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| Industry | Pulp and paper |
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| Founded | 1852 |
| Founder | John B. Brown, Josiah S. Little, Nathan Winslow, and Hezekiah Winslow |
| Headquarters | Berlin, New Hampshire, U.S. |
Key people | W. W. Brown |
| Products | Paper products, Bermico, Kream Krisp |
The Brown Company, known as the Brown Corporation in Canada, [1] was a pulp and papermaking company based in Berlin, New Hampshire, United States. They closed their doors during the 1980s.
In 1852, a group of Portland, Maine, businessmen, John B. Brown, Josiah S. Little, Nathan Winslow, and Hezekiah Winslow, purchased and built a large sawmill on the property known as the "Thomas Green Privilege" at the head of Berlin Falls in Berlin, New Hampshire. In 1854, they expanded their operations by constructing the H. Winslow & Company branch railway to the Grand Trunk Railway, and, in 1858, they built a dam and a gristmill.
By 1866, Josiah Little had died, and the Winslows had sold their interests in the H. Winslow & Company. A new partnership was formed and a new name chosen, the Berlin Mills Company. [2] In 1868, William Wentworth Brown and Lewis T. Brown purchased a controlling interest in the company and remodeled their sawmill, making it even larger than before. W. W. Brown later purchased the stock owned by Lewis T. Brown in the 1880s, acquiring complete control of the company.
The company changed its name again in 1917 during World War I to the Brown Company. The Brown family owned land that spanned from Canada to Florida, which they used for logging. [3] In the 1940s the Brown Company went through bankruptcy and never recovered. In 1954, European business began to purchase large amounts of stock in the company, therefore the Brown Company began to buy European businesses in England, Wales, and Italy. [4] The closing of the company came in the 1980s, when its parent company Gulf and Western Industries (which had acquired the Brown Company in the late 1960s) sold it to the James River Corporation. The paper mills stayed in Berlin under various companies until closing in 2006. The other plant in Gorham is now operated under the name of Gorham Paper and Tissue, which is managed by Patriarch Partners. [5]
In the 1970s, Bill Taylor, associate professor of history at Plymouth State University, arranged for 11,000 photographs taken by the Brown Company photographers from 1870–1965 to be transferred to the said university for archival usage. [6] In 2006, images were scanned, and the Beyond Brown Paper website was formed. [7] In September 2012, a partnership between Historic New England, the Berlin and Coos County Historical Society, Timberlane Regional High School, and Plymouth State University created an award-winning documentary called At the River’s Edge: An Oral History of Berlin, New Hampshire. [8]
During the early 1900s, the Brown Company created a new department known as "research and development" and constructed a building for this to take place. In 1954, over 150 projects were kept recorded in their books. [9] The objective for this new department was to "demonstrate that the future of the Brown Company didn't lie in the achievements of the past, but in the development of products and process that were yet to come." [10]
Some products that were the result of the R&D department were Bermico piping, cellulose floc, and Nibroc towels. In January 1927, work began in the Everglades in Florida by Dr. R.V. Allison to work on soil problems and to reclaim lands that were taken by two railroads. [11] At its peak, the Brown Company's R&D department held over 100 scientists and eventually earned 600 U.S. patents. [12]
The following items were created and produced by the Brown Company:
Berlin is a city along the Androscoggin River in Coös County in northern New Hampshire, United States. It is the northernmost city in New Hampshire and the only city in Coös County. The population was 9,425 at the 2020 census, down from 10,051 at the 2010 census.
Pulp is a lignocellulosic fibrous material prepared by chemically or mechanically separating cellulose fibers from wood, fiber crops, waste paper, or rags. Mixed with water and other chemical or plant-based additives, pulp is the major raw material used in papermaking and the industrial production of other paper products.
Boise Cascade Company, which uses the trade name Boise Cascade, is a North American manufacturer of wood products and wholesale distributor of building materials, headquartered in Boise, Idaho.
The International Paper Company is an American pulp and paper company, the largest such company in the world. It has approximately 56,000 employees, and is headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee.
Sappi Limited, originally incorporated as South African Pulp and Paper Industries Limited in 1936, is a South African pulp and paper company with global operations.
Domtar Corporation is an American company that manufactures and markets wood fiber-based paper and pulp product. The company operates pulp and paper mills in Windsor, Quebec, Dryden, Ontario, Kamloops, British Columbia, Ashdown, Arkansas, Hawesville, Kentucky, Plymouth, North Carolina, Marlboro County, South Carolina, and Kingsport, Tennessee. While the company operated independently for several decades with listing on the Toronto and New York stock exchanges, the company was acquired by Paper Excellence in November 2021 and has since operated as a subsidiary.
A paper mill is a factory devoted to making paper from vegetable fibres such as wood pulp, old rags, and other ingredients. Prior to the invention and adoption of the Fourdrinier machine and other types of paper machine that use an endless belt, all paper in a paper mill was made by hand, one sheet at a time, by specialized laborers.
Bagasse is the dry pulpy fibrous material that remains after crushing sugarcane or sorghum stalks to extract their juice. It is used as a biofuel for the production of heat, energy, and electricity, and in the manufacture of pulp and building materials. Agave bagasse is similar, but is the material remnants after extracting blue agave sap.
