Ellsworth American. [volume] (Ellsworth, Me.) 1855-current, 1905-08-02
PULP TO PRINTER.
THE MAKING OF PAPER IN THE
NORTH WOODS OF MAINE.
THE ouIcKNEss OF ITS DEVELOPMENT
THE SIMPLE TRICK OF CONVERT
ING SPRUCE TREE INTO A
NEWSPAPER.
winthrop Packard in the Technical World

III you would see what modern paper
mill does to bowling wilderness, you
should 20 to Miliinocket, Maine. About
all that happens in one OF the sudden
towns of our great West, where to-day is
A desert and to- morrow IL a bustling city
clamorous with all the appliances OF civil
ization, came to the heart of the Maine
woods few years ago.
When the thing, happened, you could
have found in the township OF Mininocket
but one farmhouse, four inhabitants and a
wild wreck OF what had once been a will
derness, but had been devastated by forest
fires till little butt charred stumps and
bramble tangle remained. Men came to
Millinocket, however, who could see other
things. They knew the vast stretch of
northward for hundred miles, bordering
lakes that hold mighty waters in store.
They saw the drop from the Penobscot
banks to the Millinocket stream mile
away. This drop meant that the Penob-
scot waters might flow through penstocks,
with a head OF a hundred feet, IL the pen
stocks were placed there. These men
enterprise. Unlimited water power, I'M
limited spruce and an almost unlimited
pulp mill were the cards on which they
staked this money; and they put in three
millions before they drewi out q ream of
paper.
After the game was fairly opened, how
ever, they drew out $50 tons OF it every
single day; and the play still goes on, day
and night and Sundays, for no great paper
mill stops for anything short OF disaster.
To stop for twenty four hours .means to
lose the profits for weeks.
Eight hundred men went to work in this
mill on eight-houS shifts. Store-keepers
followed, school teachers, physicians,
lawyers, ministers and-one may dare to
say-politicians and labor leaders And
behold! A "boom" town had sprung up
in the wilderness, and in a conservative
New England state at that. It is thus
that great enterprises come into being
nowadays. Instead OF the old-time slow
growth from modest beginnings, we have
the elopement OF capital with opportunity,
and a fat city comes as a wedding gift to
pulp mill came almost in a day, one might
say, $500 inhabitants; and the infant city
boasts twepty-three stores, four churches,
high and common schools ensconced in a
$1,000 school building, water and sewer
systems, gas and electric lights, a news
paper and brass band.
THE FIRST PROCESS IN PAPER MAKING.
The foundation indeed, in most cases,
the entire fahric-of paper nowadays is
spruce. The thousands OF tons OF news
and book paper used every day are but
spruce trees, chopped down, chopped up,
ground up, shredded, cooked with chemi-
calls, then the fibres cunningly reassem-
BLEED, pressed, dried and caiendered, and
rolled into the endless reams with which
all are familiar. Therefore mighty paper
mill must have for its maintenance an
endless supply of spruce trees. The forest
which feeds it must be so vast that while
its yearly supply is being cut on one por-
ton another is growing an equal bulk of
wood.
The men who cut these trees go into the
woods in August--Septembe at the latest
and have their cut all made by Christ
mas. Then come the deep SHOWS OF
winter, and the work of hauling the cut
TO the landing on the lake or river ice
takes up the time until the spring freshets
loose the letters OF ice and send the logs
whiriing down stream to the mill. This
does not end the lumberman's labors,
however. The drive is the most strenuous
rs - l.. I'll I. -.
along the swollen streams, turn them
adrift where they have stranded, break
the jams where millions interlace in the
rapids, quite literally driving them to
their destination much as the plainsman
herds cattle to the roundup.
Sixty million feet of logs, not one less
than foot in diameter at breast high
yearly to feed this Millinocket mill. A
territory 500 square miles in extent sup
plies the cut, and strict forestry methods
are adopted to insure the annual supply.
The mighty procession OF logs has its be-
ginning hundred miles northiof the mill
IN the very depths of the wilderness at
Chamberlain lake, and, as it moves in ma
jestic procession southwark, receives rein
forcements from Chesuncook, Ripogenus,
Ambejeius, Pemadumcook-lakes less diff
ticult of navigation than their names
and hundreds OF other smaller ponds and
streams.
The cut begins in August, the logs reach
their destination the following June.
The tract of land from which they are
drawn is mighty: vet il YOU stand near
the mill and see the logs piled up for win
ter use, twenty million feet and more in
the one largest log pile in the world, see
the storage basin half mile square frozen
solid with logs, and see the mighty stream
OF them that floats day and night contin-
uously into the devouring jaws of the
wood room, you can but wonder If even
this great tract of forest land will hold
out against so ravenous monster.