By Henry Belk
When it comes to giving a boost for their home town, most Trinity college students have the ordinary chamber of commerce secretary looking weak. For instance, there is J.D. Secrest, member of the junior class, of Canton, home of the largest paper company in the United States, who is all puffed up at present because bowlers from his home town won the international bowling championship recently conducted by the Y.M.C.A.
Secrest, and every North Carolinian for that matter, has right to feel proud of the feat, for the Canton team, composed of Joe Mease, merchant, Jut and Charlie Paxton, Jim Hardin, and J.T. Gossett, employed in the mills of the Champion Fibre Company, won over teams from 73 associations from 25 states, Canada and the Hawaiian Islands. The team toppled a total of 3,132 pins. Pueblo, Col., ran second with a total of 2,971.
Joe Mease, a dapper looking, nicely dressed young fellow of about ??, as described by the Trinity student, bowled a total of 663 pins. Big brawny Charlies Paxton followed with ?? pins, while Jut Paxton, brother of Charlie, tied with J.T. Gossett with 609 pins.
Mease, who led the international champions, is a son of J.N. Mease, who in 1906 sold land to the Champion Fibre Company of Ohio for the beginning of its pulp and paper mills, which today head the field in the United States. Young Secrest ?? enthusiastic when he relates a progress which Canton has made ?? the Champion company located on Pigeon Creek, 20 miles west of Asheville in 1905.
“Canton then,” he says, “was a village of scarcely 200 people. Today it is a thriving town of nearly ??.”
The secret of the growth is ex??ined by the progress which the paper company has made. When ? G. Thompson of Cincinnati started operations at Canton, it was first a subsidiary plant which supplied pulp to his Champion Coated Paper company. Now there is a company representing and investment of more than $10 million and employing 1,500 people operating at Canton. Pulp manufactured on the site is made into paper in new mills erected at an enormous expense and set going last June. Two of the mills were started at this time, work is still progressing on the other expansion projects.
“Not since the day when the first fire was kindled in the furnace under the huge smokestack which is visible for miles around, has it been allowed to go out,” said Secrest. “At present the mills are operating in full capacity for 24 hours a day, three shifts of eight hours each, working to the total production. The mill produces cardboard and paper to the total of 300 tons per day, and an order from the United States government for 1 million pounds of postal cards has just been completed.”
The Trinity student, who works for the company during his summer vacations, hands out some staggering statistics. The boilers of the company use 600 tons of coal per day; 30 million gallons of water for electrical generation and has a small woodyard of 60,000 for conversion into pulp. Seventy miles of railway tracks bring the woods to the yards in cars owned by the company and pulled by the company’s engines. Five miles of track serve the yard itself. The Black Diamond Colleries of Tennessee, owned and operated by the company, supply the plant with 1,200 tons of coal per day. As a reserve the company owns about 125,000 acres of timber land.
The Trinity student talks interestingly of the utilization of by-products by the company. One summer Secrest worked in one of the laboratories which are maintained for the purpose of research for uses to which materials which have been classed as wastes may be employed. Just now the chemists of the company are developing an anti-boll weevil solution. During the world war the United States government bought large quantities of a mixture which the soldiers occupying dugouts and trenches in France rubbed on their feet to counteract the effects of water and cold. Some other products saved are caustic soda, used in textile plants; wood alcohol, and a mixture for road binder. The company buys all of its chemicals in the mining states and extracts and purifies them in their own retorts and appliances.
The whole operation of the paper manufacturing system is automatic after the process is once started. Chestnut logs which are not suitable for merchantable timber are bought in and chipped; these chips go to vats in which the tannic acid is withdrawn, more tannic acid being manufactured in Canton that at any other town in the country. From the tannic acid vats these chips are washed and then carried into the digest tanks in which certain chemicals are applied to reduce them to fibrous pulp. After the pulp is cleaned and bleached, it is carried automatically to the machines which roll it into the finished product.
The educational and social system which the company has worked out for its employees tells the story of the championship bowling team. The Y.M.C., established several years ago, is one of the best equipped industrial organizations in the country and fosters various athletic activities. The girls have their Y.W.C.A. Home owning is encouraged by a system operated by the company which enables its employees to build their own homes.
“Co-operative societies,” concluded young Secrest, “have been reduced to a since in the community store and in the Sick Benefit Insurance society.
From page 2 of the Durham Morning Herald, Sunday, March 11, 1923
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