Doug Bassett is larger than life. A six-foot-plus barrel of a man, his voice booms through the headquarters of America’s largest manufacturer of wooden bedroom furniture, in the small Virginia town of Galax. Beds and dressers, chests and nightstands are his speciality, made from maple, oak and cherry grown in the surrounding hills. But being here at all is nearly a miracle. “We are literally the last man standing,” he says. 

Doug and his brother Wyatt are the fourth generation of Bassetts in charge of the Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Company, now one of the few survivors in what half a century ago was the biggest region of furniture making on the planet, straddling southwest Virginia and North Carolina. A 21st century increase in Chinese imports saw most of their rivals go to the wall. But the brothers and their father dug in, fighting back against the competition from the Asian market, and sticking with the Appalachian hardwoods that they knew their customers liked best.  

“If this company was owned by financiers a thousand miles away, it would have shut twenty years ago. They would just order in from China, or Vietnam or Malaysia,” says Doug. “But that’s not who we are. There’s pride here in helping our local town and economy.” Pride too in using local timber, and in the family dynasty, now in its fourth generation in charge of the company.

Doug is company’s president and chief salesman. His brother is the CEO and runs the factory day-to-day. Their father, John D Bassett III, at 85, is chairman and still comes into the office every day. As Doug talks, we can hear John booming in an outer office. The voice runs in the family – like sawdust.

Vaughan-Bassett began making furniture in Galax in 1919, as America’s furniture business came south. “Every American manufacturer of wood furniture was based within a couple of hundred miles of here,” says Doug. The area had three advantages: there were still abundant timber reserves in this part of the Blue Ridge Mountains; there was a local traditional of woodworking among Moravian and Quaker communities; and there was a plentiful supply of labour that was cheaper than further north. 

Business peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, as a generation of college-educated baby-boomers bought homes and filled them with furniture. But boom turned to bust after a 1999 trade agreement between the U.S. and China unleashed a torrent of cheap imports of copy-cat Asian furniture at knock-down prices. 

American manufacturers closed in droves – five big firms shut in Galax alone – or switched to importing Chinese product. But the Bassetts fought back. They knew their markets, had confidence in the superiority of their home-grown product, and kept the faith. And they played hardball, too.

First, they headed to China, where Wyatt tracked down a factory on the remote border with North Korea that was using Russian timber to make thousands of dressers identical to a Vaughan-Bassett design. The dressers, he discovered, were being sold in the U.S. at below what the materials alone would have cost in the U.S. or another market economy. So, John headed to Washington to lobby federal agencies to launch an anti-dumping investigation. And when the case was won, he successfully lobbied the government to introduce import levies. 

Then Doug hit the road. He eyeballed trade buyers in salesrooms and retail stores across America, pushing the virtues of his furniture, made from authentic quality American hardwoods, and decrying the knockoffs assembled from Asian pine, acacia and rubber wood. 

“All our lumber comes from within a day’s drive of our factory,” Doug says. “And for every tree we use, we plant another somewhere in Virginia: oak for oak, maple for maple, and cherry for cherry.” That’s over two million trees since 2007.

The push-back paid off. “The import levies were too late to save most American manufacturers. But they saved us,” says Doug. The business was back on track, and cornering the market in Made-in-America beds. The triumph has become an industry legend. Journalist Beth Macy wrote a bestseller on the Bassett bedroom dynasty, with John as its patriotic hero, Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local – and Helped Save an American Town. 

That town, Galax, is most famous to outsiders as the home of Appalachian blue-grass music. The Old Fiddlers Convention has been going here for over 80 years. But for most locals, Appalachian lumber is what sustains their lives. In a community of just 6,700 people, 500 have jobs with the Bassetts. “Often, their fathers and uncles and grandmothers worked here too,” says Doug. “Furniture knowledge is handed down from generation to generation.”

Vaughan-Bassett is the last furniture manufacturer in town, but a couple of streets away there is another woodworking survivor of the shift to manufacturing in Asia. Turman Hardwood Flooring still employs 160 people making solid decorative hardwood floorboards, displaying the rich grain and coloring of oak, hickory and maple. There too, they believe they could be based nowhere else. “Appalachian lumber is considered some of the best wood in the world,” says plant manager Mark Pennington. “The red and white oak especially grow real slow, making the wood harder, which is great for flooring that can last for 50 years or more.” 

Back at Vaughan-Bassett’s offices, Doug couldn’t agree more. He was talking on a busy morning after returning from a breakfast board meeting held during the Furniture Market at High Point in North Carolina. The market has been going for more than a century and remains the largest home furnishings trade fair in the world. Once it was a showcase for American manufacturing, but today it has a “strategic partnership” with its Chinese equivalent, and many of its exhibitors are showing products made there.   

The Bassetts were one of the few companies displaying mass-produced American-made furniture at High Point. But fears that they could be a last doomed holdout are increasingly misplaced. That morning, Doug was ebullient. Business boomed during Covid. 

Stuck at home during the pandemic lockdown, it seemed that almost every family in America looked around and decided they wanted new bedroom furniture, he said. And with no chance of spending their money on vacations or dining out, they also had the cash. Meanwhile, factory shutdowns across Asia meant that imports were faltering while, by a happy chance, Vaughan-Bassett had a full inventory in its stockroom, ready for shipping to stores. 

The boom has abated since, but now the political and economic tides are turning against imports.  Buying American-made furniture made from American hardwoods suddenly seems like the future, not the past. 

Doug says his family’s long-standing concern about environmental issues is also standing them in good stead in the new marketplace. “The environment is more and more important to our customers, especially younger ones,” he says.   

With its devotion to buying local and replanting trees, Vaughan-Bassett was a founding member of the Sustainable Furnishings Council. The company wastes nothing, grinding offcuts to sawdust that fuels the boilers that heat the kilns that dry the next consignment of lumber. 

This approach is also reflected in what Doug calls the “authentic look” of his furniture. “During the drying process we make the wood look old, like reclaimed wood, with splits and cracks you would see in lumber a hundred years old.” Ever the salesman, he won’t say how they do it.

Sitting in his office, surrounded by pictures of past-and-present family members, Doug recalls learning the business from the bottom up, doing unskilled summer-vacation jobs in the factory for his father when he was 16. But nearly half a century on, being boss and scion of a dynasty suits him. He says he has no plans to retire. He and his brother–the great grandsons of the company’s founders–won’t think about that until their father finally stays home. Which, judging by the laughter coming from the outer office, could be some time.