USA > Massachusetts > Hampden County > Picturesque Hampden : 1500 illustrations > Part 16
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OLD TIMES IN THE HILL TOWNS.
At the close of the Revolution many new settlers came to the hill towns. Most of them were young married men. The pioneer came the first summer, provided with an axe, a brush scythe, a shovel and a hoe. Selecting a place for his dwelling, the forest trees were soon leveled about it, a little cellar dug, and a log cabin built. A piece of
SEESAW.
A SUMMER FLOOD ON WEST SPRINGFIELD MEADOWS.
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PICTURESQUE HAMPDEN.
ground was cleared up, the logs rolled in piles, the brush burned, a patch scratched over with the hoe and sown to rye, and another pre- pared to plant with corn and pota- toes. Then the pioneer went back to the place he had come from ; but in the spring he came again, driving a yoke of oxen with a cart contain- ing his household goods, his wife with a baby in her arms riding a horse, while a cow plodded after, tied to the cart behind. Then came years of toil and hardship. The barn was to be built, the fences made, the orchard set out. Each year a new piece of land wascleared and sowed or planted, old stumps were dug out, walls built, and the farm brought under better cultiva- tion. Then came the building of a frame house with its heavy timbers and huge chimney. By this time
SPRINGFIELD, FROM THE WEST SHORE.
the pioneer had many neighbors about him, and all came to the raising. The one essential thing about a raising was a liberal supply of New England rum, and the occasion was one, not only of neighborly kindness, but of great social enjoyment. When in later years temperance reform was first agitated and a man at the instance of his better half undertook to raise a building without rum, it was to most an unpleasant innovation, and the timbers moved very slowly and not without much grumbling and strong suspicions of inhospital- ity. The houses of nearly all the first settlers were of logs, and generally contained two rooms. The most expensive items in building were nails and glass. The nails were usually ham- mered out in a blacksmith's shop, and the glass was sometimes omitted entirely, an opening which could be closed in stormy weather doing duty as a window.
When the subscriber to a newspaper in those early days, after long delay got his copy, it is not easy to see what he found in it to interest him. Of what we call news, the paper of that day contained hardly anything. The leading editorial was gen- erally a call upon delinquent subscribers to pay up, with the information that oats, peas, beans, etc., would be received in payment. Then there was generally an essay, often very
A FISHERMAN'S DINNER.
well written, upon some point of morals or some question of the day, over the name of Cato or Seneca - and by the time the paper reached him, a distant subscriber might easily make the mistake of believ- ing it was written by the veritable old Roman whose name was signed to it. Then there would be an ex- tract from a private letter to a friend of the editor, or some gentleman of the town, written a week or two before by an acquaintance two or three hundred miles away, giving an account of some remarkable event said to have happened in the vicinity of the writer, but which was probably made up by some gossip- ing neighbor or some story-telling passer by. Then there would be an account of a battle or some military operations on the conti- nent of Europe, which had taken
place one or two months before. The account of this had been obtained by the editor from an English newspaper which had come over in a sailing vessel, and had been given to the editor by a traveler who chanced to have it in his pocket. And this was substantially what the subscriber of that day found in his paper.
ON THE ELM-BORDERED BANKS OF THE CONNECTICUT.
GATHERERS OF DRIFTWOOD.
The question naturally arises how a people with such books and newspapers acquired the general information and intelli- gence which our ancestors pos- sessed. A recent writer says the New Englanders of that period acquired their knowledge by their inquisitiveness. Doubt- less this is true to a considera- ble extent, but I am inclined to think that the regular attendance at church, and the lively interest and discussions as to religious doctrines, contributed largely to the intellectual growth of the people. A traveler of that day found it very difficult to pass a house without standing a rigid cross-examination as to news; and he might think himself for- tunate if he did not become entangled in a controversy upon the trinity, or original sin.
AUGUST.
I hear the wild bee wind his horn, The bird swings on the ripened wheat; The long, green lances of the corn Are tilting in the winds of morn; The locust thrills his song of heat. - Whittier.
MANUFACTURING
and INDUSTRIAL 4
INTERESTS of of the PUNT
THE HOLYOKE WATER POWER COMPANY.
