Hurst Boiler Brand Guidelines: A 1967 Thomasville Shop, Now a Family Plant in Coolidge

Gene and Edna Hurst, Thomasville, 1967.

Hurst Boiler began in south Georgia in 1967. The company says Gene Hurst and his wife Edna started the business with limited capital in a first shop behind their home in Thomasville, then founded Hurst Boiler & Welding Company, Inc. in nearby Coolidge, in Thomas County. It has been at the Coolidge site since 1970, the year, the company says, it built a larger shop to keep up with customers.

Independent reporting gives the same starting point. Timber Processing, the sawmill trade magazine, wrote in December 2019 that Hurst had been “manufacturing, designing, engineering and servicing” boilers for thousands of customers since 1967, fired by gas, oil, coal, solid waste, wood, biomass and hybrid fuels, and described it as a key supplier to the forest products industry.

The company’s own history tells the next part as a family story. Sons Tommy and Hayward Hurst, trained by their father from an early age, joined their parents in serving more customers, and within a few years helped turn the business into a complete boiler design and manufacturing company with a global market. The firm is still in family hands. The Thomasville Times-Enterprise, in a December 2023 staff report, listed Tommy Hurst as president, Jeff Hurst as vice-president of marketing, Teri Hurst White as vice-president of finance and Hayward Hurst as vice-president of field operations, and mentioned a third-generation Hurst working in purchasing. An exporter profile written for the Georgia Made programme of the Georgia Department of Economic Development, which Hurst republishes on its site, describes the company as owned and operated by the second and third generations of the family.

Fire-tube, water-tube and biomass.

Hurst’s catalogue covers both fire-tube and water-tube boilers. The company lists packaged steam, hot-water, multi-fuel and biomass boilers from 6 to 2,000 horsepower, with pressures up to 450 psi, across fire-tube types it calls Scotch marine, firebox and vertical. Above them sit its water-tube boilers, sold as Series O, A, D and Flex, which the company rates at up to 150,000 pounds of steam an hour and pressures to 1,000 psig.

Solid fuel is a large part of the catalogue. Hurst says it makes seven types of biomass stoker and gasifier, offers coal- and wood-fired boilers, and builds modular biomass cogeneration packages that turn heat into electricity, from 250 kilowatts to 15 megawatts. Alongside the boilers it sells feedwater systems, stack economisers, integrated controls and blowdown separators, and it runs a parts and service business from Coolidge that, the company says, stocks parts for other makers’ boilers as well as its own. It lists ASME welding and “R” and “PP” stamps among its repair credentials.

The Georgia Made profile gives a sense of the customers. In it, Jeff Hurst describes units ranging “from small units for dry cleaners to big ones for power companies,” with food processors, hospitals, universities and many lumber mills in the South among the buyers. The same profile recalls that Exxon asked Hurst to build an incinerator for materials used in cleaning up the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, that the company designed a unit letting a tequila plant in Mexico run on agave waste, and that in 1995 it began building coal-fired units for carpet makers in Dalton, Georgia.

Plant rooms and steel.

Industrial boiler makers sell equipment that most people never see. A steam boiler sits in a plant room behind a hospital, a brewery, a laundry or a paper mill, and the people who buy one are engineers, facility managers and contractors. So the visual language of the category is built for a technical reader: catalogues, data sheets, project case studies and trade-show stands rather than shop windows.

The most common image is the boiler itself in a clean plant room. A packaged fire-tube boiler is usually shown as a long horizontal shell, painted and insulated, with its burner on the front, a control panel at eye level and the flue rising behind it. Around it run steam headers, valves and lagged pipework, photographed under even light so that every joint reads clearly. Cutaway drawings do the explaining: a shell opened along its length to show the furnace tube and the passes of smaller tubes, or a water-tube unit drawn with its drums and banks of tubes exposed.

The second register is the factory. Makers show shells being rolled from steel plate, welders at work on tube sheets, finished units on low-loader trailers and large boilers lifted by crane on site. These pictures stress scale and fabrication skill. Many firms in the category are old, and their histories lean on heritage photographs: riveted boilers, steam-era works yards, early advertisements and the first catalogues.

The customers appear too, usually as settings rather than people: a utility’s turbine hall, a food plant with stainless pipework, a district-heating station, a hospital service yard. Colour is mostly restrained, with greys, navy, white and one strong corporate accent, and type is set in plain sans or engineering-style faces chosen to sit comfortably beside drawings and specification tables.

A family plant beside a Georgia highway.

Hurst builds its boilers at its plant in Coolidge, and the company calls itself an “all-American manufacturer.” The plant has grown in stages. A Hurst press release of March 2007 announced an expansion that would double its manufacturing space and headquarters on Georgia Highway 319 to more than 220,000 square feet, with ground broken in mid-2006, a grand opening on 12 April 2007 and a new 35,000-square-foot vessel code shop; in it, the president of the Thomasville–Thomas County Chamber of Commerce called Hurst the county’s third-largest industrial employer.

By December 2019, when Georgia’s governor Brian Kemp toured the plant as part of his quarterly Made in Georgia tour, Timber Processing reported that Hurst employed more than 350 people in a 314,000-square-foot factory on a 17-acre campus, used Georgia’s ports and shipped worldwide. Its own site now gives more than 350,000 square feet, a campus of more than 48 acres and over 275 employees at full production, so headcounts vary by source and date. The exporter profile says the boilers leave through the ports of Savannah and Brunswick and reach every continent except Antarctica.

That profile also touches on presentation. Hurst told the programme it was adding the Georgia Made logo to its advertising and social media, and that the governor had visited the plant to introduce the programme. In Timber Processing, the company’s operations manager said Hurst had started small and grown over the years, and that it was “excited about showing our success story.” The company marked its fortieth anniversary in 2007.

For a design guide, Hurst Boiler shows how a family-run heavy manufacturer can present itself through its founders’ story, its plant and the range of fuels its boilers burn. Compare it with Cleaver-Brooks, another American packaged-boiler maker, and Clayton Industries, a family-run steam-generator maker in California. For this guide we use firebox red, charcoal, steam white and Georgia clay with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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