Jefferson Cooperage

Jefferson Cooperage. Ranson Lost History Trail. , In 1893 Elmer E. Beachley purchased property bordered by Powhatan Brass and Iron and North George Street. He built a two-story building facing Beltline where he operated a Sash Factory and Planing Mill. Unfortunately, by 1896 Beachley's factory was sold at auction to James A. Bell and Wilson Asbury Higgs and renamed the Jefferson Cooperage Company. By Fall Jefferson Cooperage was selling flour barrels to Jefferson Milling Company, nearby Maryland mills, and to the mill in Purcellville, Virginia. In 1899 Higgs expanded the operation to include production of apple barrels and in its first year of production turned out twenty-six hundred apple barrels. The Spirit of Jefferson advertisement informed the public that they manufactured "Flour, Apple and Lime Barrels, and Oak Staves.", In January 1901, Higgs bought out his partner and over the next two decades Jefferson Cooperage became one of the largest barrel manufacturing plants in the Lower Shenandoah Valley with branches at Winchester, Inwood, and an additional mill at Elkton, Virginia. The cooperage reached maximum production in the 1910s when it manufactured 135,000 barrels in Ranson. During its busiest times of the year Jefferson Cooperage employed forty men making it important to Ranson's prosperity. When W. A. Higgs died in 1924, Earnest Everett Furr purchased the Ranson plant and for the next several decades was both its president and general manager. In 1953 Furr sold the plant to Greenhill Orchards who used the buildings to store fruit, thus ending a half century of barrel manufacturing in Ranson.