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industrial gold |
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the incorporation of the Boyle County Industrial Foundation, a group whose behind-the-scenes work was responsible for luring most of the industry and thousands of jobs to Danville during that time.
Although the landscape has changed drastically and large scale manufacturing operations are harder to come by, the foundation is still the primary organization that attempts to attract and keep industry.
One of the group’s more remarkable characteristics is its four elected presidents in five decades. After Bruce Montgomery led the group at its inception, it was helmed through 27 mostly booming years by John Hill Bailey, Jr. before the tenures of John Camenisch and Joe Gibson.
Current president of the foundation's board of directors and president of Caldwell Stone, John Albright, has been on the board since 1999 and represents one of many links to the beginning. His father, D.K. Albright, also the president of Caldwell Stone, was a board member for 30 years.
"There has really been amazing continuity over the years," Albright said. "Things have changed with how you have to do some things, but John Hill Bailey and the others who started the foundation were very smart. They had the same goals we do today."
The group developed out of a committee of the Chamber of Commerce when members of that group looked around and saw the success larger communities like Lexington and Louisville were having with their own industrial development organizations.
"Vivid evidence of people driving out of Boyle County to work every day can be noted by cars parked at various road intersections toward Lexington where car pools are assembled for driving daily to work at other locations," read a portion of one of the body's founding documents.
In order to be successful in landing industry, they decided, the community needed a group to perpetually raise money for buying land.
Initially, board members were shareholders who purchased their shares without expectation of receiving dividends. Instead of profiting from investments as some industrial foundations had in the past, they reinvested any money made from land sales for future land purchases and development.
Current industrial foundation president Jody Lassiter, who is also the head of the Danville-Boyle County Industrial Foundation, has immersed himself in the history of the organization since coming to Danville in 2007. Many communities were forming private industrial foundations 50 years, but Lassiter credited the foresight of the Boyle County group's early leaders to position themselves to take advantage of companies moving operations to the south.
"What gave Danville the edge was buying and developing properties to where they were ready to go," Lassiter said. "It was about preparation, so when opportunity knocked they had the sites available."
A pivotal move during the group's first few years was the acquisition of what until that time had been 330 acres of farmland on Lebanon Road. Most of the large industrial operations have been located there ever since.
Bailey is the man most credit with industrializing post-World War II Danville and Boyle County, which had been a mercantile center to a some extent, but remained largely agrarian. He was known for his ability to work with companies and the state Department of Commerce, as well as his overall philosophy about which companies to recruit.
Those who were, or are still, on the board continue to sing his praises as both a leader and a person.
Walter L. Goggin, now the foundation’s treasurer, was recruited to join the group in the 1980s when he said Bailey was looking to bring some younger blood onto the board.
"He was a man of integrity who always wanted to do things right and never cut corners," Goggin said.
The industrial park bears Bailey's name, but the kinds of industry that have come to Boyle County over the years may be the most indelible mark he left. Bailey was known to be particular about the kinds of companies the foundation went after, or in many cases, wandered through the door.
"He delighted in recruiting good industries he and the board felt were clean and would be good corporate citizens," Gibson said. "It was very important to him that they would participate in the community and organizations like the United Way."
The company Bailey worked for also played a role in the foundation's leadership and in working with prospective businesses.
He started his career as a district manager for Kentucky Utilities and moved on to become economic development manager tasked with promoting the creation of local development groups. Around the time the industrial foundation was formed, industries often dealt as much with the major utilities as they did local governments in deciding where to locate.
