J. S. Wemyss renamed the Northumberland mill “Wyoming Valley Paper Mill.” When the Town Creek mill was destroyed by fire in 1926, he shifted tissue-making operations to Northumberland. He and his twenty-three-year-old son replaced the existing dam with a new dam, and they constructed a hydroelectric power plant to run the mill. Jim Jr. wryly described his father’s first job in Northumberland—to keep the dam builder, Mr. Harriman, sober: “[Harriman] drank Spirits of Oneida and Brown’s Relief. [Father] said, ‘The only reason I knew he was drinking Brown’s Relief or Spirits of Oneida, I’d walk up to him and say, “Stick out your tongue.”’ If his tongue was purple, [Father] said, ‘You’re drinking.’” Jim Sr. also discovered the pleasure of heaving sticks of dynamite out of a Stutz Bearcat. “He liked to hear the noise, I guess,” his son suggested. “Grandfather didn’t like the idea of him throwing dynamite out of the car, so he took him back to New York. Said he was getting bad training up here.”
In 1926, J. S. Wemyss took out a $100,000 mortgage on the Wyoming Valley mill and added a second tissue machine. He pulled nearly all his money out of the stock market just before the crash in October 1929 and paid off the 1926 mortgage. While other paper mills in the United States shut down or ran only sporadically, the Wyoming Valley mill kept running full tilt, producing toilet paper, napkins, paper towels, grass for Easter baskets, paper for wrapping fancy shirts, wax paper, and even paper to line coffins.
Grandfather Wemyss added two small, used tissue machines in 1929 and 1930 that produced about three hundred feet of tissue a minute. Jim Jr. marveled: “If OSHA could have seen that plant! You know how they controlled the speed of the paper machines? They had a wooden vat full of saltwater, and they had a little wheel up here with a winch, and they had these induction motors [that] drove the paper machine. As they lowered the celluloids into the saltwater, it put more resistance up on the motors and it would slow down. If you wanted to go fast, you pulled [them] up out of the water and it would go a little faster.”
In 1933, J. S. Wemyss replaced the finishing room he had built in 1927 with a two-story concrete-and-steel finishing room that was 150 by 100 feet. It contained a printing plant to produce wrappers for the company’s new line of napkins, towels, and waxed paper products. The mill used between twenty and forty tons of sulfite and ground wood pulp a day. Most of the longer-fiber sulfite pulp was acquired from the Groveton and Berlin mills. A Wemyss-owned mill in Danville, Quebec, provided the shorter-fiber ground wood.3 Joan Breault remembered the Northumberland mill also used rags: “They had sidings in there towards the paper machine, and people would go over there because they had boxcars of cotton clothes come in to put in the paper machine. People got a lot of clothes out of that.”
Jim Wemyss recalled the mill’s worst month: “It was in February of ’35 or ’34, and [Grandfather] said, ‘You know, Jim, we made $234 last month. We didn’t lose any money. But if I have another month like this, I’m going to shut it down. I can do better with my income on my money. I hate like heck to put a lot of people out of work, but this is an awful lot of work for just $230.’ Right after that, business changed and he started making considerably more money. That’s how close it came. Berlin was practically shut down. Groveton had one little machine slobbering along.”
The Wyoming Valley mill employed 350 in the mid-1930s. When unemployed men asked J. S. Wemyss for a job, his grandson recalled, “He’d say, ‘I’ll pay you a dollar a day. Here’s a bucket of paint and a brush.’ But with that dollar a day, they could buy a loaf of bread for five cents, or a dozen eggs for 25 cents. At least they were able to eat. That’s the way he felt, anyhow. ‘Paint it red.’”
“Times were tough,” Herb Miles asserted. “If it hadn’t been for the Wemysses, there’d have been a lot of hungry people around this area. People who didn’t see it, don’t realize it. People were hungry.”
Jim Wemyss Jr. was born in November 1925. He lived with his grandfather in Lancaster when he was ten. The youngster often heard his grandfather preach economic diversification and avoidance of debt. If a mill produced only newsprint or bond paper, and the market was poor, “you’re shut down.” “My grandfather would never leave his office at night until all the bills were paid, unless there was one in dispute,” Jim Jr. recalled. “He would not go to bed owing money to anybody. Never had a mortgage. [Actually, he took out a mortgage in 1926.] Never borrowed money. Didn’t have any life insurance either. He said, ‘That’s a dead business. You have to die to win. I don’t like it.’ He knew everything [that] was going on. He taught my father the same thing, and I guess I must have learned something myself.”
