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"Rags! Rags!! Rags!!!": Beginnings of the Paper Industry in the Salt Lake Valley, 1849-58
Early settlers were urged by the Deseret News to save rags.
"Rags! Rags!! Rags!!!": Beginnings of the Paper Industry in the Salt Lake Valley, 1849-58
BY RICHARD SAUNDERS
MODERN CULTURES DEPEND HEAVILY UPON THE WRITTEN WORD to preserve and perpetuate themselves Although the printed word is rarely ranked alongside barbed wire and sawmills as a winner of the American frontier, in the broad territory of the West print consummated and legitimized contracts and claims, promoted the spread and enforcement of laws and governmental structure, and filled a vital role in disseminating information (and propaganda) through the ever necessary newspaper. Print requires, however, a medium on which to record; it is impossible to maintain publication without a substantial, reliable supply of paper stock Papermaking developed in Utah largely to feed the press of the Deseret News, an imprint that historian Seymour Dunbar cited as "perhaps the most remarkable and historically interesting newspaper that ever existed."1 Once printing became regular in Utah, especially with the publication of the News, the demand on the press—and, through it, for paper—became constant.
Even barely off the frontier, in an area purposefully settled as was Utah, printing, especially a newspaper, was not a luxury. Before the arrival of the telegraph, Utah's territorial and religious leaders clearly saw that printing, which could produce multiple copies for distribution, offered the most economical way to communicate with outlying settlements and would be a key in the settlement and governance of the far-flung territory. So it was that the first true machinery to be brought to the Salt Lake Valley after settlement was a small Ramage printing press. 2 On this press and its successors the Deseret News Office produced most early official printing and the newspaper (which reprinted most official pronouncements, usually from the same type) together with speeches, notices, advertisements, sermons and instructions, and broadside proclamations.
Early Utah lacked the material security of an industrial or production base, so securing a dependable supply of paper to feed the press involved substantial cost. To Utah belongs the distinction of producing the first paper made in the American West, two years before the importation of mill machinery to Taylorsville, California, in 1856.3 After the first experiments by hand, 1852-54, two mechanized paper mills operated in Utah between 1861 and 1893, when the second burned. Before then, maintaining a supply of paper in Salt Lake City depended exclusively upon a thousand-mile supply line to ports either on the Mississippi River or the California coast The success of official printing, issuing a newspaper, and maintaining a job-printing office was tied directly to the consistent arrival of the merchant's train of goods
The first paper mill in the American West, tucked away in one corner of the city's public works block (Temple Square), produced individual sheets formed by hand in a shed. The industry had humble beginnings. Far-sighted governor and church president Brigham Young was a shrewd planner determined to keep Utah out from under the economic thumb of eastern capitalists. The key to independence was to limit the population's reliance upon manufactured goods from the East. To this end Young, the LDS church, and the Utah Territorial Legislature encouraged a wide variety of home (i.e., local) manufacture.4 When a particularly scarce commodity such as paper was needed Young often used church or public capital under his control and the skills of private individuals tojump-start an industry.5 But even with skilled craftsmen at hand the most important consideration became, what could be produced and marketed economically? The rapid rate of paper consumption and the attendant cost of importation begged for a local solution.