As is generally understood, the history of the Hol- yoke Water Power Company furnishes the industrial history of the city. "The Story of the Dam," as told in the early part of this work, illustrates this and renders unnecessary here a repetition of the plans and experiments which finally eventuated in laying a prac- tically imperishable foundation for the largest manu- facturing city, supplied wholly by water power, in the world.
As Holyoke is indebted to its unexampled water power - larger than that of Lawrence and Lowell com- bined-for its success, it owes this to the men who planned and made it perfect through the organization of a corporation and the co-operation of skilled minds and energy. Since 1849, when the first dam was com-
life of a dam is from fifty to sixty years, and the present apron was completed in 1871, but the company propose to be forehanded. The treasurer's report shows a surplus of $1,014,000, and, in view of the im- mediate contemplated expenditure of three-quarters of a million dollars, it will be seen that the company is not independently rich. The organization consists of a board of nine directors, of which Gideon Wells, of Springfield, is president, and Edward S. Waters, of Holyoke, treasurer. About 150 different concerns are supplied with power by the corporation, which also furnishes the basis for the city's electric light.
To describe the detail of engineering which holds and distributes throughout the city of Holyoke the great body of water and power would require much more space than can be granted. Suffice it to say that the 30,000 horse power in the control of the company
The pages following show but a part of the city's great manufacturing interests. To describe them all would require a much larger book than we should be able to publish this season, and we can only say that the Water Power Company furnish power to a great versatility of industries, paper making being the most important of all. There are now no less than twenty- four large paper mills in the city, and two more are being built. The list of other industries would require space which must be devoted to illustration, and this leads, in closing this brief review of a great corpora- tion's work, to a mention of the picture which occu- pies the lower part of this page. It is the reproduc- tion of a very rare and beautiful engraving of " Hol- yoke in 1856," as viewed from the South Hadley side of the Connecticut river.
What better evidence can the Water Power Com-
HOLYOKE BEFORE THE WAR-FROM AN OLD PRINT.
pleted, the Water Power Company has had the best of talent at its command and has spared no expense to preserve intact, and absolutely safe from rupture, the great wall which cages and holds the mighty mass of waters behind it. This has necessitated the expendi- ture of several million of dollars to date, and the cor- poration has now in view the expenditure of $750,000 more for the construction of a new dam. The average
has been more than sufficient, during the present year, (1892) to supply all the corporations requiring it, and steam power is rarely used by any of them. When it is considered that the average cost of steam power for manufacturing purposes, in the United States, is at least three times the cost of water power, it may be seen what an advantage Holyoke manufacturers have in the economy of this most important item.
pany give than an invited comparison of the Holyoke of to-day with the picture here given, showing Hol- yoke when there were but three mills in the city, and none south of Dwight street? The engraving was kindly loaned the editor of this work, by J. G. Mackin- tosh, Esq., of Holyoke, and he earned the money for framing the original, when a boy, by shoveling snow for John R. Baker, a merchant.
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PICTURESQUE HAMPDEN.
WHITING PAPER CO
WHITING PAPER COMPANY, MILL NO. I, HOLYOKE, MASS.
HOW PAPER IS MADE.
THE PROCESS, AS SEEN AT THE MILLS OF THE WHITING PAPER COMPANY.
HEN one visits a stationery store with intent to pur- chase a supply of writing paper, and in particular if you wish something for fine correspondence, the clerk will quite probably display certain attractive boxes containing papers put up by the Whiting Paper Com- pany of Holyoke. Indeed, the boxes bear their name and the acorn design which is their trade-mark. Boxed stationery has been winning for itself wide favor in re- cent years, and when you ask for the best, the Whiting TRADE-MARK. company's papers will be found to stand among the two or three brands of the first rank, and it is the effort of the company to make them altogether pre-eminent.