Walter Wemyss, a nephew of J. S. Wemyss, managed the Northumberland mill. At Christmastime 1940, Wyoming Valley workers gave both men large sterling silver cocktail sets. The engraving on Grandfather Wemyss’s gift read, “To a Fine Boss.” The boss was moved to give all Wyoming Valley employees a Christmas bonus of an extra week’s pay.5
The goodwill did not survive the year. Two hundred men and one hundred women briefly struck Wyoming Valley on September 30, 1941. Walter Wemyss negotiated an increase for the hourly workers and an adjustment in the piece rate paid to the women in the finishing room.6 The strike so embittered J. S. Wemyss that he turned his back on the mill. Jim Wemyss Jr. said, “My grandfather’s parting words to me [were], ‘Jim, don’t do any more in this mill. We took everybody for work during the Depression,’ and they gave him the cocktail shakers, and thanked him for all these wonderful things, and then they went on strike with the union. He said, ‘That’s my thank you. I’ll walk away.’ And he walked away. He gave it to me, but he said, ‘I would advise you not to put any more money in this mill. Period.’ And I didn’t. That was good advice from a smart man.” By 1941, the Wemyss family was putting its money into the Groveton mill.
Even though Grandfather Wemyss opposed the purchase of the failing Groveton mill, he put up the capital to acquire it. Young Jim acknowledged that this was one occasion when his grandfather misjudged an opportunity: “My grandfather was an executive. He was not a mill man. I don’t want to demean him, but I don’t ever remember him being that involved in his paper mills. He was involved in the executive area and sales. My grandfather didn’t really understand them, as large as they were getting. He was used to smaller, one- and two-machine mills. Father had the foresight to look ahead to see what the hell was going on in the industry.”
The Groveton mill was more dead than alive when Old Jim bought it. Len Fournier remembered the mill was “mostly all wooden floors” and infested with rats: “I don’t mean that they bothered us, but you would see them. You couldn’t leave your dinner pail around. They’d hide under the wooden floors. Eventually they got a man in to go around and put out poison.”
James Strembeck Wemyss in a top h
at and his wife, Margaret Campbell Wemyss, in the white hat, exiting a family wedding in the 1940s. (Courtesy Jim Wemyss)
Jim Wemyss believed his father was “the only man that could have bought it and run it. He knew what to do. The people before it were clowns. It took a helluva lot of work.” The Groveton mill was antiquated: “The Number 3 [paper machine] was driven by a big Ball steam engine. [Numbers] 1 and 2 had great big flywheels on them, big pistons, something you’d see driving a Mississippi River boat. I’m not kidding. Schuuuh. Schuuuh. Schuuuh. Pistons going back and forth, and steam only ran four hundred feet a minute. They had no safety devices like rope drives. The men took the paper down between the dryers with their hands, and a lot of people got injured.”
“You don’t realize how tough it was when my father took this mill over in 1940,” Young Jim declared. “Nothing had been done to it for ten or fifteen years. With his genius, and I mean genius, [he] got that mill to run and made a success out of it. His father didn’t think he could do it. Just incredible what he did. I’m going to compliment him, but I argued with him all the time [laughs]. He was a very smart man.”
Herb Miles, an electrician at the mill for thirty-six years, recalled that almost immediately the mill and the town came back to life: “It run steady all during the war. Guys had gone into the army and into the military, so they were shorthanded. Some guys, Mr. Wemyss told them they could stay there twenty-four hours a night—for example mechanics and millwrights—to keep stuff running, and be there if something broke down; they could repair it, keep it running.” Cy Hessenauer, a boss in a logging camp, complained in his diary that it was impossible to find men willing to work in the woods: “September 23, 1940: Phil not here. Wants to get in mill very badly.” On January 15, 1941, Hessenauer wrote: “Ray went tonight. Mill takes them as fast as I can get them.”7
Old Jim understood that for the mill to survive he had to immediately restart the long-idle Number 3 paper machine. His son recalled: “He said, ‘If Number 3 doesn’t run, this mill can’t exist. Gotta get it going immediately.’ It had been shut down [around] 1932. They had not taken the water out of the dryers properly. The dryers were a little bit out of round. The machine could never run over 550 feet a minute because of that. It would snap the paper off.”
Old Jim also had to rebuild the mill’s customer base. His son remembered: “The mill had no sales organization to speak of. These people [the Munroes] didn’t know anything about running a mill. My father did not want to sell to jobbers at a low price. So Father said, ‘Who are these jobbers selling to? That’s who we’re going to sell to. We’re going direct.’ Right around the jobbers to the [mimeograph] machinery manufacturers. We didn’t make any friends doing it, but we made friends with the machinery dealers because we said: ‘What would you like? We’ll make it specially for you.’ We became very successful at that.”
Jim Sr. understood that he could not revive the Groveton mill’s fortunes if he provoked a fight with the two locals that represented the mill workers. Following three days of “friendly negotiations,” Wemyss granted workers wage increases of five to seven cents per hour effective July 1, 1941. The agreement also protected seniority rights, permitted arbitration of disputes, and promised no strikes or lockouts.8
World War II had begun in Europe on September 1, 1939. By the time the United States entered the war twenty-seven months later, the transition to a wartime economy was well under way. The first draftees were called to military service in the fall of 1940, and four Groveton boys were on duty at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The war effort created unprecedented demand for paper, and this played an important role in the revival of the mill.
