Writing from Gilbertville, a Lewiston journal correspondent says:
Gilbertville, a manufacturing community in the town of Canton,
twenty-five miles from Lewiston, up the Androscoggin, is now a village
of over 500 inhabitants, where three years ago there was but a single
farmhouse. If a town had sprung into existence in a far Western
State with so much celerity, the phenomenon would not be considered
remarkable, perhaps; but growths of this kind are not indigenous to the
New England of the present era. Gilbertville has probably outstripped
all New England villages in the race of the past three years. It is only
one of the signs that old Maine is not dead yet.
Gilbert Brothers erected a saw mill here three years ago. A year later,
the Denison Paper Manufacturing Company, of Mechanic Falls, erected a
big pulp mill, which, also, the town voted to exempt from taxation for
ten years. The mills are valuable companions for each other. The pulp
mill utilizes all the waste of the saw mill. A settlement was speedily
built by the operatives. Gilbertville now boasts of a post-office, a
store, several large boarding houses, a nice school house, and over 500
inhabitants. The pulp mill employs seventy men. It runs night and day.
It manufactures monthly 350 cords of poplar and spruce into pulp. It
consumes monthly 500 cords of wood for fuel, 45 casks of soda ash,
valued at $45 per cask, nine car loads of lime, 24,000 pounds to the
car. It produces 1,000,000 pounds of wet fiber, valued at about $17,000,
monthly. The pay roll amounts to $3,500 per month.
The larger part of the stock used by the mill consists of poplar logs
floated down the Androscoggin and its tributaries. One thousand two
hundred cords of poplar cut in four-foot lengths are piled about the
mill; and a little further up the river are 5,000 cords more. The logs
are hauled from the river and sawed into lengths by a donkey engine,
which cuts about sixty cords per day, and pulls out fourteen logs at
a time. All the spruce slabs made by the saw mill are used with this
poplar. The wood is fed to a wheel armed with many sharp knives. It
devours a cord of wood every fifteen minutes. The four-foot sticks are
chewed into fine chips as rapidly as they can be thrust into the maw of
the chopper. They are carried directly from this machine to the top of
the mill by an endless belt with pockets attached. There are hatchways
in the attic floor, which open upon rotary iron boilers. Into these
boilers the chips are raked, and a solution of lime and soda ash is
poured over them.
This bath destroys all the resinous matter in the wood, and after
cooking five hours the chips are reduced to a mass of soft black pulp.
Each rotary will contain two cords of chips. After the cooking, the pulp
is dumped into iron tanks in the basement, where it is thoroughly washed
with streams of clean cold water. It is then pumped into a machine which
rolls it into broad sheets. These sheets are folded, and condensed by
a hydraulic press of 200 tons pressure. This process reduces its bulk
fifty per cent., and sends profuse jets of water flying out of it. The
soda ash, in which, mixed with lime and water, the chips are cooked, is
reclaimed, and used over and over again. The liquor, after it has been
used, is pumped into tanks on top of large brick furnaces. As it is
heated, it thickens. It is brought nearer and nearer the fire until it
crystallizes, and finally burns into an ash. Eighty per cent. of the ash
used is thus reclaimed. This process is an immense saving to the pulp
manufacturers. The work in the pulp mill is severe, and is slightly
tinged with danger.
Three thousand four hundred pounds of white ash to 2,100 pounds of lime
are the proportions in which the liquor in each vat is mixed. One does
not envy the lot of the stout fellows who crawl into the great rotaries
to stow away the chips. The hurry of business is so great that they
cannot wait for these boilers to cool naturally, after they have cooked
one batch, before putting in another. So they have a fan pump, to which
is attached a canvas hose, and with this blow cooling air currents into
the boiler, or "rotary," as they call it. The rotary is subjected to an
immense pressure, and is very stoutly made of thick iron plates, bolted
together.
