Fox River Home
Search
Index to Site
Recent Additions

Frequent Questions
Media Coverage
History
Statistics
Maps

PCB Chemistry
Human Health
Wildlife Health
Economic Damage
Corporate Profiles

Compensation
Sediment Cleanup
Cleanup Technologies

State Government
Federal Government
Local Government
Native Nations

International & Great Lakes
Technical Assistance
Other PCB Sites
Links

Photo Gallery
Political Cartoons

Message Board
Guestbook

FORESTRY AND PAPER In 1853, an estimated 200 million board feet of lumber were cut in Wisconsin.  In 1855, 350,000 board feet of lumber and 25 million shingles were shipped out of Green Bay. In the 1860s, Brown County had 60 lumber and shingle mills. Oshkosh had 25 mills. By 1970, Green Bay became known as the "Shingle Capitol of the World," exporting over a half billion annually. Shingles were shipped by rail, and over the bay ice in the winter. By the late 1870s, the mouth of every log-producing river in the Green Bay region was lined with mills. Oshkosh, which now had 234 mills on the banks of the Wolf, was "sawdust city."  By the early 1880s one billion board feet were harvested, primarily from the Green Bay watershed. By 1890, the dominant old growth white pine trees were virtually gone, and mills were turning to hemlock.

By 1920, Wisconsin was entering the era of the pulpwood log --- spruce, fir and later, aspen, which was the dominant pulp species by 1950. While the contemporary thrust is pulp and paper, the demand for wooden products, such as hardwood molding, is increasing.

In the nineteenth century, wholesale timber harvest of the watershed and the associated forest fires were followed by erosion. Some of the heavy sediments were trapped behind the numerous dams, but much went into the bay. That period also saw a decline in the natural recharge of the ground water table. The dams, built to help the water-borne movement of logs, restricted fish movement up the rivers. The impacts of lumbering, however, have declined since the decline of the big lumber operations and the development of county forests with regular management.

Environmental impacts have been a major problem. In 1967, 90 percent of the BOD loading entering the lower Fox came from industrial and manufacturing sources. BOD is a measure of "Biological Oxygen Demand." When waste material enters the water it uses up oxygen as it breaks down, which can cause fish kills if the oxygen levels drop low enough.
 

PULP AND PAPER MILLS Although paper manufacture today is based almost entirely on wood pulps, the basic materials of papermaking in 1840 were rags and straw. And these were the raw materials of the first paper mills in the Green Bay region. Contrary to common belief, the paper industry was initially drawn to the Fox River Valley not for its wood resources, but for its water power and its proximity to growing population centers. (However, it was only a matter of a few years before the region’s abundance of pulpwoods was making the lake states a paper manufacturing center.)

Because the Fox draws upon a vast drainage basin and is fed by many small streams, it has a strong, constant reliable current. Lake Winnebago acts as a midway holding pond, giving the Lower Fox River a uniformity of flowage that was highly valued by the early industrialists who sought a stream for power, processing water, waste disposal and transport. The river flow was further refined by a series of dams and locks.

The mills that lined the riverbanks were essentially unrestricted in the use of the river for power and for waste disposal.

The first mills in the valley served the local printing trade and supplied an immediate market. The owners were mostly local businessmen, several of whom had operated flour mills on the Fox when wheat was king in Wisconsin. Between 1860 and 1890 however, the paper industry underwent major changes. First came the mechanical pulping of wood (about 1840, and then the sulphite pulping process, 1866). These advances pushed wood to the front as the prime raw material of paper. The sulphite process was quickly adopted in the U.S. and the 1870s saw numerous wood pulp mills springing up along the banks of the Fox. The essential were all at hand extensive stands of spruce, hemlock and fir; water; and an expanding market. By 1899 wood pulp made up about 52% of the material used in paper in the U.S. and Wisconsin, with its wood pulp mills, was becoming an important wrapping paper producing state. Simultaneously the railroad underwent rapid expansion, opening up large new markets to what had once been a local industry.

