Milling Around

Superior Artisan Wood repurposes downed trees and stands up for the environment.

Written by Eugene Stockstill | Photos by Joe Worthem

Chad Fletcher and Allen Murphree own and operate Superior Artisan Wood in Lee County,

one of the only companies in the state that repurposes urban wood.

What exactly is wood repurposing? Well, let’s say your favorite aunt had a gigantic tree fall in her backyard during Winter Storm Fern, but she hates the idea of burning it up or having it hauled off to the landfill.

Enter Fletcher and Murphree, who can come to her house, cut up the tree and take it to their shop, where it could be transformed into a lovely mantelpiece, a rocking chair and other pieces of furniture inside a family’s dream home.

But there’s much more to the guys’ work than that. Trees absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen into the environment while they are alive and well, but they release CO2 when burning or decomposing. 

Four billion “board feet” of wood go to waste in the United States every year, Fletcher said. A board foot is 1-inch thick, 12-inches long and 12-inches high. Four billion board feet is the length of 270 trips from Los Angeles to New York City. Every year.

That equals a whole bunch of carbon emissions into the atmosphere for no good reason, warming an already much-too-hot environment, Fletcher said.

That’s why one of the small business’ primary goals is to convince Oxford or Tupelo or some other city or town in Mississippi to step up and initiate a municipal urban wood program.

Such programs can be found in places from coast to coast, and federal money is available to support such efforts, too.

“We’ll get our community one day,” said Fletcher, adding that he believes when one town makes the commitment, others will follow. “The benefits are tremendous.”

For the time being, Fletcher and Murphree content themselves with running a company committed to making the most of one of this state’s most important and overlooked resources.

“I’m an absolute tree hugger,” said Murphree. So is his partner. And both are quick to point out that just because a tree can no longer stand upright and provide the beauty, shade and food that are so easy to take for granted does not mean it can’t help us.

Trees damaged by disease or upended by storms are their specialty. They can come to you, or you can go to them. Their basic way of advertising? Word of mouth.

And because of how their company is set up, they can process much larger pieces of wood that bigger companies reject. Superior’s current portable mill can handle a piece that’s 60 inches in diameter. That’s a big tree, y’all.

Superior started in 2017 after Fletcher began milling wood to help build his family’s house, then he began looking for a new career. Not long after that, he teamed up with longtime friend Murphree, who had some trees down in his yard.

And just like that, a new joint venture between the clean-cut Fletcher and the bearded Murphree came into being.

Superior Artisan Wood is located on a sprawling piece of property in the Lee County hamlet of Palmetto. Their shop, as it were, is a shaded, grassy area out back, where the portable mill sits not far from a big pond. A drying kiln is nearby. Large, locked iron gates out front keep cows from wandering off.

Samples of their work are all over north Mississippi. They helped a family build a new house at Lake Darden. They’ve got pieces hanging on the walls or being used as furniture at the Union County Heritage Museum in New Albany. They processed one piece of wood at

Tammy Wynette’s old home in Tremont that they had to lift onto multiple blocks before they could make a single cut. They’ve sold wood to luthiers for guitars and dulcimers. They’ve even fashioned a toddler-sized serving spoon.

Here’s the process in a nutshell. Reclaimed wood gets cut, then air-dried, then dried in a kiln, then smoothed (called planing). All of that can take months to complete, just for a single piece of wood.

The day of this interview, Fletcher donned his goggles and started to plane a large piece of black walnut, which already resembled a pretty groovy looking tabletop. This reporter, standing several dozen feet away, caught a few wood shavings in the eye. Wood can move.

And, said Murphree, wood can keep moving long after you think it should. One customer ordered a piece of red oak, which at one point in the process seemed to have swelled to dimensions much larger than the order’s specs. Sometime later, that piece had shrunk back to the ordered size.

Dead wood still on the move? Really?

“Red oak really likes to move around,” Murphree said. “Wood is the only thing I know that acts like it’s still alive,” even when it’s not supposed to be.

Learn more about Superior Artisan Wood, their craftsmanship and their offerings online at superiorartisanwood.com.