Of the many types of mills that were built on the Perkiomen Creek and its tributaries, the most uncommon was the paper mill. I know of just one, located in the extreme northern edge of Douglass Township on the West Branch of the Perkiomen on, appropriately, Paper Mill Road.
The site is owned by Kenneth Yoder, of Palm, whose grandfather Isaac Yoder bought the mill from Dr. Thomas Leidy’s estate in 1902. Isaac had operated the mill for Leidy and others since 1884. Isaac Yoder’s mill operation used neither rags nor wood pulp, but scrap paper as the raw material.
During the 20th Century, the mill produced rolls of wrapping paper for large meat packing houses and silk mills. The power still came from the Perkiomen Creek, though not from a water wheel, but from more efficient turbines. Steam-heated rollers aided the paper’s drying. The mill was producing wrapping paper until 1945.
Paper made from wood pulp is a fairly recent development. The first newspaper in the United States to be printed on wood pulp paper was dated 1863. Going well back to the middle ages, when paper replaced animal skins for writing, paper has been made from linen and cotton rags, not wood pulp.
William Rittenhouse established the first paper mill in North America in Philadelphia in 1690, where there was a supply of linen rags and also worn out sails and hemp rope which made the best paper. I have been unable to find a description of the steps used in colonial America to turn rags to paper, but colonial papermakers were mostly transplanted European craftsmen, so we can assume they applied their European methods, which are known to us. All paper is made of cellulose, and to make paper, the plant fibers, usually cotton and flax (linen), had to be broken down.
First the collected rags were cut into small pieces, piled in a vat under water and left to ferment for about two months. This rotting gave the final product a pleasant ivory or off-white color. The sour rag mass was then transferred to the stamping mill.
The stamping mill was, in effect, a series of giant mortars and pestles. A waterwheel turned an axle which had short posts mortised into it. As the axle turned, these posts lifted trip hammers, which dropped into the mass of rags and beat the fibers to a pulp (which, by the way, is where the term “beat to a pulp” originated). The very thread of the cloth itself had to be smashed into its constituent cellulose.
At the end of that process, the fibrous mush was stirred into a water-filled vat. The vat man used a mold, a wooden square resembling a picture frame with a wire sieve instead of a picture. The vat man plunged the mold vertically into the vat, turned it horizontally, lifted and shook it left and right, back and forth. The mesh now held a layer of very wet paper pulp, which was flipped out of the mold onto a felt pad upon which another sheet of wet paper was dropped, then another felt on top, building successive layers of felt and paper.
At some point, the whole “sandwich” was placed under a screw press and compressed with great force. This pressure flattened the still-wet paper into thin sheets.
In order to take ink with having it “bleed,” the paper was then sized with hide glue. Hide scraps were collected from the tanner, boiled into glue, and a small amount was mixed with hot water. The paper stack was briefly dipped into the size and then compressed again, after which it was hung up to dry and became “paper.” A good team could make several thousand sheets a day, although the vat men tended to get a sort of paralysis from the repetitive motion.
Mold-making was a highly skilled craft. The sieve in the mold had to be made of wire. The wires were stretched to make a very fine grid. Before about 1820, mold wires were arranged in parallel about an eighth of an inch apart. If you hold a light source behind 18th century paper you can see the wire grid marks in parallel lines. This is usually called “laid” paper.
So rare were skilled mold-makers that one Nathan Sellers of Philadelphia, who joined the Continental Army in the fall of 1776, was discharged by an act of Congress and sent home to make molds. There was a desperate need of paper to make powder wrappers and for general military use.
Laid paper had a very slight corrugated or ripple finish left by the mold wires, so in the early 19th Century a process of weaving the wires into a mesh that resembled today’s window screening produced a more flat and even paper. Paper so made is called “wove” paper.
Into the 19th Century, rags simply could not supply the demand for paper, and new sources of pulp were sought. Everything imaginable was tried – tree bark, sugarcane waste, straw, grass, cornstalks – until manufacturers settled on ground-up wood. Regrettably, somewhere in the process, the wood had to be soaked in a sulfuric acid solution, leaving an acid residue on the paper, which is why today old books and newspapers turn brown and crumple. Much of what has been written in the last 100 years will not last, literally. Rag paper, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to deteriorate.
“Montgomery County – The Second Hundred Years” notes that the West Branch Paper Mill is “believed to have been one of the oldest such mills in eastern Pennsylvania, predating the Revolution. It is said to have supplied the paper for Benjamin Franklin’s publications.”
There is a cornerstone with the initials I.H.M 1796. An undated, unattributed 19th Century newspaper clipping claims, “During the early part of the present century, and until after the Civil War, this mill was the medium of supply for all the paper used by the weekly newspapers published within a radius of twenty miles including the weeklies published in Allentown.”
Another clipping notes the mill “furnished paper to the Welt Bote, Allentown; Bauren Freund, Pennsburg; Adler, in Reading and other German papers then very popular.” It goes on to say, “During the civil war the mill was operated by George Fagley and his son, Edward, and the stock consumed consisted of old rags, bought in Montgomery county and other counties adjoining, at which time fabulous prices were paid for them, the price being for colored rags three to six cents a pound, while as high as twelve cents per pound was paid for clean white rags.”
Over time, mechanized processes involving a continuous belt lifting the pulp from the vat made possible the rolls of paper made at Yoder’s mill.
The universal problem with many of these local mills during the summer was a lack of water. Yoder says that the scrap paper grinder took a lot of power and they would often coordinate their grinding with up-stream mills to take advantage of the extra water. The turbine that ran the grinder generated 35 horsepower. A second one that powered the rest of the machinery generated 17 horsepower.
Nothing is left today of the mill works except the dam. In 1945, Isaac’s son Clarence received two cents per pound for the paper he produced. A day’s output was 1,400 pounds, which yielded a gross profit of $28. The mill machinery was sold and taken to Tennessee.
The Historian is produced by the New Hanover Historical Society. Call Robert Wood at 610-326-4165 with comments.