Davey Tree Flipbooks

33 32 Growth Rings privately owned, with the majority ownership residing with the Bemis Company, Inc., a maker of textile bags and packaging. Cowan's first duty there had been to take MACtac public – his experience was the main reason Myers brought Cowan to Davey. Myers saw the idea of making the Davey Company a publicly traded entity a poten- tial future path for the firm. e company was already struggling to find long-term leadership within the family after eight-plus decades and three generations of Daveys at the helm. Such a move could open the door to outside management personnel, which might be a solution to the leadership problem. "Joe was a very bright guy," Cowan recalled in a 2016 interview. "He was a very sharp CEO. He had started, developed, and sold several companies. He was a very successful businessman, but always in a manufacturing background. And you really can't appreciate the Davey Company culture and what it is and how it works unless you've been there for a while, and you've worked your way up through the system." ankfully, Cowan never got the chance to take Davey public and instead played a crucial role in the employee acquisition. Expansion in the 1970s In the early 1970s, Davey once again started expanding its real estate holdings through acquisitions of smaller firms and land purchases for field facilities. Growth through acquisition included the 1970 purchase of Campe Tree Service Company in Richmond, Virginia, specializing in tree-care work in a market where Davey had not operated for several years. at same year, Davey acquired Ridgwell Nursery in Norfolk, Virginia, and closed the nursery but continued the landscape work, which was the principal business. Davey also made several significant acquisitions in the Northeast. e Eddy B. Jenner Tree Service Co., a small, private tree-care company became part of the Davey Company in 1971. Jenner Tree was founded in 1932 and provided tree pruning, feeding, spraying, landscaping, and other services. Jenner Tree carried a special connection to Davey: it operated in Tarrytown, New York, which briefly served as the location of Davey Tree's unofficial headquarters from the spring of 1907 until the fall of 1908. Martin L. Davey, Sr., used the office there while gaining lucrative business in the Hudson River valley, tending to the estates of some of the world's wealthiest businessmen such as Heinz, Colgate, Rockefeller, and Archbold. Davey acquired the Parr and Hanson Tree Co., working on Long Island, New York, in 1972. Like Davey, Parr and Hanson provided shade tree spraying, tree pruning, cabling, tree fertilization and other services. Also in 1972, Davey bought Pine Knoll Nurseries, Inc., in Suffern, New York, about 30 miles northeast of Manhattan. Pine Knoll represented Davey's first experience in running a garden center and retail estab- lishment. e move drew little attention at the time, but Pine Knoll would come to play a substantial role in the company's future. Davey Tree embarked on an extensive project for the Eastman Kodak Company in Henrietta, New York, in 1971. e Eastman Kodak Company was selling millions of cameras and countless rolls of film worldwide by 1970 and had a considerable presence in the state. A new Kodak marketing and education center called for Davey's expertise to grade and plant the corporate lawns while installing trees and other plant- ings. Davey created 21 acres of fine lawn for the new building, which required mixing in 27,000 cubic yards of peat to improve the soil while removing 45 tons of rock. Davey and Kodak had a rich history together before this. George Eastman, the founder of Kodak, had an expansive estate in the Rochester, New York, area in the early 1900s, and he had been a great admirer of Davey and his science of tree surgery. Davey had a passion for photography, something he employed at great lengths in crafting his groundbreaking book, e Tree Doctor. In the fall of 1908, Eastman invited John Davey to present a lecture on tree care to the wealthiest and most prominent citizens of the Rochester area. So many requests for tree care work came out of the meeting that all available Davey employees in the region were quickly swamped with work. Around the same time as the Kodak job, Davey broke ground on an expansion at the Kent Shop to handle the increased volume of new equipment being outfitted for the field and to address older machinery in need of repair. Money spent buying equipment and machinery was approaching $2 million per year. "We are as much an equipment-operating company as we are a tree-service company," the 1972 annual report states. "e equipment is costly and subject to rapid deterioration if operated Chapter 2 is new Davey office opened in Troy, Michigan, in 1973 to serve the Detroit area. e company opened dozens of new facilities in the 1970s. Garner Patterson and crew remove close to 10 large trees that were uprooted in the rear of the Paul Davey home on Park Avenue in Kent, Ohio, following a tornado in June 1973.

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