Benfield Industries Chemical Wood Preservative

“Benfield Industries is a company that does not exist in Haywood County today, but used to exist where the current HVO, or the Haywood Vocational Opportunities [at 172 Riverbend St in Waynesville], is. HVO is an organization that helps handicapped people find employment in Haywood County. If you go to that site today, it's a beautiful building. It looks very modern. The former industry that was located there, Benfield Chemicals or Benfield Industries, made a wide variety of chemicals. This particular chemical is a wood preservative, this object I brought. You would use Benfield's products for construction, preservation, do-it-yourself home projects, and so on. I built my house in 1982 and I was my own general contractor so I bought a lot of my own materials including this can of wood preservative. I found this can recently in my garage and I thought it was representative of what Benfield used to produce.

“The unfortunate part of Benfield was that back in the early days—not just Benfield but most industries—there was not a proper understanding of environmental impact and so many chemicals were either put into the streams or the ground. Benfield also operated its manufacturing without strict environmental regulations. In the early '90s I was working in Arden [but living in Waynesville] and I was coming home that night on the highway—the bypass that comes around Waynesville, which is a little bit elevated so you can see into the Hazelwood area—and there was this huge fire. And what I remember specifically is the fire was like a rainbow. There were all types of colors in the fire: yellows and greens and blues. It wasn't just a normal fire, and I knew it had something to do with Benfield. And then by the time I got home it was all over the radio and TV and national news: that we had this "environmental spill," if you will, and it became the only—I think it's the only—superfund site that was in Haywood County, ever. It became a superfund site with all these environmental people here for years extracting the chemicals out of the ground and trying to restore the land to its original use and not have it contaminated.

“That went on for many years, but sometime after the millennium, HVO was either given the land or acquired the land and then they built this current-day complex on top of it, all with proper environmental checks of what was there. It had been recovered by then.

“There was even part of Dayco that I used to work in that we relocated to Arden that, when we were expanding one year in the '80s we uncovered some contamination there [in Waynesville]. So, even though our part moved to Asheville there were years where this recovery [was going on in Waynesville]. We had used toluene in the process of making this one product where we dissolved the rubber with a solvent to make coatings and the toluene had not been contained, so the ground was full of contaminated groundwater. They had to put in a recovery station where the groundwater was pumped through this air system at very low levels up into the open air and for years it just pumped up the groundwater until it became contaminant-free. And then eventually that site became Walmart after Dayco was shut down.

“But the chemical side of all American industry—there weren't people doing things because they just wanted to contaminate things, people just didn't know better. There was a lot of learnings in the early part of the 20th century about manufacturing and people didn't have the knowledge of what they did, how it impacted future generations, and the possibility of contaminants. And so, what this represents, this gallon can, is something that ties directly into that.”

Interview edited for clarity

Submitted by Mike McLean on July 9, 2022