5IO FULLING 



Virginia (1744), Rhode Island (1764), Connecticut (1767), and New York 

 (1769-1773). By 1769 there were 40 paper mills in Pennsylvania, New 

 Jersey, and Delaware, annually producing £100,000 worth of paper. In the year 

 of Independence, Maryland acquired a mill. In 1789, 53 mills operated within 

 the range of the Philadelphia market alone. Massachusetts had 20 mills in 

 1795; Connecticut, 16 in 1810. The year 1811 saw 76 of them in Delaware 

 and Pennsylvania. By 1814 the total number in the United States was esti- 

 mated to be 187. 



As other states entered the industry, the number rose to 800 by 1855. 

 Florida, in 1900, was the last to join the parade, and at that time papermaking 

 was pursued in 35 states. In the interim since 1690, many mills, very likely 

 failed, and others consolidated. In 1954, 482 companies operated 775 paper 

 mills and 319 pulp mills in the United States. 



Until 1817 all paper manufactured in the United States was handmade, 

 and until 1 740 all such handmade paper was manufactured on molds imported 

 from England. That year American molds were first made by Isaac Langle, 

 a German immigrant, in Pennsylvania. In 1817 the first paper machine in 

 America was erected by Thomas Gilpin near Philadelphia, and in 1827 the 

 first Fourdrinier machine in the States, imported from England, was set up 

 at Saugerties, New York, in the mill of Henry Barclay. Other machines, at 

 first imported, but before long "Made in America," gradually replaced the 

 hand-operated molds. In 1829, however, 54 of the 60 paper mills in Massa- 

 chusetts still followed the handicraft. In 1845 that state had 89 mills; Con- 

 necticut had 37; and only two handmade-paper mills remained in America. 

 In 1866, the Willcox mill of Pennsylvania, established 137 years earlier, ceased 

 making paper by hand, the last of America's handmade-paper mills except two 

 short-lived revivals, one of which was operated from 1928 until 1931 by Dard 

 Hunter Associates in Lime Rock, Connecticut. 



For more than 150 years the early American paper industry depended 

 for raw materials almost entirely on the vegetable fibers in cotton and linen 

 rags, as the mills in Europe had very largely relied for centuries since the 

 Saracens carried the art of papermaking into Spain in the twelfth century. By 

 the middle of the eighteenth century, however, a growing scarcity of rags 

 plagued the expanding American paper industry, so much so that in 1776 the 

 Massachusetts General Court appointed a Committee of Safety in each locality 

 to encourage the saving of rags. So great was the need for paper at that time 

 that legislation was enacted which gave exemption from military service for 

 all skilled papermakers. This exemption prevailed as late as 1812. 



At the end of the eighteenth century almost every periodical, in both 

 Europe and America, carried the admonition "Save your rags," and in 1799 

 quantities of writing paper manufactured in one Massachusetts mill bore the 

 watermark "Save rags." Public notices of various sorts, in verse and prose, 



