Revived Paper Mill Brings a Town Back With It

NY Times ^ | June 5, 2008 | FERNANDA SANTOS

[neverdem]

NEWTON FALLS, N.Y. — Eight years ago, a paper mill closed in this remote corner of the western Adirondacks, taking with it more than 100 jobs. Most of the 75 houses in this speck of a hamlet a two-hour drive from Canada soon fell into disrepair, their frames thrashed by weather and hardship.

Some families moved wherever they could find work. Others were stuck with homes they could not sell and long commutes over desolate country roads. The nearest gas station closed, the local hospital struggled to fill its 20 beds, and the volume of mail at the one-person post office shriveled by half, as if the place had been given up for dead.

It is a familiar story: industry leaves, jobs disappear, hardscrabble town is left adrift. Not Newton Falls. As if in a fairy tale, the shuttered mill has come back to life, thanks to a healthy dose of luck, a longtime paper executive’s willingness to take a chance, and the unbending commitment of two men to the place where they had labored for two decades.

For eight months now, the mill has churned out an average of 200 tons of coated paper a day, or 2,000 feet per minute, 54 percent more than it did before it went dark. It runs 24 hours a day, every day, making paper that has been used in Jessica Seinfeld’s cookbook, Wal-Mart newspaper inserts, a work-wear manufacturer’s catalog and biology...

--snip--

“The mill and all the other positive changes you see here, I think they say something about the kind of people we are,” Ms. Bullock, 77, said from her newly built deck, the mill’s smokestack looming in the background. “We’re hard workers, we’re stubborn and even when it looks like the whole world is against us, we don’t give up.”

[neverdem]

Audio Slide Show Never Closed; Idle

No whining, no help from Albany or D.C. via Schumer or Hillary, just salt of the earth.

[SeeSharp]

I’ll bet they’re not having any union problems right now either.

[MichiganConservative]

Big deal, a new liberal arts college opens. Yay, some people with MFAs and PhDs can now work teaching their useless classes instead of serving coffee.

[the invisib1e hand]

Yay, some people with MFAs and PhDs can now work teaching their useless classes instead of serving coffee.

Inculcating the nuances of uselessness into the next gen isn't easy. It takes a lot of imagination to make it all sound reasonable.

[Merta]

But I thought that according to Obama, these kinds of jobs are long-gone thanks to the Clinton and Bush economies. Shouldn’t these people in this town be bitter and cling to guns or something?

[rawhide]

Neat story. Thanks OP!

[Reo]

“In our hearts, we never considered the mill closed,” Mr. Durham said. “To us, the mill was idle. There’s a difference between closed and idle.”

Great article. Thanks for posting it. (But the quote above did remind of the pending "suspension" of the Clintons campaign...."

[Rebelbase]

Paper mills stink but it’s the smell of money for the community. Glad the mill is back.

[Recon Dad]

Not all paper mills stink, just some.

Many more, Mr. Patrick said, have merged in an effort to stave off competition from China,

Little know fact....all those empty containers that are shipped from China to the US are sent back to China filled with our scrap paper to fuel their paper machines.

[flowerplough]

Overstating your case? How ‘bout, not all paper mills stink, just most? And “all” those empty containers go back to China filled with our scrap paper to fuel their paper machines? Not “many of”, or “some of”?

But beside all that, the newly-revived papermill in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, where my Nat’l Guard daughter attends a small state college tuition-free, thanks to us taxpayers, seems to be a Godsend.

[Recon Dad]

Overstating your case? How ‘bout, not all paper mills stink, just most? And “all” those empty containers go back to China filled with our scrap paper to fuel their paper machines? Not “many of”, or “some of”?

Overstating?...do you know something I don't? We have paper mills all over the country and none smell. It depends on the papermaking process being used.

As far as China and what they are doing to the US market in 2003 various grades of scrap paper we use to make our paper ran anywhere from $120 per ton to $200 per ton, today we are paying double.
As to the containers and scape leaving our shores the majority of all scrap paper on the west coast goes to China. They are up from 07 to now 44% to 2.4 million tons. The container would go back empty and they ship the scrap almost free.
Oh, and my son is a Marine.