For more than a century, North Carolina has been a major player in the furniture industry in North America, and now there is a book that targets that influential region’s furniture-making history.

Eric Medlin’s new book, Sawdust in Your Pockets, charts the course of furniture production in North Carolina from its earliest beginnings in the 1600s through its railroad-fueled growth after the Civil War, on through its competition with Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the 20th century, and the challenges it now faces in the 21st century.

Medlin hails from Raleigh and is a history instructor at Wake Technical Community College. 

He has written several previous regional histories. 

This book focuses on furniture as the third leg — with tobacco and textiles — holding up North Carolina’s economy. 

From that perspective, the book details the growth and demise of many companies, detailing their contributions to the region.
From the Civil War onward, Medlin makes clear that the fortunes of North Carolina’s furniture industry are tied inextricably to a search for lower cost labor and ready supplies to manufacture furniture. 

The post-Civil War boom was tied to railroads and forests that could supply lumber for manufacturing as well as provide a ready path to markets. 

There was also a symbiotic relationship between furniture and the state’s textile industry when it came to making upholstered furniture. 

Through much of the 20th century, cheap labor in North Carolina tipped the scales in its favor in competition with furniture manufacturing in the Grand Rapids region. 

Then cheap labor worked against North Carolina as Asian manufacturers began to compete for furniture markets.

Sawdust in Your Pockets takes its title from an expression about the large number of people who worked in the industry during its heyday and came home from factories covered with sawdust. 

But that vivid human picture is the exception in this book that focuses more on companies than people. 

Certainly a few successful entrepreneurs are highlighted, but the book is largely a tale of the rise and fall of firms without a lot of detail about what went on inside those factories.

While there is a lot of discussion of the importance of cheap labor, there is little discussion about the industry’s failure to compete on the world stage with automation and technology. 

Of course, Medlin is not alone in this oversight. 

Another book that covers some of the history of the furniture industry, Michael K. Dugan’s The Furniture Wars, posits a north-south battle in the industry, but also fails to address the industry’s slowness to automate. 

Companies in North Carolina and elsewhere were all too ready to ship production to Asia rather than invest in upgrading production at home.

This book does discuss North Carolina’s ongoing key role in the furniture industry as represented by the High Point Market, and Medlin sees that has a portent of continuing health for the industry.

All in all, the book is a fascinating look at a significant industry in a significant region of North America.