You pay fifty cents, more or less, for the box of paper that you choose, and carry the package away under your arm; but do you ever think of the time, the labor, the immense capital and the complicated processes the contents of your parcel had to go through before it was packed in that neat box you found at the stationer's ? We are all familiar with that dilapidated individual who parades the city highways and byways with an old sack over his shoulder. He moves along with a leisurely shuffle, yet with an anxious turning of the eyes this way and that and a frequent stopping at basement doors to interview the servants and canvass the chances of getting rags or old bottles. Then rubbish heaps and the ash barrels interest him, too, and he pokes them over with the iron hook he carries and makes them yield up their treasures. We have all seen him - perhaps heard him; for he has no gentle voice, and if the city authorities do not prohibit hawking about the streets, the rasping notes of his call are not soon forgotten. Most people see no more than this - the first step
and the rudest one in the paper-making process. In Hampden county, however, there are few who have not seen the high-walled paper mills along its stream or those lining the canals of Holyoke city. A somewhat detailed account of this industry may, there- fore, be supposed to have a more than ordinary interest.
A CORNER OF THE RAG ROOM.
PICTURESQUE
HAMPDEN.
119
He must be a good deal of a barbarian in these days who has no use for writ- ing paper. He is at any rate an object of pity ; for he must either be sadly lacking in education, or a man who has no friends and no business. It might be affirmed with considerable truth, that civilization itself rests on our ability to produce paper cheaply and in large quantities. What could our printing presses do without it? If books could not be made at moderate cost, education would be again confined to the few instead of as now being the heritage of the great majority. One's circle of friends would narrow, too, for if we could not write, from ignorance or because of the expense, we would lose sight and thought of many and they of us. Those who lack education, as a class, live in mists of prejudice and superstition. Educa- tion is a light which puts darkness to flight, and it is often made in the pictured simile of a lamp or a torch. To keep this flame burning was a fight against great odds in the old days, when learning was guarded by a few scattered groups of monks or some little handful of patricians of this or that empire, which had gained
a horse to draw it. Such gather the rags of our cities and the regions neighboring. In the more distant country districts, though the old-time Yankee tin peddler is no more, his somewhat degenerate prototype still makes occasional rounds and trades tinware and other varied necessities of the kitchen economy for the contents of the housewife's bags of rags and feathers. However the rags are gathered, they all in time find their way to some dealer who sorts and bales them and then sells them to the mills. Many of the rags used come from the Old World countries across the Atlantic. No doubt enough rags are produced in this country to supply the de- mand, but at the price they bring many will not take the trouble to save them.
Let us enter a paper mill and look about. I suppose we find ourselves in the office in the first place and there see rows of desks and various clerks and book- keepers, who scratch away with their pens very much after the manner of their class anywhere. But get permission to go through the mill. There are the great brown bales of rags weighing from six to nine hundred pounds each, and here are
NO. 2 MILL OF THE WHITING PAPER COMPANY, HOLYOKE.
temporary prominence and power. It was like a pyramid resting on its point with the base in the air. Permanent safety could only come by bringing it down on the base of a general education and a continual interchange of ideas. This state the de- velopment of the paper-making industry has been an important factor in bringing about. War itself is affrighted and slinks away, for it only thrives in the glooms of ignorance, with its accompanying prejudice and hasty anger. It would be in- teresting to watch the development of paper making from its first primitive begin- nings up to the present, but in the space of this article there is only room to describe the process as it is in one of the modern great mills of the present.
The chief ingredient of fine writing paper is rags. Added to this is a small per cent. of wood pulp. Newspapers are often made almost wholly of wood pulp, but this material has not the strength and fiber to make the finer grades. Rags are in the first place gathered by the street scavengers before mentioned, or by their more aristocratic cousins who have possessed themselves of a cart, and in some cases of
heavy paper-wrapped bundles of wood pulp. Reach into one and pull forth a piece Why ! it's not pulp, but paper - a very heavy, coarse-textured white paper. But that is the shape in which it reaches the mills and it must be ground over again to make an article for the public. It seems a wonder that this white pulp paper could have been made out of the yellow spruce wood, which is the material out of which it is largely made at present.
