By Robert Barron
The U.S. Gypsum plant in Blaine County celebrated its 100th birthday last fall and featured a NASCAR race car the company sponsors.
The Blaine County plant has come a long way since its founding by George Southard in 1905. It was purchased by U.S. Gypsum in 1912.
The Southard plant makes industrial bag fillers used in the manufacture of products such as dental plaster, orthopedic bandages and plastic casts. It is the purest gypsum in the company and also is used as food grade filler, as calcium supplement.
However, the majority of their products are industrial plasters, and there is a sheetrock plant at Southard.
Last year the company made 130 million feet of board, equivalent to 13,000 houses, said plant manager Bill Webber.
The Blaine County plant produces the purest grade of gypsum in the entire U.S. Gypsum organization and is the only location suitable for making the food and pharmaceutical grade products.
Gypsum also is used in the tool and casting business where automobile bodies are made and some is still used in the pottery industry, ceramic dinnerware and gypsum molds are used to make find china pieces.
Those marble counters you see in Las Vegas may also be architectural build ups and actually made from gypsum, he said.
About 300 people work at the Southard plant, and it is the employer of choice for youth who finish school and want to stay in the area.
U.S. Gypsum, with home office in Chicago, is about 250th in the top 500 industrial-sized companies in sales in the United States. They have 14,000 employees worldwide, with most of their foreign presence in Mexico and Canada.
Webber has been at the plant for 19 years and commutes round trip from Enid every day. Employees tend to stay a while, with an average tenure of about 15 years, he said.
In the future the plant will embark on a $10 million capital project, which will improve efficiencies and update the company.
“That’s quite a bit more than in recent years so it will be exciting to see the new things they are putting in,” he said.
