Industrial shredding: The rise and fall of Maine’s mighty paper industry

Abstract

Maine is well known as a place of natural beauty and as a summer home to generations of upper-class residents of the Eastern Seaboard. Less well known is its long tenure as the leading producer of the nation’s finest papers. From the late nineteenth century until the 1960s, Maine was to paper as Detroit was to the American automobile industry. But unlike Detroit, with its aura of Henry Ford, the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936–37, and the rise of the United Autoworkers, the U.S. public knows little about Maine’s paper industry’s history.