Thanks for your interesting post about kraft paper (for the uninitiated, it is the various grades of brown paper used for wrapping or constructing corrugated cartons).
We were fortunate as a nation to have abundant timber. All that scrap wood pulp and sawdust from the mills, and also cotton rags and scrap fiber from textile mills, is the raw material for sturdy paper. I toured paper mills as part of my job in the 80s. The sour stink of the fermenting paper mash was overpowering! And the paper-making machinery was amazing.
Because paper in the 1950s used to be made from original fibers, it was higher quality than the recycled stuff of today, where the fibers have been broken down again and again. Even the tissue paper that they wrapped your clothing purchases in at the department store was such excellent quality, home sewers saved it to make patterns with.
One of the delights of my childhood was receiving the shirt cardboards around which my dad’s business shirts came folded from the dry cleaners. My mom did all the laundry for the entire family, adults and kids, except for those five white shirts, washed, starched and steam pressed at the cleaners. Some of the shirt cardboards were just coarse-textured and gray; but sometimes they would come with a white paper coating on one side. The gray ones could be used to construct small containers, or houses and roadways for toy cars, but the white-on-one-side ones were great “canvases” for pencil drawings or tempera water color paintings!
I totally forgot about the cardboard that Dad’s shirts came in! Yes, that was great construction board for all sorts of signs and projects! Before hot-melt, glue, too.
I worked in paper mills in the early and mid 80s starting up and servicing kraft recovery boilers. That stuff did STINK to high heaven. It permeated your whole body and you couldn’t wash the smell out. We used to put apple cores in our cars to capture the odor, but I don’t think they did anything. I haven’t been in a mill for about 50 years and I believe they have done a lot to deodorize the process.