Three hundred sixty-two residents of Northumberland Township entered military service. Shirley Brown recalled, “It was a town of basically females.” To make up for its depleted workforce, the mill hired women, French Canadians not in the Canadian army, very old men, and mentally challenged workers. “We hired anything that could stand up,” Jim Wemyss Jr. quipped. “The digester plant was run by men all in their sixties and seventies.”
Ruby Sargent filled in at a man’s job in the wood room, where she and another woman pulled pulpwood from the wood room pond onto a conveyor belt that fed the chipper. Jerome Cote retired in 1945 at age ninety-one, after working at the mill for twenty-three years.9 The wartime labor shortage was not the only reason old men continued to work at the mill; there was no decent pension system. Channie Tilton remembered an uncle who received a forty-seven-dollar-a-month pension—a dollar for each year he had worked at the mill.
Fifteen-year-old Raymond Jackson was hired in the summer of 1941: “I was going to school then. My father had been hurt in an accident [in May 1941], so I had to take over and be responsible for the family. He was out cutting some wood for himself. It came down in the 1938 hurricane. He cut the tree, and it kicked back, and it broke his ankle and his leg real bad. I had to get permission from the superintendent of the schools to work for the summer.”
Jackson’s first job was as fireman in the boiler room: “They cleaned these ashes, made sure the coal was going down the chutes. A big hopper overhead. It got to the boiler, the stoker part of the boiler, and that’s where it stopped until you wanted it to go again. It was a good job.” That fall, when school resumed, Jackson said: “I tried to stay on and work because we needed the money. I was allowed to work there and work through to the next summer again. Then I got to be old enough so that I could work on my own. I went to work at four o’clock in the afternoon from school, and then I’d work till ten or eleven o’clock. Then the same thing over the next day.” Jackson worked full time at the mill the last two years of high school and graduated with his class in 1943. It had been a challenge, but he said, “It was to benefit my parents.”
The war disrupted normal economic activity. In December 1943, there was a national shortage of coal, the primary power source for the mill. Pulpwood was also scarce. Groveton’s mill was able to keep running, but in June 1943, the Brown Company in Berlin had shut down operations when it ran out of pulpwood. Wartime price controls, designed to prevent price gouging and profiteering, applied to existing, but not new, products. Old Jim responded with creativity. “Father started making things like ‘Drug Bond,’” Jim Wemyss recalled. “Don’t ask me where he got the name. There was no price control on Drug Bond; maybe instead of getting five cents, he made seven cents, which made the mill quite profitable. Then we started making butcher’s paper, and there was no—to my knowledge—price controls on that.”
Some things were beyond the senior Wemyss’s control. “My father was taking us all out; we were young kids back in the ’40s,” Jim Jr. remembered. “We were running green butcher’s paper down on Number 3 paper machine. He had on a brand-new gabardine suit. He was a very prestigious-looking guy when he was dressed up. Something was wrong with the pump in the cellar, and he went down in the cellar, and somebody had taken the boards off the sewer to find out how to drain the water, and he fell in the sewer. He came out a brilliant green. He said, ‘I don’t think we’re going out to dinner tonight.’ We never knew what was going to happen; it was fun.”
John Rich’s father, Nelson, was a mill employee who represented Groveton in the New Hampshire Legislature in 1943: “I think him and the old man Wemyss, they had a run-in then. Because my father went to the legislature, and there was a timber bill that the old man wanted my father to vote for, and he wouldn’t vote that way. I don’t know what it was all about, but he was pretty ornery too, either one of them.” When Jim Sr. expressed his displeasure in strong terms, the legislator quit his job at the mill.
Wages could not keep up with prices, thanks to wartime inflation. Unions had pledged not to strike critical industries during the war, but they persuaded the War Labor Board to support a five-cent-an-hour wage increase. When the Groveton mill and its two locals failed to agree on a wage adjustment in the summer of 1944, the War Labor Board ruled the mill should grant the wage increase to worke
rs retroactive to February 25, 1943. Old Jim agreed to the increase, but he balked at seventeen months of back payments. On July 21, 1944, the Groveton unions voted 427–27 to strike, and two days later, a Sunday when the mill was ordinarily closed, Wemyss shut down the mill. At the end of the month, labor and management agreed to a compromise that gave the strikers the five-cent increase immediately and 55 percent of the retroactive increase. Work resumed at the mill on August 2.10 As part of the strike settlement, Old Jim forced the unions to move the expiration date for future contracts from June 1 to September 1, a concession the local unions would regret for decades.
The Second World War claimed the lives of eighteen Groveton soldiers. Jim Wemyss Jr. had barely turned nineteen when he saw action in the final months of the war in Europe. He credited a war experience with his decision to live in Groveton: “I was in France with a platoon, and I ran them into a graveyard to get behind tombstones. I figured, ‘Pretty safe.’ Smart, huh? I was talking to the sergeant, and I was lying on the other side of the tombstone, and a mortar came down like this [he indicated a near vertical descent]. It must have hit him on the top of the head. Must have blown the tombstone over on top of me. And I said, ‘You know, if I ever get these boys out of this goddamned mess, I’m going back to Groveton, New Hampshire, and I’m never going to leave. So here I am. I got shot up later.”