Describing the business as carried on at Mechanic Falls, the same paper
says: There are six of these mills on the three dams over which the
Little Androscoggin falls. These are the Eagle, the Star, the Diamond,
the Union, the pulp, and the super calendering mills. The Eagle and the
Star mills run on book papers of various grades. The Union mill runs on
newspaper. The old Diamond mill now prepares pulp stock. The pulp mill
does nothing but bleach the rag pulp and prepare for the machines in the
other mills; while the super-calendering mill gives the paper an extra
finish when ordered. There is practically but one series of processes by
which the paper is made in the various mills.
It is a curious fact that America is not ragged enough to produce the
requisite amount of stock for its own paper mills. Nearly all the rags
used by the Denison Mills (and by others in various parts of the country
as well) are imported from the old countries. All the rags first go
through the "duster." This is a big cylindrical shell of coarse wire
netting. It is rapidly revolved, while a screw running through its
center is turned in the opposite direction. Air currents are forced
through it by a power fan. The rags are continuously fed into one end of
this shell, which is about ten feet long and four feet in diameter. The
screw forces them through the whole length of the shell, while they are
kept buzzing around and subjected to breezes which blow thick clouds of
dirt and dust out of them. The air of the room is thick with European
and Asiatic earth. It is swept up in great rolls on the floor. The man
who operates the duster should have leather lungs.
Overhead is a long room where thirty girls are busily sorting the rags
for the various grades of papers. That the dusting machine is no more
perfect than a human machine is evinced by the murky atmosphere of this
room, by the particles that lodge in the throat of the visitor, and
by the frequent coughing of the sorters. They protect their hair with
turbans of veiling, occasionally decorated with a bit of bright color.
These turbans give the room the appearance of an industrious Turkish
harem. Short, sharp scythe blades, like Turkish scimeters, gleam above
all the girls' benches. When a sorter wishes to cut a rag, she pulls it
across the edge of this blade, and is not obliged to hunt for a pair of
shears.
Curious discoveries are frequently made in the rags. Old pockets,
containing small sums of money, are occasionally found. A foreign coin
valued at about $3 was found a few days ago. In the paper stock, quaint
and valuable old books or pictures are found often. One of the workmen
has a museum composed of curiosities found amid the rags and shreds of
paper. Rev. Dr. Bolles, of Massachusetts, makes an annual pilgrimage
to Mechanic Falls for the sake of the rare old pamphlets, books, and
engravings that he may dig out.
Stuffed in hogsheads, the rags are lowered from this room through
a hatchway, and are given a red hot lime bath. They are placed in
ponderous cylinders of boiler iron, which revolve horizontally in great
gears high above the floor. A mixture of lime and water, which has been
prepared in large brick vats, is poured over them. An iron door, secured
by huge bolts, is closed on them. The cylinder slowly turns around, and
churns the rags in the lime-juice twelve hours. This process is called
bleaching. When the rags come out they are far from white, however. They
are of a uniform dirty brown hue. But the colors have lost their gripe.
When the rags shall have been submitted to the grinding and washing in
pure water, as we shall see them presently, they are easily whitened.
The lime bath is the purgatory of the paper stock.
Before we go any further, we must see what becomes of those soft
and lop-sided bundles which are going into the mills. These contain
chemically prepared wood fiber, a certain percentage of which is used
in nearly all the papers made now. It gives the paper a greater body,
although its fiber is not so strong as that made of rags. The pulp comes
down from Canton in soft brown sheets. These are at once bleached. The
brown fiber is placed in a bath of cold water and chlorate of lime.
There it quietly rests till a sediment settles at the bottom of the
tank. At an opportune moment the workman pours in a copious libation
of boiling water. This causes the escape of the chlorine gas, which
destroys all the color in the pulp. In half an hour it comes out, a mass
of smoking fibers as white as a snow heap. The drainers into which it
goes are large pens with perforated tile floors. The pulp remains in the
drainers till it so dry it is handled with a pitchfork.