Up through the 1890s, water power was the major industrial power source. But by the turn of the century, many factories had begun converting to steam. Nevertheless, a good waterfront site was still essential for industrial processing water, sewage disposal and transport. Other changes had also occurred by the 1900s. the kraft or sulphate pulping process had arrived in the U.S. in 1909 making possible the manufacture of wrapping papers and paperboard from the resinous pines of the South.

The paperboard industry also got a boost in 1906 when the railroads finally approved the use of corrugated boxes for shipping freight. Yet even after its acceptance for freight use, the corrugated carton was penalized or taxed by some railroads that had a strong tie to western lumber interests. When this discriminatory practice was taken to the courts in 1914, the paper box held its own and came out of the gray with freight rights equal to the wooden box. The immediate result of this decision was a phenomenal growth in corrugated mills whose numbers across the nation almost doubled over the following year.

The years preceding and during World War I were boom years for the Wisconsin paper industry as demand for paper products grew by leaps and bounds. This increase was due largely to a growing national population, a rising literacy rate, the stimulation of interest in current events by the war, and the need of a prospering industrial economy for a wide-spread advertising medium such as the daily paper.

In 1923, Green Bay was the world’s leading producer of toilet tissue. The daily output of 200 tons was enough to wrap twice around the equator.

However, following World War II, growth in the Lake States paper and pulp mills slackened as competition within the various paper product markets became intense. Wisconsin b this time had depleted the bulk of its spruce and fir pulp trees and pulp logs of any species were becoming more expensive. Since "wood costs … were the principle determinants of regional advantage," Wisconsin was clearly at a competitive disadvantage.

Meanwhile, with the aide of the relatively new kraft process, those mills close to the pine forests of the South and the douglas fir and western hemlock forests of the pacific Northwest had access to abundant cheap wood. It was Canada, however, with its vast boreal forest of spruce that had the greatest advantage. Aided by the Underwood Tariff of 1913 which had removed duties from imported newsprint, Canada gradually took over the North American newsprint market. Domestic production everywhere took a dive, and newsprint making was essentially eliminated from the Lake States by 1919.

The "packaging revolution" of the late 1930s gave rise to the tremendous expansion of paperboard manufacture in the South. However, Wisconsin continued to lead in wrapping paper manufacture and held its own in the paperboard market into the 1940s. But between 1919 and 1949 Wisconsin paper firms began shifting their production away from these products and into the manufacture of higher value papers. When mills such as those in the Fox Valley became dependent on imported pulp logs, there was little alternative but "…to make an insufficient supply of spruce and other scarce pulpwood go a long way to concentrating production on the more highly processed (and, incidentially, tariff protected) grades of pulp and paper. These embody more labor relatively to the cost of raw materials and are, therefore, more profitable to produce."

Thus the Fox Valley and other Green Bay region mills turned their efforts to printing and writing papers, sanitary papers including tissue and toweling, and other specialty papers. These are still the major products today.

REFERENCES

Gerard Bertrand, Jean Lang, John Ross. "The Green Bay Watershed - Past/Present/Future" Institute for Environmental Studies, UW-Madison, UW-Sea Grant College Program, Technical Report #229, January 1976.

Linda Weimer, et al, "Green Bay: Portrait of a Waterway." Collection of articles in the Green Bay Press Gazette, reproduced by UW-Sea Grant College Program, WIS-SG-79-130. 1979.

H.J. Harris, P.E. Sager, C.J. Yarbrough and H.J. Day, "Evolution of Water Resource Management: A Laurentian Great Lakes Case Study," International Journal of Environmental Studies, 1987, Vo. 29, pp. 053-070.

Peyton L. Smith, Robert A. Ragotzkie, Anders W. Andren, and Hallett J. Harris, "Estuary Rehabilitation: The Green Bay Story." Oceanus, 31(3):12-20, 1988.

Go to History of Fox River and Green Bay - page 1

Back to History
Back to top