Nehemiah Corporation of America
Nehemiah Corporation of America is a non-profit organization based in Sacramento, California specializing in homeownership, affordable housing and community development. It started in 1994 as a small organization, but grew to prominence later in the 1990s after it developed a program that allowed home buyers to make down payments on their purchases using funds that were derived from the home sellers. This program, the Nehemiah Program, became popular and was widely emulated, giving birth to what came to be known as the seller-funded down-payment assistance industry. The industry attracted criticism from U.S. federal agencies (particularly the Government Accountability Office and the Internal Revenue Service) and was ultimately shut down in 2008 by a change in federal law.
L.H. Thomson
The company was founded by Loronzo Harold Thomson (Ronnie) and his wife Margaret in 1968, as a small machine shop called NEMCO (Numerical Engineering Machine Company) just outside Macon. In 1980, it was one of a number of companies to be acquired by Boeing, resulting in Ronnie becoming the President of Boeing Georgia. In 1981, they purchased the NEMCO building back from Boeing and founded L.H. Thomson, focusing on modern computerized CNC machining instead of the more common method at the time, manual machining. In 1992, the company moved into a new facility almost four times as large as the previous building, and between 1994 and 1996 started producing bicycle parts as well. When Ronnie died in 2008, Marge Thomson took over as CEO with her son, Brian Thomson, as president.