Our mission is simple: to provide the best products and service to our customers at the lowest prices possible. We take great pride in our company, our commitment to customer service and in the products we sell. Our online store is designed to provide you with a safe and secure environment to browse our product catalog.

Who are we? Ron & Elaine Highsmith

Ron & I moved to rural East Tennessee from Santa Cruz, CA in the spring of 1985 when I was 4 months pregnant with our son, Akiah. We immediately realized that we were going to have to create our own employment in our extremely economically depressed new home. Initially Ron & his father, Ray, partnered on a portable sawmill with which we finished our house.  Not long after Ron built a solar dry kiln, which was followed by a small dehumidification unit. We were contacted by our local soil conservationist and area non-profit and offered a matching grant to build a larger dry kiln as a demonstration project.  In 1995 on Earth Day, we purchased the former Rock Hill School at public auction. This is when Ron’s dream of Full Cycle Woodworks became reality. He had envisioned a business that began in the forest, selectively logging, then sawing to lumber, kiln drying and then sold as kiln dried lumber or becoming a finished product such as flooring, moldings, cabinets & furniture. It probably doesn’t sound that radical, but, there were no models to follow. No one else we’d heard of was doing all this and with a very small local crew. We cross trained employees so that they could not only cut down trees and run a saw mill but set up a molder, plane lumber etc. It was exciting; we had been able to not only create jobs for ourselves, but a number of local folks as well. We were also showing by example that it is possible to log a timber boundary and have it look great afterwards,  then NOT sell the logs, but continue to “add value” by sawing, drying and creating finished products right here with our local crew. Keeping the profit here in our poor community. Over the years we have built a “stash” of natural edge wood slabs that we now make into tables, benches, desks etc. These are mostly made from forked logs “crotches” and species of wood that are not considered commercially valuable and are often just left in the woods to rot or made into firewood.

We were the first land owners in the Southeast to be certified sustainable by SmartWood. We have been members of Green America for years. We have been included in articles in the publications Fine Woodworking, Woodshop News, and Nature Conservancy’s magazine among others. We have consulted land owners and educated the public by offering workshops on forest management, tree identification and grading, handling & drying lumber....Elaine Highsmith

Our area is mostly forest. At Full Cycle Woodworks our work is based on forest products. Our goal is to manage the resource base in a way that provides us employment while we maintain and improve it. I need knowledge and understanding of this diverse, complex resource base. What I harvest will have to generate income and all harvests are part of management. Common sense tells me if I live in the forest it is in my best interest to take care of the neighborhood. Where I live we have three separate landowners joined together with similar interests, cumulative effect is 700 acres which is different than individual parcels. I'm talking hundreds of acres while millions of acres in Tennessee have no logging regulations and in economic hard times the immediate dollar is the manager. I find this a challenge and quite interesting....merging that immediate need for a dollar with the management of the forest resource. My view is to keep it long term, develop products, marketing directly to the consumer. This does not fit economy of scale according to what they teach at the university. Fully integrated and cross trained is what we need. We have to process it all, here, and sell it directly to the consumer...so full integration...top to bottom. Everyone has to be cross trained so the long term employee will not only know ten different edible mushrooms, how to skin bark, grade lumber, set up a moulder, run a cnc router, some will even write gcode for tool paths. This is not rocket science, it’s what we need to do to take care of our forest land and the folks who choose to live here.

Currently we have no logging regulations and over 99% of the trees cut here are hauled away in log form. Those distant corporations determine our local forest management. Our local high school graduates looking for a job can't tell poplar from oak whether it's on the stump or lumber form and those are the most common species, basswood or buckeye, no clue. I have asked them what is 3/8 and 1/4 and they look at me like it's some kind of a trick question. On my side of the mountain we don't have much internet access, which seems to enhance computer skills. These graduates need to be trained and that will be expensive. Why don't they learn this stuff in school? I want somebody to measure a board, then cut it. I want them to know what an early wood cell is, cambium layer, wet/dry bulb depression. This is not rocket science; it is the proper information to work with forest products. Logs sawn to lumber, drying the lumber, developing products and markets, manufacturing those products then shipping them directly to the consumer. We are not doing these things now and 60% of our area land generates just a handful of jobs. We all pay for those jobs in the form of potholes, left from the logging trucks hauling our logs out of the country. I have brought this issue to my political and scholastic leaders and the situation has only worsened, despite their shallow, empty rhetoric to the contrary.

So here we are at Full Cycle Woodworks. We have an accumulation of information, skills and equipment. We still live in the woods and are taking better care of it; we are influencing others to manage their resources also. We need your business, if it involves wood we can probably provide it. Let us know your project. Thanks...Ron Highsmith