We are now ready to look at the beating machines, which have to perform
a very important part in paper making. These are large iron tanks with
powerful grinders revolving in them. Barrow loads of the brown rags are
dumped into them, and clear cold water is poured in. The grinders are
then started. They chew the rags into fine bits. They keep the mass
of rags and water circulating incessantly in the tanks. Clean water
constantly flows in and dirty water as constantly flows out. In the
course of six hours the rags are reduced to a perfectly white pulpy
mass. There is one mill, as we have said, devoted exclusively to the
reduction of rags to this white pulp. It is dried in drainers such as we
saw a few moments ago filled with the wood fiber.
There are other beating machines just like these, which perform a
slightly different service. Their function may be compared to that of an
apothecary's mortar or a cook's mixing dish. The white rag stock and the
white wood fiber are mixed in these, in the required proportions.
At this stage, the pulp is adulterated with China clay, to give it
substance and weight; here the sizing (composed of resin and sal soda)
is put in; oil of vitriol, bluing, yellow ocher, and other chemicals are
added, to whiten or to tint the paper. These beaters are much like
so many soup kettles. Upon the kind, number, and proportion of the
ingredients depends the nature of the product. The percentages of rag
pulp, wood pulp, clay, coloring, etc., used, depend upon the quality of
paper ordered.
After the final beating, the mixture descends into a large reservoir
called the "stuff chest," whence it is pumped to the paper machine. The
pulp is of the consistency of milk when it pours from the spout of
the pumps on the paper machine. The latter is a complicated series of
rollers, belts, sieves, blankets, pumps, and gears, one hundred feet
long. To describe it or to understand a description of it would require
the vocabulary and the knowledge of a scientist. The milky pulp first
passes over a belt of fine wire cloth, through which the water partly
drains. It is ingeniously made to glide over two perforated iron plates,
under which pumps are constantly sucking. You can plainly see the broad
sheet of pulp lose its water and gain thickness as it goes over these
plates. Broad, blanket-like belts of felt take it and carry it over and
between large rolling cylinders filled with hot steam. These dry and
harden it into a sheet which will support itself; and without the aid of
blankets it winds among iron rolls, called calenders, which squeeze it
and give it surface. It is wound upon revolving reels at the end of the
machine.
If a better surface or gloss is required, it is carried to the super
calendering mill, where it is steamed and subjected to a long and
circuitous journey up and down tall stands of calenders upon calenders.
The paper is cut by machines having long, winding knives which revolve
slowly and cut, on the scissors principle--no two points of the blade
bearing on the paper with equal pressure at once. Girls pack the sheets
on the tables as they fall from the cutters, and throw out the damaged
or dirtied sheets. A small black spot or hole or imperfection of any
sort is sufficient to reject a sheet. In some orders fifty per cent. of
the sheets are thrown out. There is no waste, as the damaged paper is
ground into pulp again. Having been cut, the paper must be counted and
folded. Then it is packed into bundles for shipment. The young lady who
does the counting and folding is the wonder of the mill. Giving the
sheets a twist with one hand so as to spread open the edges, she gallops
the fingers of the other hand among them; and as quickly as you or I
could count three, she counts twenty-four and folds the quire. She takes
four sheets with a finger and goes her whole hand and one finger more;
thus she gets twenty-four sheets. Long practice is required to do the
counting rapidly and accurately. Twenty-four sheets, no more and no
less, are always found in her quires.
Papers of different grades are made of different stock, but by the same
process. Some paper stock is used. This must be bleached in lime and
soda ash. There are powerful steam engines in the mills for use when
the water is low. There are large furnaces and boilers which supply the
steam used in the processes.
The Messrs. Denison employ 175 hands at Mechanic Falls. Their pay roll
amounts to about $5,000 per month. The mills produce 350,000 pounds of
paper per month and they ship several car-loads of prepared wood-pulp,
in excess of that required for their own use, weekly. The annual value
of their product is not far from $300,000. They use, for sundries,
each month, 300 tons of coal, 100 casks of common lime, 250 gallons of
burning-oil, 28,000 pounds of chlorate of lime, 3,700 pounds of soda
ash. 10,000 pounds of resin. 24,000 pounds of sal soda, 22,000 pounds of
oil of vitriol, 22,000 pounds of China clay, etc.
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