JAMES C. WEMYSS JR. fondly recalled an August 1940 trip to Groveton with his father, James C. Wemyss Sr.: “I was out of school. [Father] said, ‘Come on, I’ll take you to look at a paper mill over at Groveton.’ He and I drove over. We spent the night in the company house, which is now the [Passumpsic] bank. It was staffed with a lady. She cooked something for us to eat. I was only about fourteen. He said, ‘Let’s go down and walk through that paper mill. So we walked through it, and he said, ‘What do you think of it?’ I said, ‘Gee, I wish we could buy that.’ He said, ‘I just did’ [laughs]. I said, ‘Oh, that’s good.’”
Rumors of the impending sale had been swirling around the North Country during the summer of 1940. Logger Cy Hessenauer recorded in his diary: “Aug. 13 (Tuesday): Looked like rain again and this time did. At noon it began. Phil and I went to town in PM. . . . Mill down. Everyone talking about the change in ownership. . . . Aug. 18: This new week will mark a landmark in Groveton history. The mill under new management. Many men layed off. 270 out of woods alone.”1
The sale of the mill was completed on August 14, 1940. Old Jim immediately changed the mill’s name from Groveton Paper to Groveton Papers. The Wemyss family assumed responsibility for the mill’s debts, which included two years of back property taxes owed to the Township of Northumberland and loans totaling $570,000 from Coos County that had been guaranteed by the State of New Hampshire. Old Jim Wemyss secured an additional loan of $180,000 to make necessary capital improvements to modernize and expand mill capacity.2 The Wemyss family purchased roughly ninety thousand acres of timberland in New Hampshire and Vermont, including the forty-thousand-acre Nash Stream watershed, as well as nearly two hundred buildings and houses in Groveton. “We owned most of the town,” Jim Jr. said.
The elder Wemyss made a good first impression on Puss Gagnon, the recently hired fifteen-year-old. “I first started for Old Willie Munroe,” Puss told me. “One week or two, then Wemyss bought it. We went from forty-eight cents an hour to fifty-one cents an hour. We thought he was a hell of a nice fellow.”
Jim Wemyss Sr.’s father, James Strembeck Wemyss, patriarch of the family paper business, opposed his son’s decision to buy Groveton Paper Company. Grandfather Wemyss had purchased an idle newsprint mill in Northumberland village on August 23, 1923. He converted it to a tissue mill. For seventeen years, he observed the struggles of Groveton Paper, three and a half miles to the north. Decades later, Jim Wemyss Jr. explained his grandfather’s thinking: “It was a mess, and he said, ‘It’s been a mess for many years, and it’s still gonna be a mess.’”
James S. Wemyss had gone into the toilet paper business in 1909 because, he told his grandson, “I didn’t want to sell grand pianos. You only sell one to one family maybe in a lifetime. I want to get a business where they use my product every day of the week.” In 1910 he paid a struggling Virginia business $5,000 for the right to call his tissue line “Vanity Fair.” His first mill was on Town Creek, just across from the Brooklyn Bridge, next to a slaughterhouse. “My grandfather used to tell me it was not the cleanest water,” Jim Wemyss chuckled. Around 1914, James S. Wemyss acquired a small mill in Pittston, Pennsylvania, in the Wyoming Valley, and another small mill in Troy, New York.
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.”
Grandfather Wemyss, a tough, paternalistic capitalist, was no friend of organized labor. A Coos County Democrat headline proclaimed on October 18, 1939: “Police Guard Paper Mill: The Wyoming Valley Mill Takes Action to Prevent Possible Harm from Outsiders.” The outsiders, it turned out, were six strikers from a mill in Gouverneur, New York, that the Wemyss family had owned since 1935. Fearing the strikers intended to sabotage operations at Northumberland, J. S. Wemyss called on Groveton’s selectmen and police to protect his mill. State troopers, along with Groveton and Berlin police, discovered that “the delegation from Gouverneur had no intention of molesting private property.” Instead, they hoped to persuade the mill’s workers to organize a papermakers union affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The Democrat’s unsigned news story opined: “It is not believed that any great number will be ready to join a union. The present wage scale is higher than is paid in similar mills operating under similar conditions. A five percent increase in wages recently went into effect, and another increase becomes effective automatically.” Since wages were in the twenty-five-cents-an hour range, the raises were a penny or two an hour. Workers voted against organizing a union in mid-November.4
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 hat 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 workers 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.”
