Hallie Heacock and the St. Helens Pulp and Paper Mill

While Heacock carved on wood that he acquired from around the world, some of the wood in his collection was local, including scraps of wood from the St. Helens Pulp and Paper Mill. He also took inspiration from the mill’s façade and used it as a subject for some of his sketches. As co-curator for The Carvings of Hallie Heacock, I spent a good deal of time researching Heacock and became interested in learning more about the St. Helens Pulp and Paper Mill, where Heacock worked from 1933 until his retirement in 1951.

Papermaking is dependent on two main ingredients: water and wood. This made Oregon and the Pacific Northwest an ideal locale for the pulp and paper industry. The first mill in Oregon to use ground wood pulp for paper was the Falls Pulp Company in Astoria, located along the Youngs River. The mill was built in 1884, incorporated in 1887, and workers there used spruce wood as their pulp source. A sample of the pulp from this mill took first place in a pulp competition at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago besting pulp samples from East Coast mills. Between 1866 and 1948 numerous pulp and paper mills were founded in Oregon and across the state border in Camas, Washington. These mills specialized in different paper and pulp products, including newspaper, wrapping paper, carpet paper, Kraft paper, and manila paper. The timeline below gives a brief overview of these mills.

Hamlin F. McCormick and W.P. Hawley of Hawley Pulp and Paper Company founded the St. Helens Pulp and Paper Company in 1925 and hired Max Oberdorfer from Michigan as the general manager of the mill. Oberdorfer designed the first Kraft pulp mill in the United States, and he was in charge of the design and construction of the St. Helens mill, starting in 1926. Kraft is the name for the process to make Kraft pulp — a type of wood pulp that is made when specific chemicals are added to the wood digesters during the cooking process. Kraft pulp makes high-strength paper products that do not tear easily. Kraft paper is used to make brown packing and wrapping paper as well as paper bags. In January 1927, the mill produced Kraft paper for commercial sale. Production went well, and by the end of 1927, the mill was producing 60 tons of Kraft paper a day using one paper machine, a wood processing plant, a steam plant, and a sulphate pulp mill.

In 1928, the St. Helens Pulp and Paper Mill acquired the California Bag and Paper Company of Emeryville, California, and moved its machinery for making paper bags to St. Helens. The mill started producing paper bags six months after the acquisition, with forty bag machines producing three million paper bags every eight hours. By 1931, the St. Helens Pulp and Paper Mill had added a second paper machine and became the first company in the United States to perfect the process of bleaching brown Kraft paper to make white paper, and to sell white paper commercially. Workers developed a semi-bleached paper, trade named “Kranila,” at the mill.

The St. Helens Pulp and Paper Mill continued to be a major employer in St. Helens until the late 1970s. In 1977, the mill celebrated its 50th anniversary with a special behind-the-scenes tour of the mill and property. Hallie Heacock’s 1935 pen and ink drawing was featured on the cover of the tour booklet. Although the bag factory closed in 1974, the mill is still in operation, just on a much smaller scale making tissue paper instead of pulp and specialty paper.