The hand-operated Ramage press ordered for Willard Richards arrived from the Mormon depot in Kanesville (present Council Bluffs), Iowa, barely two years after settlement in the Salt Lake Valley. Accompanying the press were fonts of type and type cases, ink, press furniture, and 8 1/2 packs of paper stock.6 Soon after the Ramage press arrived in the city, at a time when Utah's industrial capacity rested primarily on cottage industries and even before the issue of Utah's first titled imprint, plans to produce paper in the valley were being considered. In a general meeting on September 16, 1849, leaders enjoined those in attendance to "save their rags for the Purpose of establishing a paper Mill."7
Paper production is mechanically simple and can consume waste fibers, two qualities that made papermaking an ideal candidate for local production in Utah. Cellulose fibers from such sources as cotton or linen rags, or (in the Orient) the inner bark of certain trees, are cooked and beaten to separate the individual fibers and suspend them in water. This was first done by stamping in mortarlike vats, but the process was markedly accelerated by development of the mechanical Hollander beater Technology for making paper from ground wood was just coming into use in Europe and the East. To form the sheet by hand, a framed screen is dipped and lifted out of a stirred vat of floating fiber with the water draining away to leave a layer of matted fiber on the screen. The pulpy sheet is laid in a stack, each sheet separated by a piece of tightly woven felt (usually of wool), and the water squeezed out under pressure The wet paper sheets are then solid enough to handle; the felts are separated for immediate reuse and the paper is hung to dry. After drying, the sheets are sized by a brief soak in a tub of very thin, warm gelatin or starch solution, pressed, and again dried. Sizing makes paper slightly water resistant so that inks will not disperse too much on the surface, feathering the printed letters or images.
Despite the September 1849 injunction the project lacked both a production plant and, despite the deceptively simple process, someone at least familiar with papermaking. Nevertheless, the determination to produce paper remained firm. The industry had begun.
A year later, in the fall of 1850, six months after the four-page weekly Deseret News commenced publication, the cry for "RAGS! RAGS!! RAGS!!!"was reiterated, printed in the issue of November 30 A blessing to the project's beginning came with the almost simultaneous baptism of an English papermaker, Thomas Howard, who was hustled halfway around the world to superintend the process. 8
Thomas Howard was born in 1815, the son of a papermill superintendent In his father's Buckinghamshire mill he learned papermaking and worked in the mill for twenty-two years. Leaving England with an emigration company in April 1851, Howard arrived in Salt Lake City six months later. The event was significant enough for the Journal History to have noted on that date that "a papermaker arrived from England." He was put to work almost immediately and by the middle of October 1851 was busy outlining necessary mill machinery and a plant in the First Presidency's office.9 An unsigned, undated report on papermaking machinery in the Brigham Young papers concerns improvising the elemental parts of a beater, a press, and mechanical sheet former Before the turn of the year Howard received the help of two men appointed to assist him—machinist/mechanic. Thomas Hollis and Sidney Roberts, who apparently managed facilities for the concern.
While Roberts went about planning a mill site six miles south and east of the city on Mill Creek, the paper manufactory was temporarily allocated some space on the northeast corner of the public works block In November 1851 Hollis began looking for sufficiently large parts.
Through the winter of 1851 and into the following spring Howard and Hollis worked at creating operable equipment while Roberts worked on a mill in Sugar House. Weaver Matthew Gaunt supplied the tightly woven woolen felts needed to separate the sheets being pressed Meanwhile, the canvass continued in local congregations to secure a stock of suitable rags as raw material. Despite the effort at drafting and staffing a proper concern, the project suffered from material shortage right from the start.10 Barely 150 pounds of usable rags were on hand when Howard began; near the end of 1851 a broader plea was issued.
If Howard was able to produce usable paper at this time there is no record of it In fact, the manufacture of paper dropped completely from the pages of the Deseret News and other contemporary records, although securing paper stock overland remained a continual worry. 12 Why plans to manufacture paper were shelved is not certain All concerned understood within a year of commencing serious printing that even the four-page Deseret News would probably consume more paper than could be inextensively produced by hand, especially considering the state of the equipment. Despite the lengthy preparations suitable raw material was scarce, and the cobbled digester apparently did not work well enough to continue experimenting with it. The machinery was not the only problem. In January 1852 Sidney Roberts wrote to Brigham Young, pleading with him to reprovision the factory at Mill Creek. Unable to secure adequate tools and barely able to feed his workers, Roberts explained that they had only gotten as far as excavating a site for the foundation, mill wheel, and tailrace.13
That spring Hollis and Howard tried again. They arranged to borrow and adapt some juice-extraction machinery and sugaring equipment that had arrived in the city and was sitting idle on the public works block.14 A beet grinder was pressed into service, rigged as a beater for rags. They also used some copper-lined vats intended for the ailing beet sugar project to hold the rag-fiber slurry and for vat sizing. A branch of City Creek that ran through the block supplied water.15 The forms or molds (a two-piece wire screen and frame that actually makes the paper sheet) and drying boards for the formed sheets were improvised, probably produced locally The watermarks on several examples of the handwork suggest that the molds were crudely made of narrow wooden slats covered with cloth rather than woven wire screens A hydraulic press may also have been borrowed from the unestablished sugar works to squeeze excess water from the formed sheets. Gaunt's felts were again used but were only half the size required.