A paper towel is an absorbent, disposable towel made from paper. In Britain, paper towels for kitchen use are also known as kitchen rolls, kitchen paper, or kitchen towels. For home use, paper towels are usually sold in a roll of perforated sheets, but some are sold in stacks of pre-cut and pre-folded layers for use in paper-towel dispensers. Unlike cloth towels, paper towels are disposable and intended to be used only once. Paper towels absorb water because they are loosely woven, which enables water to travel between the fibers, even against gravity. They have similar purposes to conventional towels, such as drying hands, wiping windows and other surfaces, dusting, and cleaning up spills. Paper towel dispensers are commonly used in toilet facilities shared by many people, as they are often considered more hygienic than hot-air hand dryers or shared cloth towels.
The kraft process (also known as kraft pulping or sulfate process) is a process for conversion of wood into wood pulp, which consists of almost pure cellulose fibres, the main component of paper. The kraft process involves treatment of wood chips with a hot mixture of water, sodium hydroxide (NaOH), and sodium sulfide (Na2S), known as white liquor, that breaks the bonds that link lignin, hemicellulose, and cellulose. The technology entails several steps, both mechanical and chemical. It is the dominant method for producing paper. In some situations, the process has been controversial because kraft plants can release odorous products and in some situations produce substantial liquid wastes.
The Androscoggin River is a river in the U.S. states of Maine and New Hampshire, in northern New England. It is 178 miles (286 km) long and joins the Kennebec River at Merrymeeting Bay in Maine before its water empties into the Gulf of Maine on the Atlantic Ocean. Its drainage basin is 3,530 square miles (9,100 km2) in area. The name "Androscoggin" comes from the Eastern Abenaki term /aləssíkɑntəkw/ or /alsíkɑntəkw/, meaning "river of cliff rock shelters" ; or perhaps from Penobscot /aləsstkɑtəkʷ/, meaning "river of rock shelters". The Anglicization of the Abenaki term is likely an analogical contamination with the colonial governor Edmund Andros.
A pulp mill is a manufacturing facility that converts wood chips or other plant fiber sources into a thick fiber board which can be shipped to a paper mill for further processing. Pulp can be manufactured using mechanical, semi-chemical, or fully chemical methods. The finished product may be either bleached or non-bleached, depending on the customer requirements.
In industrial chemistry, black liquor is the by-product from the kraft process when digesting pulpwood into paper pulp removing lignin, hemicelluloses and other extractives from the wood to free the cellulose fibers.
Cascade is an unincorporated community within the city of Berlin and the town of Gorham, New Hampshire, United States. The village gets its name from a nearby alpine waterfall, which is visible in the hills to the east. The village straddles New Hampshire Route 16, the main road into Berlin from the south. On the eastern side of the road, there is a paper finishing mill located on flatlands by the Androscoggin River known as "Cascade Flats". On the western side there is a hill known as "Cascade Hill".
A Hollander beater is a machine developed by the Dutch in 1680 to produce paper pulp from cellulose containing plant fibers. It replaced stamp mills for preparing pulp because the Hollander could produce in one day the same quantity of pulp it would take a stamp mill eight days to prepare.
The sulfite process produces wood pulp that is almost pure cellulose fibers by treating wood chips with solutions of sulfite and bisulfite ions. These chemicals cleave the bonds between the cellulose and lignin components of the lignocellulose. A variety of sulfite/bisulfite salts are used, including sodium (Na+), calcium (Ca2+), potassium (K+), magnesium (Mg2+), and ammonium (NH4+). The lignin is converted to lignosulfonates, which are soluble and can be separated from the cellulose fibers. For the production of cellulose, the sulfite process competes with the Kraft process which produces stronger fibers and is less environmentally costly.
Paper is a thin sheet material produced by mechanically or chemically processing cellulose fibres derived from wood, rags, grasses or other vegetable sources in water, draining the water through fine mesh leaving the fibre evenly distributed on the surface, followed by pressing and drying. Although paper was originally made in single sheets by hand, almost all is now made on large machines—some making reels 10 metres wide, running at 2,000 metres per minute and up to 600,000 tonnes a year. It is a versatile material with many uses, including printing, painting, graphics, signage, design, packaging, decorating, writing, and cleaning. It may also be used as filter paper, wallpaper, book endpaper, conservation paper, laminated worktops, toilet tissue, or currency and security paper, or in a number of industrial and construction processes.
William Robinson "W. R. " Brown was an American corporate officer of the Brown Company of Berlin, New Hampshire. He was also an influential Arabian horse breeder, the founder and owner of the Maynesboro Stud, and an authority on Arabian horses.
Royal Golden Eagle is a global integrated, resource-based industrial group, with businesses in paper, palm oil, viscose, construction and energy, property and asset management. Owned by Indonesian businessman Sukanto Tanoto, the group employs 60,000 people worldwide with assets exceeding US$30 billion.
William E. Corbin (1869–1951) was the inventor of Nibroc paper towels and was the mayor of the city of Berlin, New Hampshire (1931–1932).
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