Parlor - History of Appleton and America
Traveling back and forth between Cheyenne and Chicago, Henry Rogers met two brothers, William and John Van Nortwick. The Van Nortwick family owned the largest paper mill west of Ohio. It was located in Batavia Illinois, just outside of Chicago. Though successful, the mill had a huge problem: It could not keep up supplying newsprint to the Chicago Tribune.
At this time, literacy was exploding in America, reaching 80% by Eighteen Seventy. This was double from just ten years before. The newly literate populous was clambering for reading material. Sensing the potential, Rogers and the Van Nortwicks formed a partnership to create a paper empire with Rogers supplying the capital and the Van Nortwicks supplying the expertise.
The three men chose Appleton as the location to start their paper empire. It had everything.
It had vast forests to the north for pulp. In fact, Rogers and the Van Nortwicks were among the very first to use the sulfite method (using sulfuric acid) to breakdown wood pulp to make strong, supple paper. The method is still the primary means of making paper today. Henry Rogers was even an early adopter of industrial technologies.
It had large markets to the south like Milwaukee, Chicago, and St Louis. In fact, the partners sold newsprint as far away as Yokohama Japan.
In the middle, it had the broad and brawny Fox River. The river not only supplied the tremendous amount of water required to make paper (10 billion gallons flow past Hearthstone every day), it also supplied the power. The river drops 40 feet in just one mile here in Appleton. This stairstep was perfect for building dams to harness the mechanical power of the river by using waterwheels.
It had a ready-made infrastructure. The river was already lined with mills. At first they were flour mills during the Civil War, then lumber mills. In 1872, Henry starts buying them up and turning them into paper mills.
And finally, it had labor. The mills were filled with millwrights, experienced laborers who knew how to harness the power of the river.
It is the second Waldo painting, over the piano, that depicts this part of Henry’s business empire. It shows the dam, which is still there, and the two papermills that were also originally lit on that first night along with Hearthstone. In the center is the Appleton Paper and Pulp Company (owned by Rogers and his partners) which he founded in 1872. This is where Henry put the dynamo to light his home, that mill, and the mill pictured on the left, the Kimberly and Clark Vulcan mill.
Henry Rogers and his partners along with Kimberly, Clark, and their partners are the ones who founded the paper industry along the Fox River. The area is still dotted with paper mills to this day and is still called "The Paper Valley."