The lower floors of this part of the mill are mostly given up to storage. We mount to the fourth story. Here the bundles of rags are being slashed open by a man with a big knife; the brown sacking and cords are removed, and the close- packed mass is pulled to pieces and thrown into a great hopper. There a swiftly revolving wheel catches the rags on its spikes and whirls them about so fiercely that you wonder to find any rags left after the process, to say nothing of getting the dust out of them. From this hopper they are dropped through a hole in the floor, and if we follow them - not through the hole, but down the stairway - we enter a
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PICTURESQUE HAMPDEN.
large room, where a little army of "girls " is at work amidst a great array of immense baskets heaped to overflowing with the white rags. By "girls " I do not mean chil- dren. A woman is always a "girl" in the mill, whatever her age. The women wear a sort of uniform in this room. At least, each has a blue cap and apron. Most of them stand facing the windows before a wide, continuous table divided into apartments and floored with a coarse wire screen. In front of each girl is a heavy upright knife like a broad-bladed scythe, which they use to cut off buttons with. Behind her are
11
THE CALENDERS.
two or three baskets into which the different sortings are thrown. From the " Screen girls " the rags go for a more careful sorting to the " Table girls." The heavily loaded baskets filled by them are slid into a little side room where the cutter is at work. A single girl feeds the rags into the low, rattling, grind- ing, jarring machine that, six feet from the starting point, delivers them all cut in one to three-inch squares at the rate of a ton an hour. Until within a short time this work was done by hand on the knives in the room adjoining.
SORTING.
IN THE ENGINE ROOM.
The cutter drops the rags on a revolving strip of canvas, which carries them down stairs, and lets them fall into another dusting machine. This machine is a huge drum of wire netting inside of a box or small room. Lift a door and look in and you see the rags rolling about within the drum, and below a thick deposit of linty "dust." The "dust" is nearly white and looks quite good enough for fine paper, but it is all sold to mills which manufacture the coarse paper used under carpets. The rags pass through three of these dusters one after another and then are caught on a strip of canvas which hurries them up to the ceiling, there to toss them down a steep incline of iron slats. Through this such stray buttons as have passed the sorters are sup- posed to fall. A vigilant watch is kept for buttons up to the last moment and there are many little devises for detaining them, so that there is small danger of a customer's finding any in his paper.
After the dusting, the rags are pushed down through a convenient hole in the floor, which lets them fall into an immense cylinder tank of iron which holds fully three tons. A mixture of lime water and soda ash is put in with the rags and the steam is turned on. In this slowly revolving tank the rags are boiled for twelve hours. They look to be well cooked by the time they come out, for they have turned to a rusty brown. Numerous big boxes
THE PAPER MACHINE.
mounted on trucks are being trundled by the workmen from the sloppy floors of the boiler room to the apartment adjoining, where they are thrown into great oval vats known as "engines." Each engine is furnished with a heavy, revolving iron wheel slatted with knives, which keeps the contents of the vat in motion and tears them to bits. A stream of water is turned on, and this water, though it came originally from the near canal, has been filtered to a purity that, if one tries it, will be found in taste and quality fully up to spring water. Chloride of lime is added for a bleach, and after six hours working over in this tank the contents are very white and pulpy. Still, this is only the beginning. For a full week this pulp is allowed to soak in great tanks of bleach and then is ready for a final grinding. It comes from the bleach of a delicious whiteness, and looks good enough to eat. A paper pulp pudding, if it tasted as good as it looked, would be a rare dish. Now the pulp is washed in one of the engines and freed from . the chloride of lime, and is kept grinding for ten hours more before it is ready for the paper machine. Meanwhile, color has been added and alum to fix it, and now it goes down to the basement to the "chest." The chest is a big vat, with long arms revolving within to keep the contents stirring,;and from this the pulp is pumped up to the
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PICTURESQUE HAMPDEN.
