About Us

Whitewater is an advanced manufacturer with over 200 years of collective industry experience, specializing in architectural millwork, wood components & stair parts. We operate out of a 60,000sf facility east of Cincinnati, OH.

We are a fifth generation family run organization with a passion for producing the highest quality products in the most efficient manner possible.

Everyone will tell you they make "the finest products" or only select "the highest quality".

So what sets us apart?

We are different by design.

We have the advantage of multi-generational perspectives. We know what worked in the past, and thanks to this, we're incredibly well positioned to find the best path forward to evolve into the future. We have the advantage of maximizing our production efficiency with the highest test equipment (including robots) and minimizing our waste, while maintaining the ability for all of the key stakeholders to oversee the finer details of what we're producing. And we feel like we're just getting started.

Our History

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.

Today, led by Dan Shiels (President) & his son Chase (Vice President), Whitewater represents the fifth generation of our family in the lumber business.

Our entire team takes a tremendous amount of pride in having been around so long, especially in a day when being sustainable is more important than ever. Through our long term relationships with many of the finest sawmills in the industry, we source sustainably harvested, kiln-dried American hardwoods primarily from the Appalachian and Northern regions in states including Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky.

We strive to be a zero waste facility. All of our byproduct is converted into downstream products such as  animal bedding and pellet fuel for wood burning furnaces. As part of our ongoing sustainability planning, we are continually working toward increased usage of our byproducts and reducing our energy footprint.

We operate out of our 60,000sf facility featuring state of the art, fully mechanized equipment. This includes computerized, optimized rip, chop and moulding lines capable of processing multiple truckloads of lumber in a single shift, and several other machine centers to allow us to produce high quality products. Our plant also makes use of CNC tooling equipment to allow us to produce everything we need on site.

As an OEM to some of the most well known brands, we run 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 our cutting edge production lines 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.