The attempts to create a paper manufactory, first from nothing and then with cobbled sugar machinery, did not succeed; and failure probably made the best argument yet for securing appropriate equipment. Young's secretaries opened negotiations toward securing the necessary equipment with an eastern manufacturer. Papermaking received a major boost in the spring of 1853 with the purchase and importation of some suitable machinery procured at a cost of $8,500. The equipment consisted of a Hollander beater, a machine that chews boiled rags in water and separates the individual fibers into the stuff of actual production The beater would have shortened production time considerably A Gavit cylinder for forming binder's board for book covers also arrived in the city with the new equipment. 1 6
In January 1854 Howard and Hollis installed the new equipment in the northeast corner of the public works block and once again advertised for a collection of rags and waste paper. 17 They were operating by late spring and aimed toward finishing their handiwork in time for display at the April conference of the LDS church Despite five years of delays and supply problems a ream of Howard's locally produced paper was exhibited on schedule One of the hand-formed sheets from this first successful batch was belatedly presented to Governor Young on June 1, 1854.18 The export of capital—for this product at least—could at last be curbed.
Late spring to early summer was typically a lean time in Salt Lake City Until supplies began to arrive in midsummer or later the city consumed the remainder of stocks imported the year before. Understandably, by June the paper supply for the News and other printing was low. When the season's first pack train from California arrived in the city on June 8 it probably did not contain a stock of paper Remarks reported from the first annual meeting of the Deseret Typographical Association tied Howard and Hollis's renewed efforts directly to an impending shortage of paper via California.19
With paper production now at least possible those involved renewed their plea for rags. 20 While the News struggled to maintain its publication schedule with a rapidly dwindling stock of paper, Howard and Hollis redoubled their efforts to make up the shortage, if necessary, to keep the News in print. By mid-June the supply of newsprint was gone. Howard's locally manufactured paper made its inelegant— and probably hasty—debut in half-sheets in the Deseret News issue of June 22 Given the conditions of a new mill, an eclectic collection of untried machinery, and a mishmash of raw materials, use of the local product was probably a measure of necessity rather than confidence. From the quality of the product it is doubtful that Howard was really ready to supply paper to the community The next day several members of the LDS church historian's office wandered down the block to watch Howard and Hollis hurriedly "making paper for the next News" and stayed to see the hydraulic press squeezing the new-laid sheets.21
The editor promptly apologized for the appearance of the newspaper. 22 The first demonstrably local paper was a grey, undistinguished sheet; nevertheless, for a month (four weekly issues) the Deseret News was issued on a single 22 x 16-inch leaf of this locally produced paper rather than the two-leaf (four-page) folio previously produced on imported newsprint.23 The issue of August 27 appeared on imported newsprint, and then the News resumed its use of the home manufactured product with a second, even darker batch of paper.
This second batch of paper came from a new vat of stuff Possibly due to the rush its quality approached dismal. The composition of the paper itself is definitely rags, but the fibrillation (beating that separates the fibers) was obviously incomplete; threads of varying sizes are visible throughout the sheets. At least one copy sported several masses of dark fiber, one nearly three inches long, on the front page; another had a fly neatly formed into the paper in the center of one column. Bleaching agents were unavailable to lighten the paper's color The first batch emerged a pale beige grey, but the second was positively lavender. Due to the shortage of pulpable rags the makers could not be too choosy about those they put into the paper, though they tried to be.24 Howard's newsprint is noticeably thicker than the machine-made imported stock25 and is matted unevenly rather than distributed uniformly across the leaf, probably the best evidence that they produced it in a hurry to fill a large demand. The unevenly formed sheet and incomplete beating of the paper's stuff was not the only problem. They lacked felts for pressing a sheet the full size of the newspaper's 22 x 36-inch folio In retrospect, the overall quality of Utah's first paper is only fair.
