The Hudson River Mill was the largest of the seventeen pulp and paper mills in New York State and New England that were purchased to form the International Paper Company in 1898. IP immediately became the largest paper company in the world, and the Hudson River Mill its largest and most productive plant. Photographs and other graphic documents show that in just twenty-nine years the Hudson River Pulp and Paper Company dramatically expanded pulp and paper production facilities at Palmer Falls, from two small, wood-frame structures into a sprawling complex of red brick buildings. International Paper had essentially acquired a "turn-key" pulp and paper mill.

In the early decades of the 20th century International Paper continued to utilize the most modern and efficient technologies for the production of wood pulp and newsprint at the Hudson River Mill. In 1902 a major remodeling of the groundwood mill was begun with the installation of the first of several 1000-watt General Electric generators that would be powered by Palmer Falls to drive pulpwood grinders and to supply electricity throughout the Mill.

The increase in pulp production that resulted from the renovation of the groundwood mill spurred the installation of two additional steam-powered paper machines in 1906 to replace older, water-driven ones. But the Hudson River Mill's new groundwood plant was unable to supply enough mechanical pulp to meet the increased production capacity of the new and faster paper machines, known in the modern era at the Mill as No. 3 and No. 4 machines. Modern paper machines that were being powered by oil-fired boilers featured both a wider roll and increased machine speed that demanded that more pulp be supplied to their headboxes.

Curtis Mill (1921)

Mechanically processed wood pulp accounted for approximately eighty percent of the pulp used in newsprint. Although the Hudson River Mill continued to produce large quantities of sulphite pulp, it now had to purchase pulp laps from other mills to meet the pulp demanded by its new steam-powered paper machines. Sometime after 1907, plans were underway to build a groundwood mill at Curtis Falls, a quarter-mile upriver from Palmer Falls. By 1913, the Curtis Manufacturing Company - privately owned by the Curtis Family and operated by Warren Curtis Jr. - was producing groundwood pulp under contract with International Paper. A new rail spur was built to the Curtis Mill from the main Delaware and Hudson line that led to the Hudson River Mill, and soon fresh groundwood was being sent downriver from the Curtis Mill to the Hudson River Mill through an elevated, fourteen-inch wide pipeline.

By the 1910's the Hudson River Mill had become a leading producer of both wood pulp and newsprint. The Mill's ability to produce pulp in quantities sufficient to supply the growing production capacity of its paper machines was a result of its proximately to the abundant timber on land that it owned in the Adirondacks, and to the capacity of the Hudson to power two groundwood mills. Sometime after 1890, and increasingly after International Paper began to purchase larger tracts of New York State woodlands, the Hudson River Mill started to build a large reserve of pulpwood in its upper mill yard rather than rely on daily rail shipments and pay seasonally fluctuating pulp wood prices.

Burliegh's 1888 birds-eye view map of Corinth shows a small reserve of pulpwood near the terminus of Hudson River Mill's upper-mill yard rail spur. But a photograph of the Hudson River Mill yard that appeared in the 1897 New York State Fish and Game Department Annual Report suggests that by then a large pulpwood reserve was in place. Within twenty years, two, eight-story high piles of pulpwood lined each side of the rail spur leading to the Hudson River Mill. Pulpwood became ubiquitous within the Palmer section of Corinth, as the piles stretched from the Mill's main office, westward nearly 1000 feet behind the homes and businesses on Palmer Avenue.

The substantial pulpwood reserves that lay in the yard of Hudson River Mill became a part of the community landscape and served as a symbol of the Mill's productive capacity. By 1927, when International Paper commissioned a panoramic photograph of the Mill's pulpwood supply, 90,000 cords of pulpwood lay in reserve, enough to supply the Hudson River Mill's paper machines for nine months. At the time, approximately one and one-quarter cords of wood was required to produce one ton of newsprint that was used to print the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Sunday Mirror, and the New York Herald Tribune.

One Side of the Mill's Wood pile (1927)

A fifth sulphite pulp digester that was installed at the Hudson River Mill in 1898 further contributed to the substantial effluent that was becoming a notable a by-product of pulp and paper production at the Hudson River Mill. By 1910 there were five sulphite digesters at the Mill that each "cooked" an average of 15 cords of pulpwood in tanks approximately nine feet wide and thirty feet tall.

