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- By the 1870s, Menasha and Neenah
had become thriving manufacturing towns,
each with a retail center.
The two villages grew toward each other
and functioned as one place.
But old feelings died hard
and attempts to combine the two governments
and make one bigger, more efficient city
failed.
In Menasha's National Hotel,
George Reed, brother of Menasha and Neenah founders,
Curtis and Harrison Reed,
organized the Wisconsin Central Railroad.
The federal government promised to grant the railroad
over 800,000 acres of land
if it could build a line
from Doty Island to Stevens Point,
and through the northern wilderness
to Lake Superior.
Once completed, the Wisconsin Central carried
an abundant supply of wood
to the drying yards of the Menasha Woodenware Company,
which now spread out on both sides of the river channel.
Elisha Smith's factory continued to make a variety
of turned wooden containers for shipping products.
- And at that point,
butter, you know, it was very different back then,
was transported in wooden buckets
of various different sizes.
And they ended up making those
that they would supply to the dairies
that would then put the churned butter into these tubs.
So he ended up turning into
the largest wooden butter tub manufacturer in the world.
- In Neenah, flour millers
faced fierce competition from Minneapolis,
where former Wisconsin Governor Cadwallader Washburn
purchased the water power rights
at St. Anthony Falls.
There, he built an enormous flour mill,
equipped with the latest milling technology
that produced huge quantities of high-quality flour.
In Neenah and Menasha, most mills remained small
and used traditional grindstones
that produced a lower quality flour.
To make matters worse,
yields from area wheat farms steadily declined.
- Wheat growing was easy because it was basically
kind of an extractive industry, almost like coal mining.
It tapped the natural advantages in the landscape,
particularly the nutrients in the soil.
So what farmers tended to do,
because they didn't have a lot of money,
is they would farm a couple of acres of land
for a couple of years until the yield went down
and then they would move on
and they'd settle a new piece of land,
farm that for a few years,
but eventually you ran out of land.
- And pretty soon, it wasn't economically viable.
What took its place was paper--
paper production.
And they had the power to do it.
But they also needed clean water, itself,
in the manufacturing process of paper.
They needed to be able to rinse the pulp
to make sure the pulp was clean.
And water was used throughout the manufacturing process.
- Taking a chance on the promise of a new industry,
Neenah entrepreneurs purchased some papermaking machinery,
and built the city's first paper mill.
- That was the first financially successful paper mill
in the state of Wisconsin.
And so, there were local investors
who really took serious note of this.
- Four investors pooled their money
and formed a venture called Kimberly, Clark and Company
to build a second paper mill.
- It was Alfred Kimberly
and his business partner, Havilah Babcock,
C.B. Clark, a hardware store owner,
and Frank Shattuck,
a traveling salesman out of Chicago.
They purchased a water power site on the Fox River,
tore down a flour mill,
and constructed the Globe Paper Mill.
- Initially, they were creating paper primarily out of rags.
- They brought rags up from Chicago,
and they had picking rooms where you pick out
the pockets and the buttons and all those other things
and these were all ground and dissolved.
- Processing rags into pulp
made a paper of the highest quality.
- They marketed this as a source of making newsprint.
Every municipality worth its salt
had at least two newspapers
and very often four or more.
- Newspapers were expanding, magazines were expanding,
print catalogs, things like that,
and this required
so much paper
and there just weren't supplies.
They were able to go into markets
like Chicago and Milwaukee,
these big metropolitan centers
that were really expanding rapidly.
- It was for the company,
it was for the community,
and this part of the state, an economic perfect storm.
- Kimberly-Clark expanded into Appleton,
partnering with a mill
that used a new technology to grind wood for pulp.
They built the Atlas Mill
and produced the first paper in the Midwest made from trees.
And there, papermakers experimented with new methods
to make new kinds of paper
and pioneered a new process
to use chemicals to break down wood.
- And it was after that
that they expanded again and again and again and again
because they really found that they had it down.
- Success in papermaking required a great sales force,
required innovation in terms of technology,
and it required research and development.
And those three things are money intensive.
- They funneled all their money back into operations.
They took almost nothing out themselves for pay
or living extravagant lifestyles or anything like that.
They could buy timber rights and they could buy water rights
and these were the keys to their future success.
- The Neenah-based company expanded rapidly,
building new mills at several water power sites
in the Fox River Valley.
- A couple years later, they built the Vulcan Mill
next door to the Atlas Mill.
And they also bought the Genesee Flour Mill,
and they changed that over to the Tioga Paper Mill.
- Back in Neenah, they constructed the Badger Mill.
After that, they tore down the Neenah Mill
and reconstructed that into a very large mill.
They built the Telulah Paper Company,
and then they ran out of water power
in Appleton and Neenah.
And then, they bought more water power
in what was called "The Cedars,"
and they built a company town
and named it Kimberly.
- They built a very large pulp mill there.
After that, they bought more water power at De Pere,
and there they created the Shattuck and Babcock Mill.
- Other companies also built paper mills
in Menasha and Neenah,
drawing large numbers of immigrant workers,
who kept the mills running day and night.
- So it was so successful
that it spread outward
and shaped the entire region.
And so,
although Neenah and Menasha had remained small,
its impact on northeastern Wisconsin
has been enormous.
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