Silent auction: The unheralded sale of Franklin Industries

In deal said to be worth $350 mil, Belgian conglomerate buys minerals firm with almost a century of local heritage

Email | Print By E. Thomas Wood

Franklin Limestone Co. placed this ad in the 1949 Nashville city directory

A very large Nashville company with a rich local history has sold out to foreign investors — but if you've never heard of the company, the lack of attention seems to suit its leaders just fine.

The sale of Franklin Industries Inc. closed on December 1st with no public announcement, apart from a notice issued by the Richmond, Va. investment banking firm Harris Williams & Co., which handled the deal. The buyer was Chemical Lime Co., based in Fort Worth, Texas, a unit of global chemical concern the Lhoist Group, which is headquartered in Limelette, Belgium.

Terms of the transaction were not announced, but NashvillePost.com has learned that the purchase price was in the range of $350 million.

Franklin Industries is the largest producer of high-calcium chemical limestone in the United States, operating mines and processing centers across the Southeast. You have seen its operations if you have driven past the big mine visible along Interstate 40 in Crab Orchard, Tenn., a few miles from Crossville — but odds are that you have never seen its name in the press.

The company has kept a low profile locally for generations. Its principal owner, chairman and CEO, H. Rodes Hart, is socially prominent in Nashville and has funded a number of philanthropic initiatives together with his wife Patricia Ingram Hart, sister of the late Ingram Industries CEO Bronson Ingram. But searching for any substantive news stories on Franklin Industries from the past two decades or more is an exercise in futility. Rodes Hart has not returned telephone calls for this story.

Not that there's anything wrong with going about one's business quietly as a privately owned company. It's just interesting to discover how invisible a significant economic entity can be, even when details of its major transactions are available in the public record.

This month's sale is, as it turns out, only the final step in an exit process that included at least two other large deals. Franklin Industries sold mica mining reserves and other assets to Oglebay Norton Co. of Ohio in 1999 for $32 million in cash, according to a filing by the buyer with the Securities and Exchange Commission. And in 2003, the company sold its subsidiary Franklin Brick Co. — the largest brick distributor of brick in the U.S. — to Boral Limited, Australia's largest building and construction materials supplier, for $66 million in cash. That news was announced in Sydney but never made it into the Nashville press.

Corporate data aggregator Hoover's Inc. estimated that Franklin Industries had revenues of $100 million in 2005, with 425 employees including 30 at its headquarters on 10th Ave. N. Hart has been with the company and its predecessors since 1956, having entered the business under the tutelage of his uncle, A. Battle Rodes.

Members of the Rodes family created Franklin Limestone Co. in 1911, according to an ad placed in a 1949 Nashville city directory. They sold the company sometime in the late 1940s to Cale P. Haun, who had been one of the founders in 1930 of Nashville's Equitable Securities Corp. Battle Rodes and his nephew Rodes Hart went on to operate Franklin Builders Supply Co., but after Haun sold the assets of the old Franklin Limestone, Hart returned to the limestone business under the name Franklin Industries.