Somewhere on an interstate this morning, a car or truck is running on fluid lines designed and built in Livingston, and somewhere else a piece of machinery is holding pressure because a rubber seal from the Parker plant here came out. Out in Rickman, white oak cut from the hills around us is being milled into staves that will become the barrels in which Tennessee whiskey and Kentucky bourbon spend years aging, and most of the people who one day enjoy what comes out of those barrels will never know that part of the story started in Overton County.

The state's most recent profile of Overton County counts roughly 985 manufacturing jobs inside our borders, which comes to about one out of every six jobs in the county and makes manufacturing our largest private employer by a comfortable margin. Those jobs pay an average of nearly $54,000 a year, compared with a little over $46,000 for all jobs countywide, and when you add the people who live here and drive to a plant in a neighboring county every morning, the Census Bureau puts close to 1,900 of our residents in manufacturing, which is more than work in health care, in retail, or in any other field.

Those paychecks do not stay at the plant, because they are spent at our grocery stores and restaurants, they pay the mortgages our local banks write, and the plants themselves help carry the property tax base that pays for our schools and roads, which is why a strong manufacturing sector matters even to families who have never set foot on a production floor.

Hutchinson, whose Livingston workforce designs and produces the fluid transfer lines that go into cars and trucks, is the largest employer in Overton County of any kind, with more people on its payroll than our school system, and Parker Hannifin makes the seals and O-rings that keep engines, hydraulics, and industrial equipment from leaking, which is the sort of part nobody thinks about until one fails. The newest name on that list is American Stave Company, a subsidiary of Independent Stave Company, which opened its Rickman stave mill last fall as part of a $30 million investment and which buys white oak from loggers and landowners across this region, so that the benefit of the mill reaches well beyond its own gate and into a timber economy that has supported families here for as long as there has been an Overton County.

Alongside them are Cumberland Foam Products, which makes the foam that goes into bedding and furniture and so ends up in bedrooms and living rooms a long way from here, and WW Manufacturing, whose parent company has served the livestock industry since 1946 and whose Livingston plant produces its pregalvanized line, part of a catalog of gates, panels, alleys, sweep tubs, and rodeo equipment that is shipped to ranchers and arenas across the United States, two operations that may not carry the headcount of the plants named above but are every bit as much a part of what this county produces and ships out into the world.

Behind each of those names are machine operators, maintenance technicians, quality inspectors, engineers, and supervisors, a good many of whom have spent the better part of a career at the same plant and have watched their own children come to work alongside them.

It would not be honest to write about manufacturing this month without acknowledging what many families in our community are already living with, which is that INOAC has announced it will close its Livingston facility, with a wind-down beginning in February 2027 and operations ending that April, and that more than 200 of our neighbors will be affected. The Chamber has offered Rapid Response services to the company and will work with INOAC's local management team, alongside County Executive Austin Dodson and Mayor Lori Elder Burnett, to connect affected employees with job placement, retraining, and support, and should the company make the building available for sale or lease we will work with them, the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development, and TVA Economic Development to put it back into productive use. Those workers are also the strongest case we can make to the next employer, because a company weighing a move to rural Tennessee wants to know before anything else that it can find experienced people who know their way around a production line and want to keep working close to home.

Most new jobs in any community come from the companies already there, which is why the Chamber is sitting down this fall with the leadership of our existing industries, one plant at a time, to ask what they need in order to stay and grow here, whether that turns out to be trained workers, room to expand, better infrastructure, or simply a local partner who will pick up the phone.

Recruiting new industry is the other half of the job, and it begins with a question we cannot yet answer as well as we should, which is where a new company would go. When the state or TVA brings a project to a rural community, the first thing asked is whether there is a site with the acreage and utilities the company needs, ready on the company's schedule, and communities that cannot say yes are usually passed over without ever knowing they were considered. 

The City of Livingston has secured a $1 million state site development grant to ready 15 acres in the Livingston City Industrial Park, and we are grateful for it, but that property is the only industrial land in Overton County under public control, and a single good announcement would leave us with nothing to show the next company that calls, which is why the Chamber intends to say plainly and often that Overton County needs more industrial land.

Earlier this year our Board of Directors established a standing Economic and Community Development Committee of local business and civic leaders, and one of its first charges is to make the case to our city and county governments that land for industry deserves to be treated as the same kind of long-term public investment as a road or a water line. In practice, that means identifying tracts that are suitable and talking with the landowners who might be willing to part with them, pursuing the state, federal, and TVA programs that can help pay for acquisition and infrastructure so that local taxpayers are not asked to carry the whole cost, and bringing those opportunities before our elected leaders. 

We go into that work with real advantages, among them a workforce pipeline that runs through the Tennessee College of Applied Technology in Livingston, Volunteer State Community College, and Tennessee Tech, and partners at the state, at TVA, MTIDA, and at the Upper Cumberland Development District who have shown more than once that they are willing to bet on this county.

If you know someone who works second shift at Hutchinson, or on the line at Parker, or at the mill in Rickman, tell them this month that what they do matters. 

The Livingston/Overton County Chamber of Commerce works on behalf of more than 200 member businesses to strengthen our local economy through economic development, tourism, workforce development, small business support, and advocacy. To learn more about the Chamber's work or to become a member, call 931-823-6421, visit livingstonovertonchamber.com, or stop by the office at 222 East Main Street in Livingston.