Toward the end of February 1945, as American forces pressed toward Germany, Young Jim was badly wounded: “It’s not like in the movies. You’re running down the streets, throwing hand grenades in windows at night, and the tanks are firing, and the glass is flying around, and all of a sudden you’re lying on the ground. They said, ‘Who shot you?’ ‘I didn’t catch his name.’ I don’t know what happened. All of a sudden I’m bleeding like hell, and hurting like hell, and they put a tourniquet around my leg and rolled me against the building and said, ‘We’ll try and come back and get you.’ They gave me a couple of toothpaste tubes full of morphine [and] said, ‘When it gets too bad, don’t forget to relieve that thing.’” Wemyss would be on crutches until September. Ever after, he walked with a limp, and he had to have additional surgery on the leg years later. I asked him about the pain after all these years; “It never stops,” he answered.
Rosa Gaudette Roberge vividly recalled her childhood during the war years. She was about seven when her father died in 1942: “The night my father was sick, he was having such pains. He sent my sister up to the doctor’s office to have him come to the house. Back then they’d go to your house. [The doctor] was drinking; he wouldn’t come. So my father walked from behind the high school down to that house where [the doctor] lived. He knocked on the door, and the doctor opened the door, and my father dropped dead right on the doorstep. You always heard that line about, ‘You opened the door and fell on the floor.’ Well, it happened to my father. He was dead before he hit the floor.”
Old Jim Wemyss had closed the company store on October 31, 1942, and shortly thereafter Rosa’s mother moved the family to one of the apartments above it. “When my mother went to get [an apartment], the guy came there. He says, ‘My goodness, you’ve got five kids. Isn’t that a lot of kids?’ She said, ‘What am I supposed to do? Shoot ’em?’ [laughs]. He didn’t want to rent that to her with all those kids. We never destroyed anything. We were taught different.”
Her father’s World War I pension and Social Security could not support the family. Her mother strung a clothesline from their apartment across to the mill’s converting plant, and she took in washing and ironing. “We didn’t have any money,” Rosa said. “I remember every once in a while we’d take a cart up to the town. Behind the bank there was a barn there. We’d get surplus food. If it wasn’t for that—we didn’t eat very good.”
“Across from the company block, on the mill side, there was great big stacks of coal dust. It was like sand almost,” she said. “We’d take an old cardboard box and cut it down and slide down the coal pile, winter and summer [laughs]. It was fun living there. I enjoyed it because we had all kinds of kids to play with, and everybody knew everybody. Everybody got along with everybody.”
It is inconceivable today that small children could roam freely around the mill premises. Rosa and the neighborhood kids would sneak into the mill on Sundays, when blue laws required the mill to shut down: “We used to go in and play around the paper machines. We used to hide under them. Just to get in there and see what was in there, trying to get away with something.”
“Behind the blacksmith shop there were these big iron [tanks]. There was a hole in the top. I guess they filled it with some kind of chemicals or something. I thought I’d be smart one day, and I got down in the hole,” Rosa recollected. “It was empty. And I was short. I couldn’t get out [laughs]. I was panicking; I’ll never forget that. Finally, I don’t know if I jumped up to grab way the hell above me. Scared me. Nobody was with me, so nobody knew I was there.”
The lumberyard sawdust pile was another dangerous but irresistible place to play. “They had a thing that brought the sawdust up into the boxcars. It was like a conveyor belt, and we used to go over there and jump in the sawdust in the boxcar. Of course there was probably air pockets in there. We could have sunk right into the sawdust and suffocated.” And then there was the river: “They used to have the boom logs to keep the pulp from going down the river. We weren’t supposed to be on them, but we played on them. Never fell in or nothing.”
Rosa witnessed the same prejudice against poor families that Shirley Brown had suffered: “My oldest brother was blamed for robbing a store, Bouchers. Somebody broke into the store, and they stole beer and cigarettes and stuff. First thing, the cop comes to the house and says something about Arthur was supposed to have broke into the store. [Mother] said, ‘I don’t see how he could have. He was in bed.’ Come to find out it was [Boucher’s] own relative that broke in the store.”
Despite the family’s poverty, Rosa remembered the war years with fondness: “We didn’t have much, but we made our own fun.”