Paper-Making
an account of paper-making from its earliest
known record down to the present time by
J.W. Butler Paper Company 1901
marked that in 1842, according to an estimate made at a meeting
of paper-makers held in New York City in that year, the paper-mill
property of the United States was valued at $16,000,000, and
the annual output at $15,000,000, while the value of rags
imported from Europe amounted to $468,230, and the raw stock,
rags, and other material collected in the United States to
$6,000,000. With the adoption, in 1843, of the devices for a
rotating strainer, for draining water from the pulp in the washing
or beating vats, came another advance in the process of
paper-making.
In 1844 a jobbing house was opened in Chicago by Oliver Morris
Butler to dispose of the paper f made at his St. Charles Mill.
Several years later J. W. Butler, the present head of the J. W.
Butler Paper Company, was placed in sole charge of the Chicago
branch. Oliver Morris Butler was also a part owner and president
of the Lockport Paper Company, of Lockport, Illinois, a successful
plant erected for the manufacture of Straw Board, and he
remained active in the trade up to the time of his death, which
W. Butler, touches closely, through him, his ancestors, and ~y their earlier years as paper-makers, nearly the whole of
the nineteenth century in the line of the paper industry in this country. That this direct branch of the Butler family may
have had even earlier identification with paper-making is not improbable; the family line is clearly and directly
traceable as continuous residents in America back to the earlier half of the seventeenth century, only a few years
subsequent to the Pilgrims' landing, but the meager records of our earliest settlers seldom speak of their vocations,
and our first positive knowledge of the Butler family's connection with the paper industry is early in the nineteenth
century.