It's a short list, the number of businesses in Jefferson County that have been under the same ownership for 30 years or more.

One of the most family-friendly of these success stories is Edensaw Woods, Ltd., which celebrates its 30th anniversary with a public event this Saturday, Aug. 16.

Jim “Kiwi” Ferris and Charlie Moore began Edensaw in 1984 in Ferris' backyard with a couple of blue tarps and a pickup truck. Now it's a huge business with 41 employees, buying and selling wood all over the world. They moved to their Seton Road location in 1988 and built a warehouse that, at the time, seemed far too big.

“It was massive," Ferris said. "We wondered why we needed it so big.”

By 1992, it wasn’t big enough. They built a second, which is now used as a millhouse; then a third in 2006; there's also a a 15,000-square-foot warehouse in Tacoma, used as a staging and drop-off point and housing the inventory of veneers.

Edensaw is a family business in many ways. People seem to like being there and to care for each other and for the community. The business has spent a lot of time helping others, and know the loss of their own.

“We’re still getting through the loss of Charlie [Moore],” Ferris said. Moore died on March 11, 2013 after a long battle with cancer.

Employees tend to stay there. Arthur Franklin, the company’s first employee, just retired two years ago.

Several other employees are related: Adam Henley and his son Ross; Trampas Minnihan and his daughter Trisha; Minnihan’s cousin, Brenda Ryan, and her daughter Lily Martin; Dennis Stickle and daughter Melinda Stickle; and Ferris’ eldest son, Buster.

Jimmy Argites has worked there about 18 years as “head go-fer,” he joked. “We all kind of get along and do whatever needs to get done.”

BOATS, CABINETS

Ferris came to Port Townsend from New Zealand in 1979 aboard a sailboat called Ishmael, arriving just in time to be in the first class of students at the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding. The last boat he worked on was Grail, a 47-foot schooner, of fir, with oak frames and a Port Orford cedar deck.

Wood for boats is about 28 percent of Edensaw’s business; about 25 percent goes to cabinets, he said. About 1 percent of sales happen online, but Ferris said it’s hard to know how much business the website draws. “People call and want to talk about” the products they see online, he noted.

To buy the best product, Ferris travels to Central America, plywood plants in China, to Germany to look at veneers, and to Ghana and the Congo for sapele, bubinga (African rosewood) and makore.

In a few months, he'll go to a sawmill in Europe to direct the cutting of some African sapele logs he bought about a month ago. It’ll air-dry until June or July of next year, he said, then go into a dry kiln for about six to eight weeks before being “packaged, shipped and containerized” and sent here.

LESSON IN BUYING

The first container of wood he bought was in Gulfport, Mississippi, from the Newman Lumber Co. (A train car container costs about $3,200 to ship across the country; on a semi truck it costs about $6,000, he noted).

When Edensaw was still a couple of tarps in Ferris' backyard, he and Moore would drive a pickup truck to suppliers in Seattle, find trade magazines in the waiting rooms and stuff them in their bags – they wanted to find out where the Seattle suppliers were getting their wood. Flicking through one of these pilfered magazines, they saw a hardwoods meeting happening in Los Angeles, starting in just two days.

“I got the short straw, I guess, and went,” Ferris said. There he met Roy Newman of Newman Hardwoods, who took him out to dinner.

“You can imagine what a lumber baron from 30 years ago was like. Heavy drinker, heavy smoker and the deer antlers behind the desk," Ferris said. “I was just a young punk.”

Ferris wanted to buy some Honduras mahogany. “Roy said, ‘We got plenty.’” So Ferris went to see him in Gulfport.

“I’d never seen so much ... wood,” Ferris said of Newman’s warehouses. “20 to 30 million board feet, sheds and sheds and sheds of mahogany.” In his office (“dark walnut paneling, smoky ceiling tiles, deer's head"), Newman offered Ferris a cigar.

"And he pulls out a cigar this big and this big around, and he calls the boys in and we sat there for an hour and a half, two hours, and chatted about things, and lumber. We wanted long Honduras mahogany, really nice stuff for the boat guys," Ferris recalled.

"He says, ‘how you gonna pay?’ I said, ‘I guarantee I can do it in 90 days, but I can probably do it in 60 days.' He says, ‘you’re telling me you want to buy a whole truckload … and I don’t even know who you are?’” And Ferris said, “Yes, that’s kinda what I’m asking.”

Newman asked “the boys" what they thought, and they hemmed and hawed before Newman said he’d do it, said "I trust you.”

Ferris paid him in 60 days.

Pretty soon, Edensaw was buying 20-25 containers a year from Newman. “And I never, ever dreamt of going somewhere else to buy Honduras mahogany.”

Honduras mahogany is the name of the species that grows in Brazil, Peru, Cuba, and Central America. Brazil was a mainstay of Honduras mahogany imports to the U.S. and when they banned its export about eight or 10 years ago, prices got so high, the furniture business wanted to find something more cost-effective; hence the switch to African mahogany and sapele.

FOREST MANAGEMENT

Edensaw is the 51st member of the Forest Stewardship Council, an organization that tries to ensure responsible forest management.

“You have to be very diligent on where your product is coming from and how responsible the harvesting methods are,” said Ferris. “The good thing is so much of the world’s forests have become FSC certified … It’s not just the timber industry” cutting trees, he said. “It’s not just logging. A lot of it is, like, soybean farmers going in and clearing thousands of acres to plant soybeans for a few years.”

Edensaw practices social responsibility as well, with its Edensaw Community Cancer Foundation (ECCF). In 2002, a customer in Bremerton asked Argites if there was a Relay for Life in Port Townsend, and Edensaw's management decided to make it happen.

“We were instrumental in bringing Relay for Life to Port Townsend,” Ferris said. Their Relay for Life team raised about $125,000 in the next five years, he said.

Ferris said they decided, “why don’t we start our own nonprofit? We’re pretty good at raising money.” In 2007, ECCF received its 501(c)(3) standing. “We’ve given about $180,000 to people in East Jefferson County since then,” helping about 200 people pay medical bills. In 2014 they've raised more than $14,000 so far; the employees' regular donations out of their paychecks adds up to about $10,000-$12,000 each year.

Hospitals in Sequim and Bremerton have Edensaw’s information and know to contact them when people from Jefferson County are there who are struggling to pay their bills. Contact Edensaw at 385-7878 for more information; they're willing to help.

Visit Edensaw at their anniversary party this Saturday, 11 a.m.-7 p.m., Aug. 16, at 211 Seton Road.