"machines." The machine room is a noisy place and I can remember as a little fellow the half fright and awe with which I passed through this room, the machine is so big and complicated and so loud in its clattering. The floors are wet and steamy vapors are rising from the damp paper, and the air here is warm and moist, whatever the outside weather. A machine is about a hundred feet long. At one end a little stream of pulp is allowed to flow in, varying in volume with the weight of paper desired. It is mixed with a stream of water that reduces it to a thin, milky fluid, that seems to be so nearly water that one doubts the possibility of ever getting such stuff into solid sheets of paper. All this end of the machines is in violent, jarring motion to distrib- ute the paper fiber evenly. Presently the fluid flows on to a long strip of revolving wire cloth and begins to lose its water. Fifteen feet distant, almost as if by miracle, the substance flows away a solid, broad sheet of paper. The moist sheet now passes beneath a revolving roll of wire, which bears on its surface raised letters and, perhaps, certain designs, and these stamp what is known as the water-mark on the paper. You can see it if you look through a sheet held against the light, but it is not usually apparent otherwise. After a little further progress, you find the paper has become dry and hard. Lastly it passes through a vat of gluey animal sizing and under a revolving cutter and is delivered at the end in fast falling sheets of the size desired. The paper then goes to the loft to be dried. The sheets are hung over poles in folds of ten or fifteen in a bunch, until a room is filled from floor to ceiling. Then steam is turned on and it is allowed to dry for forty-eight hours. It does not look very handsome as it comes from the lofts. It is so wrinkled and rough that you begin to think it's a failure after all, when the calender girls get it and run it through their machines and it comes out as fair and as smooth as you please. Next the sorters take it. They sit at their table and keep the sheets swiftly turning- the perfect sheets being put in one pile, the slightly imperfect in another, and the
SEALING.
more defective, which must be ground over, in a third. A counter takes the sheets and runs them over rapidly and lays them off in reams to be trimmed and wrapped for the market. The last work is that of the sealer who, with a stick of wax and a lighted gas jet, accumulates the neatly packed packages about him or her with astonishing rapidity. If the paper is to be put up in boxes, it has to be cut into small sheets and perhaps passed through a ruling ma- chine. Then it is folded, pressed and banded. En- velopes have to be made to go with it, and it is in- teresting to watch the machine, which takes the queerly outlined sheets cut for it and folds and gums and shapes them into envelopes. The girl at the ma- chine counts and bands them, and another takes them away and puts them and the paper up in the pretty boxes awaiting. And now they are ready for the final packing and shipment to stationers the world over.
If this story were a bit of newspaper advertising, the reader would find a moral at the close some- thing like the following: "When next you need stationery, Buy Whiting's Standard." As it is, 1 leave the readers to draw their own moral, provided they can find one.
It may be of interest to note that the product of fine writing papers, sent out by the Whiting com- pany, is larger in amount than that of any other mill in this country. What I have so far written has had special reference to the boxed papers sold by stationers, but that is only one branch of the in- dustry. The firm makes ledger papers, bond papers, linens-in fact all the varieties of first-class papers which are called for by the general paper trade.
The company has three mills, two in Holyoke, and the other on the Chicopee river at Wilbraham, Mass. They would all be ranked as large mills, even in an industry noted for its immense buildings. Then, too, it is to be mentioned that the corporation, large as it is, has very few stockholders. The stock is, in fact, all owned in two families, the Whitings of Holyoke and the Jenks family of Adams. C. J.
THE MILL OF THE WHITING PAPER COMPANY, AT WILBRAHAM, MASS.
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PICTURESQUE HAMPDEN.
MILLS OF THE NONOTUCK PAPER COMPANY, HOLYOKE, MASS.
.
PICTURESQUE HAMPDEN.
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THE HAMPDEN GLAZED PAPER AND CARD COMPANY.
The Hampden Glazed Paper and Card Company was incorporated October 11, 1880, and the corporation organized and began business with a capital of $28,000, locating in the first mill east of the Connecticut river and occupying two floors of that mill. On November 22, 1882, the company doubled its stock, purchased the present mill site and, during the winter following, built the present mill. The capacity of the mill is now eight
printing papers, is being constantly increased. About eighty hands are employed.
The company has made for itself an excellent repu- tation through the quality of its goods, which accounts for the rapid increase in the amount of its product, and the personal attention given to its business by every officer of the corporation also accounts for much of its success. George F. Fowler is president ; T. H. Fowler, treasurer, and N. N. Fowler, secretary, while associated with these brothers and largely identi- fied with them is another, R. P. Fowler.
were for a one-machine mill, to turn out five tons daily but in July, 1881, a second machine was added and the product increased to about twelve tons.
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