After nearly two months of printing the Deseret News on the home product the press went back to printing on imported paper following the arrival of a supply train from St. Louis,26 with a polite thank you and thinly veiled relief:
With that, the first attempt to put locally produced papers to commercial use came to an abrupt halt.
A few weeks later, perhaps in deference to the efforts made by Howard and Hollis to produce a usable product, the Deseret News ran a column on the mechanical process of papermaking. 2 8 Local production lapsed that fall, and Howard and Hollis parted company Eventually the sugar company requested that the borrowed machinery be returned The hydraulic press was dismantled, and part was sent to Cedar City to the iron works there. With the concern dissolved Thomas Hollis formed a partnership with William Jepson to produce paper in Davis County, just north of Salt Lake City. For a few years advertisements to buy rags (for a pricey nickel a pound) appeared sporadically. Production could not have been substantial. In August 1855 the pair advertised for rags, but by October Jepson had bowed out and "Messrs. Hollis and Vernon" announced that they were adding a lumber mill to their paper plant, probably a move of economic survival.29 Another little-known concern was sponsored by Howard's onetime assistant Sidney Roberts and others who petitioned the Legislative Assembly for the right to divert water from Big Cottonwood Creek "to propel machinery for making paper." The legislature refused to act on his request and disbanded the review committee.30 There is no record of paper being produced under Roberts's supervision
The dissolution of the Howard/Hollis/Roberts venture in 1854 marked the effectual end of the earliest efforts to make paper in Utah Those involved had learned several things about the paper industry in the process First, proper machinery and chemicals were absolutely necessary to turn out a consistent product of suitable quality Though mechanization helped in Howard's first efforts, the lack of bleaching agents and proper forming and finishing equipment severely affected quality. The poor product obtained from the "mill" was probably the single most important factor in tabling production.
A second, less controllable factor was the quality and quantity of the material used for stuff. Without bleaching agents only pale rags, such as worn wagon covers or bed linens, could be used, despite the zealous call for "rags of all colors, of every name and denomination." This was no small problem Clothing and yardage were made over until there was nothing left to remake; then thrifty families used the last worn scraps of fabric to make braided rugs instead of offering them for paper. 31 Papermaking in the territory remained permanently handicapped until a reliable source of rags could be found. Carting rags a thousand miles was not an attractive proposition, so a method to glean them systematically from within the territory had to be established.
Time also worked against the industry The 1857 Utah War pushed the industry's restarting back a year, and papermaker Thomas Howard's interim assignment to a colonizing mission in the Blackfoot, Idaho, area further postponed it. Despite the hopeful starts by Roberts, Hollis, and Jepson, Utah remained dependent on eastern mills for newsprint, stationery, and other consumer papers.
As the vats and machinery lay idle though the late 1850s, Brigham Young began negotiations with a Boston manufacturer for a larger, fully equipped mill, a move that quietly began the second period of industrial development for Utah paper With tinder in place, events of the early 1860s would put a spark into the Utah market that fed capital and institutional commitment into the fledgling industry and put it on its own feet Howard's less than spectacular successes in paper production nonetheless marked the faltering beginnings of an important production base, one that operated successfully until an unfortunate 1893 fire in Utah's single producing mill marked the end of Utah's paper industry. Thomas Howard's efforts in the 1850s were undoubtedly a learning experience. No production records remain to gauge the success of the venture other than to say that it successfully met an immediate demand, which may be the most suitable accolade. On these footings was built a thirty-year paper industry that remains one of Utah's most fascinating, necessary, and, in the end, productive attempts at self-sufficient local production.
