The Forest and the Trees: Cersosimo Lumber &Amp; Cersosimo Industries

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The Forest and the Trees: Cersosimo Lumber &Amp; Cersosimo Industries

It's like something you'd read in a novel. A man goes alone into the woods and carves out an empire. Because this is a business magazine, the story won't have any sex in it. But still, it's an epic.

The time? The 1940s. The man? Anthony F. Cersosimo. The company? Cersosimo Lumber, Inc in Vernon. The empire? Today, 60 years later, two individual, privately held, family-run companies, Cersosimo Lumber Co, Inc, which employee 285 people and reports $50 million in annual sales, and Cersosimo Industries, Inc, which employs about 100, half of whom are engineers, surveyors, administrators, etc, and reports $15 million a year in sales.

Anthony Cersosimo was raised poor on a farm in Connecticut. One Christmas, according to his longtime secretary, Madeline G Arms, his parents could only afford to give each child an orange. Yet, Tony Cersosimo was determined to go to college, and he talked his way in to a two-year school, Bay Path College, in Longmeadow, MA, by promising the administration he would pay back every cent over time. And he did.

It was a time when men still worked as secretaries, and after college Tony Cersosimo became the secretary of a man who owned a lumber company.

"It was probably during the middle of the Second World War, when they were looking to build housing for the recruits and troops," said Arms, who is now the communications and utilities manager for Cersosimo Lumber. "They were having a hard time getting lumber. So Tony said, 'Let me go up to Vermont and see if I can get any lumber for you'."

At the time, Vermont was rural and poor, and many people lived partially or completely off the land hunting, fis...

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