Little rain doesn#8217;t deter local carpenter#8217;s union
Published 12:00 am Saturday, June 3, 2006
SOUTH POINT — In between sprinkles Friday, two members of the Carpenter’s Local 437 of Portsmouth put a roof on the Millwright’s Local 1819 in South Point.
“We’re one union helping another union,” James Cox, of Deering, yelled down to the ground as he stood on a scaffold and hammered, along with fellow carpenter John Smith, of Ashland, Ky.
Be it union folk helping each other or union members helping the community at large, the Millwright’s Local has a history of helping the community.
“We do the food distribution for the county,” Millwright’s union hall office manager LuElla Crabtree said. “We’ve done that 24 years.”
She said while the union hall is located in South Point, its 240 members come from all over the Tri-State and work on projects locally and throughout the region.
“They come from Boyd County, Ky., from Wayne County, W.Va., from Scioto County, just all over,” Crabtree said. “We really don’t have that many members who live in Lawrence County.”
The union hall has been a community fixture for 28 years.
Cox said business has been good: They started three weeks ago on the union hall roof and should have that job finished within a week or two.
“This was just a flat roof and we had to install trusses and put a new roof on it,” Cox said.
Before that, they completed jobs at The Point industrial park and will later install a retaining wall at the new South Point High School.
The Dart is a weekly feature in which a reporter throws a dart at a map of Lawrence County and finds a story where it hits.