Spotlight on Missouri Business
Success of McGinnis Wood Products in Cuba helps “stave” off demise of
long-time Missouri industry
Governor Nixon lauds McGinnis Wood Products for its more than four decades of business success
during a visit to the cooperage in Cuba on January 19.
The white oak trees that dot southern Missouri are what help make the Ozarks one of the nation’s truly unique landscapes. These beauties of nature are what once made the state a bastion of what are called stave mills, or places where staves, the individual wood
strips that form the sides of a barrel, are made. Back in the 1940’s, there were more than 80 stave mills in the state of Missouri, taking advantage of the nearby abundance of white oaks.
Today, there are only five stave mills left in Missouri. Leaving McGinnis Wood Products of Cuba, and its 81-year old founder Leroy McGinnis, as a flagship to a shrinking Show-Me State industry.
“I didn’t start the company to be famous,” Leroy told an interviewer in 2011. “I just wanted to make a good product that could keep a business running for my kids to make a living at. But to a certain extent, every country in the world gets some of our barrels.”
That would be wine and whiskey barrels, which McGinnis Wood Products produces and sells to customers around the world. The company produces approximately 500 barrels a day from its location in Crawford County, shipping more than 120,000 barrels to distilleries and
wineries across the U.S. and overseas to Scotland, Spain, France, China and Japan.
Which suggests that while the stave mill industry in Missouri may seem to be withering on the vine, the company Leroy McGinnis founded in 1968 with a single building and eight employees is thriving. Today, McGinnis Wood Products has four buildings in Cuba that range in size
between 8,000 and 22,000 square feet, eight dry kilns, and 140 employees.
McGinnis purchases all of its wood products from within a 100-mile radius of Cuba, where truckloads of logs arrive at the company to begin the process. The wood is cut into long, narrow strips (staves) and then either prepared to used as wine staves or bourbon staves, with wine
staves stored outside to be dried and the bourbon staves dried in kilns. Once dried, the staves are ready to be used to make a barrel. The pieces of wood are cut to the appropriate length, bended and shaped into position, and eventually bonded with head rings on each side to hold
the barrel together. The final step is to actually burn the inside of the barrels with a propane torch, which is key to giving the spirits aged inside the barrels their distinctive taste and color.
The hard work of Leroy McGinnis and his family-owned business – his sons Don and Jack run the day-to-day operation of the business, with help from Leroy’s wife, two sons-in-law and six grandchildren – has turned McGinnis Wood Products into a small-town, home grown Missouri business
that manufactures the finest crafted white oak barrels in the world. The company’s Hogshead and Bourbon and Whiskey Barrels are now prized both domestically and internationally for the unique flavors they give to the products stored inside of them.
McGinnis Wood Products is none other than a Missouri small business success story, one that was cited by Governor Nixon upon his visit to the famed cooperage in Cuba on January 19th.
“What the folks here at McGinnis do every day is part of the hardworking spirit that is special about Missouri,” Gov. Nixon said. “This family-owned business was founded more than 40 years ago, and today, it has grown into a global player in its industry, employing about 140 workers
here in Crawford County. This is exactly the type of story we want to hear about in communities all across our state.”
“Whether it’s the men and women who manufacture vehicles, or folks like these who make some of the finest oak barrels in the world,” said the Governor, “ we value the good folks who arrive early and stay late to ensure that the job gets done.”
The job has clearly been getting done for decades at McGinnis Wood Products in Cuba, which is poised to keep rolling out the barrels for wine and whiskey lovers for the foreseeable future.
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