Over one hundred years of high quality wood products.

For over 150 years, our family has been manufacturing and distributing quality forest products. Our story begins in the mid 1800s when Hugh Shiels arrived in the Ohio river valley from Ireland. On the banks of the Ohio, he set up a veneer mill and a hardwood mill.

In the latter part of the 1800s, Hugh's son Charles opened his own lumber distribution company to service the burgeoning industrial markets in the Cincinnati area, ranging from supplying foundries for machine tool manufacturing to furniture and cabinet building.

The company eventually wound up in the hands of Charles' youngest son Richard, who pushed heavily into the domestic hardwood markets. In 1965 Richard's son Dan (our president) began working for his father as a janitor after school. Richard passed suddenly in 1968, leaving the company to his wife Marjorie.

In 1971 Dan graduated from the National Hardwood Lumber Association Inspector Training School. Following inspection school, he moved to the east coast where he graded imported species at the Port of Baltimore and domestic production at sawmills before returning to Cincinnati a few years later.

Dan was able to work his way up through the company, building a strong reputation for impeccable service and top notch quality, ultimately serving as President from 1986-2010. Having grown up with his dad taking him down to the yard, Chase started in the summer of 1999 in between school until his dad's departure in 2010, doing everything from cleaning bathrooms to working at the dry kilns and meeting with vendors. Today, he's responsible for overseeing day to day operations, technology, and driving future growth.

Today, Whitewater represents the sole fifth generation of our family in the lumber business. This gives us the advantage of a long term outlook rather than concerns about meeting a quarterly earnings goal and gives our customers, vendors, and employees the security of knowing there's a strong succession plan in place to continue the company.

We pride ourselves on running one of the most modern operations in the industry, and invest heavily in it because we know what it takes to stick around for the long haul. From a state of the art computerized millwork plant to maximize yield and minimize production time to a mobile dispatched fleet, our goal is to provide the best experience for our customers, team members, and vendors - without them, we wouldn't be here.

150+ years in we feel it’s safe to say that both quality and sustainability are our ingrained into our DNA.

This isn't just what we do, this is who we are.