The Town Of Norway

The wood pulp paper industry’s birthplace

by Charles Francis

Through much of history, record-keeping and the storage of information was done on rags or paper that was made from rags. By the Civil War era, however, paper had become the chief medium as well as one of the most vital components of big business and bigger government. Because of these changes in society and culture, it was increasingly difficult for the paper industry to find an adequate supply of rags for its mills. The quest for a substitute fiber for paper took on an added dimension.

In the late 1850s a German scientist named Henrich Voelter perfected the first practical method for turning wood pulp into paper, and the paper revolution was on. By the mid-1860s there were small wood-pulp paper plants in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts as well as one in Maine at Topsham. All of them failed, however, primarily due to a lack of capital. Then a Norway and Mechanic Falls visionary by the name of Adna C. Denison saw that Maine offered just the right combination of timber and water power, and began opening wood pulp paper mills on the Androscoggin River.

Denison began operation of his first paper pulp mill in Norway in 1869.

This mill was almost immediately followed by five more, further downriver at Mechanic Falls. Eventually he had an entire complex of mills, the farthest from his first one in Norway was located in Brunswick.

Adna Denison’s mills either used poplar or wood waste from lumber mills as their source of wood fiber. For the most part, the poplar was harvested by farmers rather than logging companies. The poplar logs were floated downriver behind regular drives. The farmers who supplied Denison’s fledgling paper industry did not see this task as a secure source of additional income, however. Because they were the chief source of material for the paper plants, this created a problem almost from the beginning.

Initially, Denison’s Norway Mill looked as if it would be a success. It provided needed employment for approximately twenty men and from three to five women. Each day the mill turned out around a ton of pulp which translated into about half a ton of paper which Denison had no problem selling on the open market. Then in 1873 a depression hit, and Denison’s source of poplar for his Norway mill dried up as farmers went under.

The majority of the Norway workers moved downriver to Mechanic Falls, however, where the mills had been relying on mill waste from the area sawmills for its pulp rather than on farmers. For the next five years, the Mechanic Falls mills produced approximately