She knew ‘big things’ were coming to Rock Hill. Now, she runs a worldwide company here
Ida Luchey was lost. She had embarked on a two-hour drive from Greenwood, S.C., to Carowinds for a company picnic in the summer of 2002, and she decided to skip the interstate, opting for scenic back roads. But near the end of her trip, she somehow ended up near Winthrop University.
She continued to drive around, admiring the “nice, quiet college town,” which would soon become one of the fastest growing regions in the Southeast as more people, like Luchey, discovered Rock Hill.
“I just fell in love with it,” she recently told The Herald.
And she didn’t want to leave. So, Luchey quit her job, moved to Rock Hill and started working for what would become known as Koppers, a worldwide chemical manufacturing company. Years later, the company would promote her to plant manager, making Luchey one of few female chemical manufacturing plant managers in the industry.
“I used to call (the city) my little secret,” Luchey, 55, said. “I just could tell big things were going to happen here, so I wanted to be part of it. And I was hoping that, as a middle-aged woman at that time, I would be able to recast my net and find a home.”
She had no idea she would come to lead a facility that is part of bringing more employment and business opportunities to Rock Hill — just as she saw possible when she drove through the city 18 years ago.
This week, Koppers, which provides treated wood products, wood treatment chemicals and carbon compounds, expanded its Rock Hill location, purchasing a tract of industrial land from the city adjacent to its current site on Robertson Road.
With the expansion, the company plans to hire about 14 employees, company officials told The Herald.
“It is hard for me to wrap my head around it because when I started it, we had maybe like 20 folks and now this year, I have 34 on the books,” Luchey said. “Next year, I’m going to have 14 more. Who would have thought?”
In 2014, Koppers acquired the wood preservation business Osmose, which was previously housed at its current Rock Hill location. Luchey had been with Osmose for more than 10 years and when Koppers took over, the company promoted Luchey, who had been a production manager, to facility manager.
“The place that hired me when I came to Rock Hill — I never imagined being the person that would be able to actually manage this facility, and especially because it’s a man’s world,” Luchey said. “I know of some really awesome women and they’re engineers, but I’ve never met a woman chemical manufacturing facility manager. Never. Never.”
‘Feel the sense of community’
The property acquisition will allow the Rock Hill facility, which manufactures and packages treated wood products, to expand production, officials said. The company also will be able to route and park trucks more safely on site. Proceeds from the sale will go directly to Rock Hill, according to a press release.
“Since 1984, when the city began establishing business parks in our community to pull itself up from the collapse of the textile industry, the city has seen over $1 billion in investment and over 6,000 new jobs created,” Mayor John Gettys said in a provided statement. “This new investment by Koppers allows us to continue our trajectory as a community and assists in transforming our state into the competitive marketplace it has become.”
Luchey, who has been plant manager for nearly six years, said she’s shocked by how much Koppers’ Rock Hill facility and the city have grown, and she’s excited to continue expanding the company and its impact on her once “little secret.”
“With the purchase of the land, that gives me just that much more of an opportunity to get more people into the Koppers family,” she said. “That’s what we do here, give people a decent wage, a safe circumstance to work under, and mutual respect between the people that they work beside, and the people that they report to. That’s what being able to acquire this land is doing for the Koppers family, and that’s what makes me proud to be the facility manager at this time.”
And despite the fact that Rock Hill has grown to become South Carolina’s fifth largest city, Luchey said it still has the same community feel she first witnessed when she took a wrong turn in 2002, and she works to ensure her facility reflects that same feel.
“We’re a large company just because we have a global presence,” she said. ‘Regardless of that, when people come here, a lot of times they say, ‘You feel the sense of community.’ Isn’t that a reflection of what Rock Hill is all about?”
This story was originally published November 25, 2020 at 11:00 AM.
