Our "White Hat" founders.
James Allen Shackelford & Margaret O'Connor "Peig" Shackelford
Some companies are built on a quarterly earnings call. Allen Refractories Company was built on a handshake, a kitchen table, and a promise to do business the right way.
A company started at a kitchen table.
On February 19, 1970, from an office in their home in Canal Winchester, Ohio, Jim and Peig Shackelford co-founded Allen Refractories Company. They sold refractory materials and refractory construction services to a handful of customers who took a chance on a young couple with a strong work ethic and a stronger sense of right and wrong.
More than 50 years later, A.R.C., Inc. has grown to over 50 full-time employees on a beautiful 8-acre campus north of Pataskala, Ohio. The address — 131 Shackelford Road — was named for the family that built this business by showing up, doing the work, and treating people right.
Jim and Peig always credited three things.
1. Our employees
"Our greatest asset, for sure." The crews who line the kilns and rebuild the furnaces are the company. We have hired carefully, trained patiently, and stood by our people for over five decades.
2. Our refined customers
The plants and mills who chose us are the kind of customers who reward consistency and integrity. Many of those relationships are now in their third generation of plant maintenance leaders.
3. The "White Hat" philosophy
An old 1970s cliché — the good guys always wore white hats in the westerns. We do the right thing because it is the right thing, not because it's expedient. It may sound corny. It is not typical in today's business culture. We do not care; it is who we are.
The last privately owned American refractory company.
Over the last several decades, nearly every other American refractory company has been acquired, consolidated, sold to a multinational, or absorbed into a global conglomerate. We are the last one still privately owned in the United States.
That isn't a marketing line. It's a fact we are quietly proud of — because what it means for our customers is this: when you call us, you talk to the people who own the work. There is no quarterly target pulling decisions in a direction that isn't right for you. There is no overseas headquarters routing your emergency through a service desk. There is a family, a campus, a warehouse, and a phone that gets answered.
For a refractory construction partner, that independence matters. Outages don't wait for approval chains. Material substitutions don't get cleared by someone three time zones away. The same people who price your job own the consequences of how it performs in your plant.
Today: the same business, the same promise.
Allen Refractories Company continues to grow because of those same three factors Jim and Peig identified at the beginning: our employees, our customers, and a business philosophy where we always conduct ourselves honestly, ethically, and morally. We warehouse refractory materials for fast shipment, run construction crews across the United States, and respond to emergency outages 24/7.
If you're considering us for a project or a material order, ask anyone who has worked with us. The story they tell will sound a lot like the one Jim and Peig would have told you in 1970.