Paper-Making
an account of paper-making from its earliest
known record down to the present time by
J.W. Butler Paper Company 1901
about 1540, Henry VII I. of England used for his private
correspondence, a paper whose watermark represented a hog
with a miter. This was to show his contempt for the pope at
Rome, with whom he had so bitterly quarreled. It may have been
manufactured for him by special order in Germany or the
Netherlands, or it may have been made by foreign settlers who
returned to their own country, so that the trade was afterward
lost for a time in England, and its manufacture was not known to
the authorities that granted the patents.
Long before this, paper-making had been introduced into Spain
by the hordes of Saracenic invaders, who, coming over from Africa
on a plundering expedition, had ended by making conquest of
the whole peninsula. When, however, the long struggle between
Christian and Moor ended in the downfall of the latter, and his
expulsion from the land that had seemed to him the paradise of
the prophet, the industry declined in Spain, to be revived at
Fabriano, in the province of Ancona, in Central Italy, which soon
rose into prominence as a paper-making center. Later on, in 1
Padua.
The beginning of the industry in
America was almost coincident with'
the granting of patents for the
manufacture of paper in England. A
paper-mill was established by William
Rittenhouse, a native of Holland, at
Germantown, Pennsylvania, in the
year 1690, one of the builders and
owners being William Bradford, a
Philadelphia printer, who was
afterward the owner of the first
printing office in New York City. It was
through him that Benjamin Franklin,
in 1723, received his first introduction
to a temporary home, and
employment, in Philadelphia. The
paper at this first American mill was
made from linen rags, and the
product was about two hundred and
fifty pounds per day. The mill was on
a stream subsequently called
Paper-mill Run, which empties into
the Wissahickon. In 1697, William
Bradford, probably in preparation for
Nicholas Rittenhouse, for a term of ten years, the annual rental being "ye full quantity of seven reams of printing
paper, two reams good writing paper and two reams of blue paper.
William De Wees, a brother-in-law of Nicholas Rittenhouse, in 1710 erected another mill in that part of Germantown
called Crefeld, this being also on the banks of a small stream that emptied into the Wissahickon. It is stated by
several authorities that in the year 1712 Peter the Great of Russia visited Dresden, and was so pleased with the
process of paper-making as he witnessed it there that he secured workmen and sent them to Moscow where they
erected a paper-mill with many valuable royal grants and privileges. The following year, 1713, saw a revival of the
industry in England, where it had again gone to decay, and where Thomas Watkin, a stationer of London, brought it
into great repute in a short time.