Lodge Manufacturing constructs biggest building in Marion County

Photo by Chattanooga Times Free Press

Marion County manufacturing is in the news!

NEW HOPE, TENN. — Construction crews are erecting the biggest building ever built in Marion County — and one with one of the flattest floors in America.

The 212,000-square-foot distribution center is being built for Lodge Manufacturing Co., which plans to consolidate its four other warehouse facilities into the new complex by May. The new distribution center will store thousands of Lodge cast iron skillets, dutch ovens and other cookware before they are shipped to customers around the globe.

The $9 million complex, which is being built by Morgan Construction Co., is designed to include a super flat floor to allow distribution workers to use wire-guided lift trucks to store and retrieve inventory stacked on shelves in the 50-foot-high complex. To allow the fork lift operators to lift tons of cast iron cookware on to upper shelves along the 33 aisles that span the massive new complex, the concrete floor in the building was laid over the past two weeks with a variance of less than .0015 of an inch across a building that spans the size of nearly four football fields.

Read more at Chattanooga Times Free Press.