Technology Hasn’t Put Brooks Over a Barrel : Manufacturing: Using 100-year-old equipment, the Maryland company produces 100,000 units a year. It’s a timeless trade that is still done by hand.

The 21st Century is only a few years away. But don’t tell the crew at the Brooks Barrel Co.

In an age of automation and high-tech, where robotics have replaced unskilled laborers, this barrel-making company is a hundred years behind.

Antique machines, black with decades of grease and grime, cause a deafening noise in the former railroad station where some 100,000 barrels, kegs and planters are produced annually.

It’s a timeless trade still done by hand.

Kenneth Knox, Brooks Barrel’s owner, believes his company is one of only six slack cooperages still operating in the United States. “It’s a dying trade,” he said.

Coopers are the barrel makers. Slack barrels are for dry goods. Tight barrels are for liquids, like aging whiskey and wine.

Not much has changed since Paul Brooks opened the business in 1950. At first, he was fixing broken barrels. But as cooperages began to close down, he started buying up parts and machinery and making his own barrels.

Knox, who was married to one of Brooks’ daughters, was a lab technician when he joined the business about 17 years ago. The marriage didn’t last, but the business relationship did. When Brooks retired in 1991, Knox and a silent partner bought him out.

Knox employs a dozen, including himself and Mary Brooks, his former sister-in-law, who is the office manager.

Their cramped office takes up a small corner of the dimly lit shop where workers, with practiced eyes and deft hands, inspect the staves--the slats of wood that make the body of the barrel.

The staves and barrel heads or bottoms are made in the shop from yellow pine from the Delmarva Peninsula. Last year, that amounted to 1.7 million pounds of wood.

The nearly century-old machines spit out the steel and wire hoops that go around the barrels.

When a machine breaks down, and that’s often, Knox fixes it. He even has spare parts that he and Brooks bought years ago and have kept in storage because they knew the companies that made the machines dating back to the late 1800s and early 1900s wouldn’t be around forever.

While there aren’t many slack cooperages around, there apparently will always be a market for barrels that literally can’t hold water.

“The need may be as much ornamental or nostalgic as anything else,” said Ronald Dixon, president of the Associated Cooperate Industries of America and president of East Tennessee Wood Products Co. in Seymour, Tenn.

“Slack cooperage takes you back in time. It reminds you of grandma and grandpa,” said Dixon, a tight cooperage and hardwood manufacturer.

Before conveyor belts, boxes and forklifts, slack cooperage filled with chickens, flour, corn, sugar or other dry goods would be rolled onto ships or other modes of transportation. But as technology evolved, their uses declined. At least for shipping.

Knox know goes into stores and sees his barrels filled to the brim with candies or used for some other commercial display.

His barrels have also been used as props: in “Queen,” the television sequel to Alex Haley’s “Roots,” on a Sesame Street videotape, and in a new movie expected out later this year called “Follow the River.”

The company has been advertising in Garden Design magazine and it has gotten an overwhelming response this year for barrels and planters.

“I think it has to do with the country motif. Everybody loves country,” Mary Brooks said.

“And they’re durable,” Knox said.

Brooks noted a woman called recently “and said she had had one for 20 years and it was finally giving out. We sent her out a new one.”

Ida Austin, secretary-treasurer of the cooperage association, headquartered in Louisville, Ky., said she frequently gets calls from people who want to know where they can buy barrels.

“The barrel has never changed since the beginning of time. A barrel is a barrel. They have different sizes, but basically they’re made the same,” she said. “It’s about the only thing that hasn’t changed.”