Superior Artisan Wood creates furniture, art pieces from salvaged trees
Dec. 3—PALMETTO — Chad Fletcher moved with his family to Tupelo in 1980 for the Burger King franchise his dad bought on South Gloster Street, where Tellini's stands today.
Fletcher grew up working in the fast-food restaurant from the time he was 5 until his family sold the franchise in 2015.
Suddenly, he was out of a job.
Fortunately, a hobby Fletcher had picked up a couple of years earlier would be his saving grace.
"I had dabbled in woodworking and had always romanticized about building my own home," he said. "I bought a small band sawmill and started sawing out pieces for the house in 2013."
Fletcher found himself really taken with the work.
"I enjoyed the process of working with my hands and being able to transfer raw materials into finished pieces," he said. "It's almost instant gratification to make a board from a raw tree."
Soon, he began picking up some work for folks on the side. As his business grew, he noticed a demand for processing large pieces of timber. It was work that couldn't be done without a larger sawmill.
So in 2018, he partnered with his friend Alan Murphree to create Superior Artisan Wood in the Palmetto community. It wasn't long before they installed a state-of-the-art kiln drying system that allows Fletcher to do the work he does today.
"The main focus is in utilizing urban wood, typically from a home setting or a municipality, that is not felled with the intention of making wood products," Fletcher said.
That means trees that haven't been cut down on purpose, but rather have come down in the name of progress or because of natural causes or a storm.
"If a tree comes down in last night's storm, nine times out of 10, it's gonna end up in a burn pile or a landfill," he said. "That's a tremendous resource we should salvaging instead of wasting. That's our passion — utilizing this tremendous resource."
What Fletcher has found is that more often than not, these felled trees are connected to a family or a story.
"That story doesn't need to end in a landfill," he said. "We continue to tell that story for generations through our pieces."
Salvaged material only
The different woods Fletcher uses come from a variety of sources, but almost all of it is from Mississippi.
"Our heart is our community, and we try to use as much locally as we can," he said.
Fletcher might see a fallen tree on the side of the road and track down the landowner to get permission to haul it to his shop, or he might get a call from a family that has an old tree on the property that needs to come down.
"Someone might call and say he had a white oak tree fall in a storm, and all his cousins grew up swinging from that tree," Fletcher said. "There's a real connection to the tree. We'll go evaluate the tree, saw it in the best manner possible, and dry it in the kiln. We're intimately involved with the material at that point."
Fletcher said he tries to use as much of the tree stem — or trunk — as possible, but sometimes he can't use it all.
"Some of it deserves to be firewood," he said. "Small scraps that are pulled off the mill might get turned into small products, like a 6-inch spoon. Because of the passion we have, we will only build pieces out of urban salvaged material. We feel it's important that that's all we use."
A year ago, Fletcher hired Jody Ho to work with him in the shop.
"A lot of people refer to themselves as woodworkers," Ho said. "I think of myself more as an artist that works in wood. I feel like I've found my way here."
Together, Fletcher and Ho make large pieces like single-slab tables, wall art, side tables, kitchen islands and countertops, conference tables, barn doors and mantels. They also create smaller pieces, like coasters, cutting boards, charcuterie boards, bowls and spoons.
"In limiting the resources we're able to work with, we've found it enhances our creativity," Fletcher said.
"It's also enhances my appreciation of the beauty of wood that's gotten thrown away," Ho said. "I want to change the mentality of trees having defects, the language people use. Trees don't have defects. A tree is a tree."
4 billion board feet
Since he's been working to salvage and repurpose fallen trees, Fletcher has discovered a big problem — and a solution.
"There are 4 billion board feet of potential wood products that are discarded annually in the U.S. due to traditional removal and disposal practices," he said. "A board foot is a unit of measurement — 1-inch thick, 1-foot wide and 1-foot long. If I lay 4 billion board feet end to end, they would go from New York to Los Angeles 270 times."
By diverting that material away from the waste stream and toward a revenue stream, Fletcher said, he can reduce waste, reduce the strain on landfills, reduce expenses for municipalities, stimulate local economies and be a good steward of the land.
"We work closely with the Mississippi Forestry Commission," Fletcher said. "There are monies available for municipalities for Urban Forestry Management programs and plenty of government grants for municipalities who use resources in a green manner."
One municipality that's forward-thinking is New Albany, Fletcher said.
"The Union County Courthouse was built in 1908 or 1909, and the old oak trees around it began to decline in health," he said. "The board of supervisors had to make the hard decision to have them removed — everybody had a connection to those trees, had walked under them when going inside to pay a bill. The board had the foresight to put a couple of stems in the county barn. We're really excited to process those. We'll do some pieces to return to the courthouse. Our plan is to do a documentary about the project to show other municipalities in the state what can be done."
Fletcher said the highest value a tree has is when it's healthy and standing and doing its thing. But when it's down on the ground, Superior Artisan Wood can step in and give it new life and meaning and preserve its stories.
"We feel honored to continue those stories through our work," he said. "We didn't set out to do this. I needed a job. But the deeper we got, the more we saw that the benefits are just tremendous. It's as if we accidentally found ourselves through this work."
