Landmark Smokestack Missing from Bristol Skyline

BRISTOL, Va. – This time there were no bees.

Standing in a basket suspended from a heavy-duty crane, workers from B&B Metals used cutting torches Wednesday to dismantle a 90-foot steel smokestack.

The landmark stack – visible from much of the Twin City – was the last vestige of the former Bristol Door and Lumber Co. on Williams Street.

“We started this last year, but the bees were so bad we had to stop,” said Billy Barnard, owner of the Mooresburg, Tenn.-based business. “We’d hit that [stack] and it looked like a dust cloud when the bees came out. And the race was in town then, so there was no place for us to stay, so we came back this spring.”

Workers began carving the stack into 15-foot sections Wednesday morning, while a second crane secured the massive structure. It was on the ground by early afternoon. “This was put up around 1935 and was the last existing piece of the old Bristol Door and Lumber,” said Ted Cox, who owns the property and now operates a truck maintenance and warehouse businesses there.

“We believe this was the biggest boiler system in this part of the country,” Cox said.

The top three sections of the stack, which was 4 feet in diameter, weighed a combined 19,000 pounds, Barnard said. The lower sections weighed even more because they were constructed of thicker steel for stability.

Two years ago, Cox had large sawdust silos removed from the former woodworking facility, where Fleet Maintenance now operates. A.D. Reynolds established a lumber mill on the site in the late 1800s, according to historian V. N. “Bud” Phillips. It was then operated as Bristol Door and Lumber by the McCrary brothers.

The facility later operated as the Visador wood processing plant before it closed in 2002.

Barnard said his research indicates the steel sections were shipped to Bristol by rail and then assembled on site.

“It was probably drilled here and then they put up a section, and a man would take hot brads up from the ground and hammer them in to hold it together,” Barnard said with some admiration. “And they didn’t have big cranes back then.”

The steel will be taken to Ameristeel in Knoxville, Tenn., where it will be recycled and likely sold to the state for use as concrete re-bar in highway construction, Barnard said.

He estimated it will take his crew as long as three weeks to dismantle the stack and a former sawdust silo that has been stored on the property since it was taken down in 2007.

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