritime Commission for making engine castings for military ships.
• 1945: Foundry learns that it made castings used for machinery in the Manhattan Project’s Oak Ridge, Tenn., facility.
• 1961: Lynchburg Foundry Co. sold to Woodward Iron Co.
• 1969: Foundry announces $1 million project to build warehouse facility in Mt. Athos area.
• 1971: Lynchburg Foundry Company announces $40 million expansion including building of Archer Creek Foundry.
• 1974: Lynchburg Foundry Credit Union is the first credit union to construct a building in Lynchburg. Located 2000 Main St.
• 1983: Lynchburg Foundry Company sold to a holding company that later is named Intermet.
• 1993: Intermet announces it will close the lower basin plant.
• 1997: Intermet opens technical center in Lynchburg to provide advanced design and engineering work for customers.
• 2008: Intermet files for bankruptcy.
• October 2009: Closure of New River Foundry in Radford and Archer Creek Foundry announced.
• Dec. 12: New River Foundry closes.

Source: Company information, news archives.

“That place, it just boomed down there for so many years, and it provided employment for so many people,” said Bill Hopkins, former manager of Archer Creek Foundry. “To lose that in our community, it’s just devastating. … I feel like it’s a big loss to the community.”

Doug Smith, a foundry employee who retired this summer, said the closure is breaking up a close-knit group of employees. “There were two entities there: There was the Archer Creek Foundry, and there was the Archer Creek family,” he said. “Everyone there, up to this point, is like a family. They’ve been together so long.”

Lynchburg Foundry Company and its parent firm, Intermet Corporation, fell victims to sharply falling automotive sales in the past two years. Its chief products were crank shafts, brake calipers and other heavy metal parts for Ford, Chrysler, General Motors and Toyota vehicles, Hopkins said.

Before the current recession, the company weathered many economic downturns, including the Great Depression. Over the years it adapted its product line, which has included castings for plows, other farm equipment and parts for military operations. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the company focused exclusively on automobile parts, Hopkins said.

The company was founded in 1896 as Lynchburg Plow Works. Local investors, including shoe entrepreneur A.P. Craddock, bought $25,000 of stock in the company. Its owners built a factory in Lynchburg’s lower basin, an area near the James River off what is now Concord Turnpike.

Within a few years, the company called itself “the largest manufacturer of plows exclusively in the south.” It had 100 employees and used 2,000 tons of iron in a year, according to the book “Lynchburg, Virginia” by Phillip Lightfoot Scruggs.

In the early 20th century a retired employee of Glamorgan Pipe — now Griffin Pipe — came to work for Lynchburg Plow Works and introduced a pipe manufacturing process. The company changed its name to Lynchburg Foundry Company and bought a foundry in Radford.

The company made parts for the U.S. military during both World Wars. In the early 1940s, it made heavy iron castings that were used in Oak Ridge, Tenn., in the creation of the atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, and helped draw the war to a close.

Hopkins began working at the Lower Basin Foundry in 1969. In the early 1970s, the company built Archer Creek Foundry on Mt. Athos Road in Campbell County and Hopkins helped get work under way there.

Thousands of people worked at the foundries over the decades, although few official accounts are available. In 1993, the Lynchburg-area foundries employed a total of about 1,300. When a federal agency took management of the Lynchburg Foundry Company pension plan earlier this year, the plan included about 2,500.

For years the foundries’ business followed the automobile industry’s ups and downs, Hopkins said. “The whole time I was with the foundry group, we went through cycles,” he said. “It seemed like every five years, we’d boom for four years and then have a slow year, and then boom back up again.”

In 1993, Intermet announced that it would close the Lower Basin Foundry. The building flooded too often and it needed expensive renovations to meet federal pollution standards, the company said. About 600 workers lost their jobs.

Hopkins said Intermet ran into financial trouble beginning in 2003. He believes it resulted from stiff competition. Many domestic plants were upgrading their equipment to accomplish more work with fewer employees. “We lost a lot of business to offshore facilities,” Hopkins said.

“The competition with the Koreans and the people in Mexico was just unreal.”

The company’s situation worsened in 2008 when automobile sales plummeted. That created a cash flow problem for automobile manufacturers, and for Intermet itself, which declared bankruptcy.

On Oct. 26 — exactly 113 years and six days after the company’s records say the first castings were made at Lower Basin Foundry — the company notified state and local officials that Archer Creek Foundry would close Dec. 26. New River Foundry in Radford would close Dec. 12.

Hopkins said he is concerned for the many foundry employees who, though they have been offered help in training for new jobs, had dedicated their lives to the foundry.

“It was such a wonderful workforce. They had a work ethic second to none,” he said. “Our people knew they were supposed to work when they came to work. They certainly did their part.”