Chuck Mills
President and CEO of Mills Machine Company
Air Date June, 16, 2013
Over 100 years in business indicates that something has been going right along the way. Mills Machine has been doing the correct thing since being founded in 1908. The company is built on a line of strong people and a history of innovation.
At the end of the Civil War, Samuel and Lucinda Mills were making a meager living in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Looking for greener pastures they left in a covered wagon, first for Kansas and then to the Indian territory, when the free land opened. W. H. (Homer) Mills, born in 1890, the youngest of nine, was born in Kansas and raised in the new state of Oklahoma.
One day in 1908, at the age of 18, Homer came in from the fields and told his parents that he was tired of starving and was taking his tools and going to Shawnee to start a business. He founded Mills Repair Shop on Main Street with most of the business coming from the bicycle (the automobile was not readily available to the average person). The mechanically inclined Homer soon gained a reputation for being able to repair almost anything. He added guns to his growing list of things to be repaired while his brother, Frank, joined the business. After a couple of years Frank sold his share to Les Thompson for the grand price of $15.00.
An electric motor driven central shaft powered the lathes, presses and drills. A smithy with a hand driven blower helped create the special shapes needed for repair of the motorcycles, guns and custom machine parts. The picture above shows the shop around 1920.
In 1924 Homer bought out Les and changed the name of the company to Mills Machine Company. Around this time the oil boom hit Oklahoma with one of the worlds largest oil fields in the booming town of Earlsboro, five miles East of Shawnee. Oklahoma Seismograph Company moved into Shawnee and decided that Mills Machine had the technical skills to repair the drilling rigs and bits. As the experience grew, Mills Machine began to manufacture bits and tooling for seismic crews in Oklahoma and beyond.
David Mills, the son of Homer and Edna, was born in 1916, after graduation from Shawnee High School in 1935, he attended Oklahoma A & M (now Oklahoma State University). He had worked for his dad as a teenager and now returned to the business. After serving in the Army Corps of Engineers in the Pacific Theater during W.W.II, he again returned to become a partner with Homer and his brother Oscar.
They started the first building for the current factory in 1946 and after completion in 1947 began soliciting larger jobs. For a brief time they built and mounted water tanks, drilling rigs and other accessories onto their customer’s trucks.
The local oil boom declined in the early 1950’s and the company started moving into the water and irrigation markets. Farmers were switching from dry land farming to irrigation farming and needed lots of wells drilled. Mills Machine sent salesman all over Nebraska, Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma to deliver new bits and tooling and pick up bits to be repaired.
Starting on the ground floor of the water well business allowed Mills Machine to become and remain a leader and innovator of custom manufactured down hole drilling tools. The markets expanded as uses by utilities, mining, construction, and environmental industries appeared.
Homer and David bought out Oscar in 1970 and David bought out his dad, Homer, in 1972. David added large contracts with drill rig manufacturers and in the international markets to expand business to over one million dollars in sales for the first time. He also bought five lots surrounding the business.
In 1979 Charles D. (Chuck) Mills joined the company after graduating from Central State University with a BBA in management. Chuck started working at Mills Machine when he was 11 years old, learning to weld, operate the machines in the shop, shipping and receiving and finally, inside sales.
In 1981, David retired and Chuck bought the stock in the company and became President and CEO of Mills Machine Company. Due to his own ambition and vision, Chuck was able to expand the business into a multi-million dollar concern. In the late 1980’s he led the company in the design and development of a full line of hollow stem augers for the environmental markets. In 1989 he received a patent for the Milclaw, an innovative earth drilling bit.
The company has developed into a full line manufacture of specialty earth boring tools and accessories for water, mining, construction, utility and environmental applications. Products include hollow stem augers, stabilizers, underreamers, pipe handling tools, drilling adapters, soil sampling equipment, claw bits, drag bits, core bits, and miscellaneous drilling accessories.