NOTES
Mr Saunders is a librarian at the Renne Library, Montana State University, Bozeman.
1 Cited in "The William Robertson Coe Collection of Western Americana," Yale University Library Gazetted (October 1948): 109.
2 Orson Hyde to Howard Egan, May 7, 1849, Brigham Young Papers, LDS Church Archives, Salt Lake City, abstracted in Journal History of the Church on that date The press was to be shipped in the spring of 1848, but shipping problems in Nebraska kept it there until the following spring. It is now part of a permanent exhibit at the Church Museum of History and Art, Salt Lake City.
3 Dard Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft (New York: Dover, 1978), p 556.
4 Acts, Resolutions, and Memorials . . . Territory of Utah . . . 1852 (Great Salt Lake City, 1852), pp. 205-6.
5 Leonard J Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), pp 63-130, 195-256; John L Clark, "The Mormon Church and Utah Salt Manufacturing, 1847-1918," Arizona and the West 26 (1984): 225-30.
6 Hyde to Egan. The original letter is clear as to the amount, but the typist for the Journal History somehow recorded "872."
7 Randy Dixon of the LDS Church Historical Department provided a typescript of this reference from his the on Salt Lake City; it had no primary source citation but was probably taken from a minutes collection in the Historical Department.
8 Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, p. 114.
9 William B. Beatty, "Early Papermaking in Utah," The Paper Maker 28 (1959): 12; Journal History, October 1, 1851.
10 Sidney Roberts to Brigham Young, January 20, 1852, Brigham Young Papers; Hunter, Papermaking, pp. 556-57. Hunter mistakenly attributes first production to the later Sugar House location.
11 Deseret News, December 27, 1851.
12 Deseret News, July 30, 1853.
13 Roberts to Young.
14 See note 7.
15 The small stone arch through which the stream left the block is still visible in the sandstone foundation of the wall, immediately north of the west entrance gates.
16 The machinery ordered was probably for the maceration of pulp I seriously doubt that a mechanical former was delivered since a number of contemporary references specify hand production.
17 Deseret News, January 12, 1854 This would place the concern in a location today occupied by the foyer of the Salt Lake Temple.
18 On the Mormon Frontier: The Diary of Hosea Stout ,Juanita Brooks, ed., 2 vols (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1963), p 512 (April 7, 1854); Beatty, "Early Papermaking in Utah," p 14; Deseret News, May 25, 1854.
19 LDS Church Historian's Office Journal, June 8, 1854, LDS Church Archives; Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, pp. 114—15; Deseret News, February 15, 1855.
20 Deseret News, May 25, 1854.
21 LDS Church Historian's Office Journal, June 23 1853.
22 Deseret News, July 6, 1854.
23 Deseret News, June 22 to July 20, 1854.
24 See "To Our Readers," ibid
25 Average caliper on the imported sheets runs .004 to .006 inches. The local papers of the first batch run .005 to .008 and the second batch .007 to .009 Part of the difference in the second batch is explained by poor or unskillful forming of the sheets that left some areas thicker than others Howard's experience had been in operating a mechanized mill.
26 LDS Church Historian's Office Journal, July 29, 1854 Whether or not it actually carried paper is open to conjecture, but the News did not resume printing on imported sheets until September 28.
27 Deseret News, October 12, 1854.
28 "Paper Making—How it is Done," Deseret News, November 23, 1854.
29 Deseret News, August 22, 29, October 31, 1855; August 27, 1856; October 24, 1855.
30 Brooks, On the Mormon Frontier, p 579 (December 31, 1855) and p 588 (January 16, 1856) All water was public property and was not open to riparian or proprietary claims.
31 For a picture of conditions in Utah close to this period see Donald R Moorman and Gene A Sessions, Camp Floyd and the Mormons: The Utah War, Utah Centennial Series, vol. 7 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992), pp 55-56.
