EACOM celebrates 70 years in Nairn Centre

EACOM Celebrates a Milestone EACOM's Nairn Centre Sawmill is celebrating its 70th anniversary. CTV's Molly Frommer was there.

The EACOM Sawmill in Nairn Centre, located about 50 kilometers southwest of Sudbury, celebrated a major milestone today.

The Sawmill has been operating for 70 years now. Over that timeframe, the facility has been forced to adjust with the changing times and increased use of technology.

“Making mining timbers for the mining industry and then ships for the pulp mill, that was started in 1920’s,” says Wade Zammit, EACOM Vice President. “So what’s changed? Everything’s changed! The way we operate in the forest has changed, the sustainability issues, the replanting responsibilities and environmental responsibilities.”

Since 2015, EACOM has invested more than twelve million dollars into technology and equipment upgrades into the facility.

“In the materials, handling the technologies helped us increase our speeds, productivity, there for our costs,” Zammit says. “The optimization technology has helped us in improving the extraction of the value product from the log.”

Today’s celebration was attended by employees of the facility, both past and present. Its workforce has grown in size from 19 to the current roster of 170 employees.

For some, like Jean-Claude Hebert, EACOM has been a part of their life for decades.

“I started off down the old sawmill they had, everything was running by the old time like carriage and everything that’s run by steam”

Meanwhile, others have had multiple generations of their families employed at the facility.

“Four generations of my family have been at the Nairn Centre site,” says Lisa Bouillon, who currently works for EACOM. “My father worked as an operator for years, my grandfather worked as a supervisor for a period of time and my great-grandfather came over right from Folliet when they first opened the property.”

The company is proud of the difference it has made in the local community over the years through various charitable donations. This year it will be donating supplies to update the welcome signs.

“I kind of came up with the idea to that our town welcome signs are based on logging,” says Laurier Falldien, the Mayor of Nairn and Hyman. “They’re manufactured out of logs and timbers so I thought ‘wouldn’t it be cool if we had an old two man saw,’ which was how the industry kind of started back in the day when it was still horses to look like they were embedded in the top logs of our welcome signs.”

Officials are hoping to have the new signs finished before the beginning of winter.