September 2024

MABEN, W.Va. — It’s almost a cliché for people who spend their lives working in colder states further north to retire down south in sunny Florida for their golden years. Logger Jack Griffin did the opposite: he left Florida to retire in the snow of West Virginia. But then, Griffin is no stranger to going against the grain of the prevailing culture around him.

Griffin, 70, owner of Griffin Log- ging LLC, is a Florida native who’s spent almost his whole life either farming or logging. And he’d been logging in Florida for nearly 25 years, with no thought in his mind of going anywhere else, when it started to look like maybe God had other plans for him in the second half of his life.

Back in 1995, Georgia-Pacific had been after him for some time to come up to West Virginia to consult on an OSB plant they were starting up. “They wanted me to give them some ideas on using mechanical logging, because there wasn’t any mechanical logging in this area to speak of at that time,” Griffin recollects. “There were only one or two crews that even had semis; they were all tandems and pup trailers.”

It was an extremely cold day in Florida in late February that year when Griffin, who hadn’t been especially interested in making the trip, finally relented and agreed, he says, just to get GP off his back. With his wife and son, who was 6 at the time, Griffin loaded up that afternoon and drove all night, arriving in West Virginia at 3 in the morning. He had never been in snow before, but the turnpike that night was covered in it, and his rear wheel drive car from Florida struggled to make it.

On the way to the meeting he saw a place for sale, so after he had finished with GP, Griffin retuned to check it out. “It was only four acres with a house, but it was on a creek with a waterfall. Coming from Florida into all that snow covered land, it was like paradise,” he says.