Centre Foundry And Machine Plans To Close
Derek Redd Trending
Centre Foundry and Machine - a Warwood-based business older than the state of West Virginia itself - is planning to close closing.
Tom Hoffman, recording secretary of United Steelworkers Local 4842, confirmed the plans. He said that 36 union members will lose their jobs with the plant’s closure. Negotiations, he added, “did not go well” between the company and the union on Thursday. Hoffman said the company did not provide the union with a definite closing date.
Centre specialized in gray iron casting for the specialty steel industry and alloy producers. The 100,000-square-foot foundry was able to produce in excess of 100 tons a day, according to the company.
According to the company's website, the earliest recorded history of Centre Foundry is in 1840, when James and Andrew Baggs started Baggs Foundry in Ohio County, Virginia. The company was bought by Alexander Cecil, Charles Cecil and John Young in 1855, and was renamed Cecil and Co. That name stuck for 10 years before it became Centre Foundry. At the time, the plant was located in the Centre Magisterial District of Ohio County in Wheeling, Virginia.
In 1881, Centre Foundry became the first incorporated business in Ohio County, West Virginia. Between 1923 and 1927, the company outgrew its location and moved to an 11-acre tract in Warwood, where it stayed until its closure.
Young acquired control of the company in 1881 and his family owned Centre Foundry and Machine until selling it in 1979 to the Dyson-Kissner-Moran Corporation based in Poughkeepsie, New York.
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