In 1910 a proprietary process was developed at the Hudson River Mill for recovering the spent sulphite liquor from these digesters and recycling it into a saleable adhesive product called "binderene." Binderene, which was most often used in road construction, became a successful secondary product for International Paper. A new and enlarged binderene plant was completed at the Mill in 1917, and new technologies were regularly applied to the sulphite recycling process. By 1948, when new evaporators were installed to increase production capacity, weekly production of binderene at the Hudson River Mill was 115,000 gallons.

Logjam Above Palmer Falls (1921)

The technological development to occur in the newsprint era that bore the most significant long-term consequences for the Hudson River Mill came in the wake of a flood on March, 1913 when a raging Hudson destroyed the crib dam that had been built at the Falls in 1877. A cofferdam was immediately erected so that the Mill could resume production, and plans were quickly developed to construct a permanent concrete dam at the Falls. Completed in 1914, the dam both dramatically increased the power available from Palmer Falls and forever altered the natural character of the Hudson River at Corinth.

Dam Workers (1913)

The increased eighty-four foot head of the completed dam could now generate up to 25,000 horsepower at the Hudson River Mill, additional power that would be critical to expanded pulp and paper production in the future and to satisfying the increasing demand for electricity at the Mill. In order to secure the higher head and increased horsepower, the new dam had to be located slightly downstream from the former crib dam and constructed on top of the cascading rock ledges that had defined Palmer Falls, natural surfaces that had been left near fully exposed when the crib dam was in place. Much of Palmer Falls, whose irregular, jagged and sloping ledges had been for a century a source of romantic inspiration for painters and photographers, now lay beneath and behind the Hudson River Mill's new concrete dam. The Hudson River now pooled year-round behind the dam, also submerging the picturesque upstream ledges that Seneca Ray Stoddard and other photographers had found so visually appealing some forty-five years earlier.

Three factors help to explain the overall significance of the Hudson River Mill to International Paper during its newsprint era. First, the Company signaled the importance of the Mill by locating its headquarters there in 1898, and by constructing a mission-revival style structure in 1905 to serve as its main office. While sales and accounting offices were eventually located in New York City, the Corinth office remained listed as IP's principal office in annual reports through the 1920's.

Beginning in 1898, and continuing for the first few decades of the 20th century except for a few years during the 1921 Paper Strike, the Mill also served as the location for the annual stockholder's meeting, with specially outfitted trains carrying the Company's directors to the Hudson River Mill each August. It is likely that the annual meeting was scheduled to coincide with the peak of the tourist season in the Adirondacks and the annual thoroughbred racing meet at nearby Saratoga Springs. In 1921, when the book, Newsprint, was published by International Paper, author and IP Vice-President W.E. Haskell used a disproportionate number of photographs of the Hudson River Mill to illustrate and explain the newsprint production process.

New Woodyard Conveyer (n.d.)

The production capacity of the Hudson River Mill is another factor that explains the importance of the Mill to IP. In 1920, just as International Paper was beginning its expansion into Canada, the Hudson River Mill recorded the highest daily tonnage production of all of IP's thirty-one mills at an average 554 tons per day: 262 tons of paper, 230 tons of groundwood, and 62 tons of sulphite pulp. While the Otis Mill produced the most newsprint, the Hudson River Mill may have been the most profitable IP mill since it produced substantial amounts of its own groundwood and sulphite pulps. Even the large new mill then under construction at Three Rivers in Quebec was not expected to exceed the daily production of the Hudson River Mill.

Finally, the Hudson River Mill was critical to International Paper in the newsprint era also because of the strength and importance of its local labor unions. The Hudson River Mill locals were the largest within both the International Brotherhood of Papemakers and the International Brotherhood of Pulp, Sulphite and Paper Mill Workers, and both were actively involved the direction of the Internationals. It was IBPM Palmer Local No. 7 that led a walkout in 1910 that resulted a general strike against International Paper throughout New York State and New England and produced the unions' first-ever contract with the Company.

The Hudson River Mill rank-and-file, who were members of the Papermakers, the Pulp-Sulphite and Paper Mill Workers, and auxiliary unions like the Electricians, Oilers, Machinists, and Carpenters, all played a prominent role in the industry's labor movement throughout the 1910's. A strong economy previous to and during World War I helped to minimize labor conflicts, but International Paper's decision in 1921 to operate under open shop conditions after failed contract negotiations produced a bitter and prolonged strike that did not officially end until 1926. The Hudson River Mill was the first mill that the Company tired to operate with non-union labor in the summer of 1921, and much of its financial and legal energies were directed over the following two years to getting its largest mill running productively. The details of both the 1910 and 1921 strikes are provided in the next section.