Pines & Pioneers

Last week Union Bag & Paper Corp. approved final plans for a $4,000,000 plant in Savannah, Ga. Up to last month when the world's biggest maker of paper bags leased a tract along the Savannah River on the old Hermitage Plantation,* the city's businessmen & bankers were on pins & needles lest the company choose another site for its first Southern paper mill. Fernandino, Fla. tried desperately to wangle PWA funds to build a pine-pulp mill, which Union Bag was to operate. Then Jacksonville was discussed. But at last Savannah's newspapers got their chance to welcome a new industry with banner headlines.

Financed by an offering of rights to common stockholders, Union Bag's new factory will employ nearly 1,000 persons directly, and another 500 indirectly in the nearby woods. However, the Savannah paper mill did not represent the long-promised birth of a Southern newsprint industry. Like many another paper mill in the South, the Union Bag plant will turn out coarse, dark kraft paper for bags and wrapping.

Nevertheless, the Union Bag project last week received the blessing of the Dearborn Conference of Agriculture, Industry & Science, a group organized last spring to promote the use of farm products in industry and now functioning as the Farm Chemurgic Council (TIME, May 20). The Council carefully called the public's attention to the works of Chemist Charles Holmes Herty, who has long dreamed of transferring the newsprint industry from the spruce forests of Canada to the pine woods of Georgia. For several years Chemist Herty experimented with the pine pulp on a $40,000 grant from his native State and contributions from the Chemical Foundation. After Governor Talmadge vetoed further appropriations, the Chemical Foundation took up the slack. By 1933, as director of the Pulp & Paper Laboratory of the Industrial Committee of Savannah, Inc., Chemist Herty succeeded in making enough pine-pulp paper for one run of a little Georgia weekly called the Soperton News. Later that year a group of nine Georgia dailies simultaneously ran off one day's edition on all-Georgia newsprint. The newspapers paid freight to and from Canada on 25 tons of local pine pulp to be manufactured there on high-speed paper machines.

Paper is a hot subject in the South, partly because of the conviction that Northern newsprint "interests" are blocking the flow of capital to their unborn industry, partly because Southern pines-- slash, loblolly, longleaf, old field and Virginia--sprout like weeds. Slash pine grows as much as 6 ft. in a single year. And ardent Southern piners like Chemist Herty claim that if cultivated like field crops, slash pine could be harvested five years from the planting of seedlings. Ordinarily slash pine can be cut for pulp at an age of ten to 15 years, as against 20 to 80 years for Northern conifers.

In the sylvan visions of Chemist Herty & friends, Union Bag's new Savannah plant is hardly a symbol. Their piney economy turns on newsprint, which devours a forest for every tree that is used in kraft paper. With a capacity of 120 tons of paper per day, the bag plant will mash up only 70,000 cords of wood annually.

Union Bag was originally not a maker of bags but of bag-making machinery, sold under license agreements. Up to the Civil War paper bags were improvised by wrapping old paper around one's arm and twisting the end like a cornucopia. Flat bags were developed in the 1860's and with them patented machinery for large-scale cutting and pasting. When it became evident that there was more money in making bags than bag machinery, Union Bag's predecessor merged with a group of companies operating under its licenses.

In the 1920's Union Bag was severely deflated by the introduction of the kraft process, which is supposed to have been discovered by a Swedish workman who unwittingly treated pulp with an alkali instead of the usual acid. The result was called kraft--Swedish for "strength." Upshot was that Union Bag's sulphite pulp plants had to be scrapped. For five successive years, right through the gayest days of the Coolidge Boom, the company reported deficits. Then, having adjusted itself to the kraft order, Union Bag climbed out of the red in 1931, only to slip back the next dark year. In 1933 profits of $400,000 were reported, and last year, the best in eleven, Union Bag made $680,000, which on its small capitalization amounted to $4.67 per share.

Today Union Bag turns out more than 6,000,000,000 bags per year, varying from Cellophane pill envelopes to containers for 100-lb. lots of zinc oxide. Its biggest competitor is Continental Paper & Bag, International Paper & Power subsidiary.

The man who titillated shady, moss-hung Savannah with an expansion program that will increase Union Bag's assets more than one-half is President Alexander Calder, known to his subordinates as "Sandy," though greying hair reveals his 50 years. As a Union Bag salesman, not long out of St. Lawrence University, he bagged the Woolworth 5-c--&-10-c- stores account, which was a springboard to a vice-presidency. Boardchairman and one of Union Bag's big stockholders is old Philanthropist August Heckscher.

*The white, colonnaded Hermitage mansion, slave quarters and other plantation buildings were purchased by Henry Ford last March for $10,000. Section by section the century-old brick structures were dismantled, barged down the Savannah River, up the Ogeechee to become the seat of the 75,000-acre domain which Mr. Ford has pieced together from 30 antebellum plantations for a winter home in Bryan and Chatham Counties.

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