In this exhibit, we highlight conservators who learned treatment techniques for archival, flat paper objects. Conservation involves an understanding of materials, with insight into the time period during which they were used. In this case, it entailed knowledge about the production and timeline of paper in the 1800s. What are the properties of paper from this era? What is industrialized paper made from?
Generally, people think of modern paper as a product of wood. You may be surprised to discover that it was not until the 1860s that paper mills commonly began to make paper from wood pulp in the United States. Rag, straw, and manila were the most common kinds of paper during the first half of the 19th century.
In the early 1800s, American mills used a mold (a container used to give shape to liquid) and vat (large tank or tub) to make paper by hand (see Fig. 1). So, how does this process relate to rag paper? Rag refers to a pulp of cotton and linen fibers. While cotton production soared in the United States at the start of the 19th century, papermakers still had difficulty managing its short and skinny fibers with a laid mold (See Fig. 2-3). However, they soon discovered that a composite of cotton and linen worked well when cotton alone did not, and the production of laid rag paper became more common and inexpensive. The later emergence of the wove mold (Fig. 4) in the United States had a significant effect on rag paper and its common usage for book and news paper (rather than writing paper). With brass wires woven tightly together to better capture fiber, a wove mold enabled paper makers to use entirely cotton-based pulp (Valente 2010).
Since the turn of century, British engineers were advancing the 1799 invention of a cylinder-wire paper machine. However, the British Parliament forbade exporting this technology to the United States. Interestingly, an American paper-maker found a way to bring the paper machine to the colonies. Joshua Gilpin of Wilmington, Delaware, somehow obtained the plans of the machine from the London patent office, then hired a former master papermaker from Great Britain for his new 1817 mill in Delaware. By the 1830s, while it remained common practice for hand mills to produce laid writing papers, machine mills also produced paper in the United States. Machine mills would sometimes employ a dandy roll (see Fig. 5 for an example), a wire-covered cylinder used to apply watermarks during the machine papermaking process (Valente 2010). In the case of Letter to Hook from John C. Calhoun, a dandy roll was probably used to apply the blue ruled lines to the paper.
Fig. 6. A handmade laid paper shows the impression of straight, closely laid lines. 
Fig. 7. A machine-made paper shows wavy lines, an intentional design to give the impression of hand production.
Straw emerged as a material of the American paper industry in 1829, after a farmer in Meadville, Pennsylvania, noticed the possible applications of crushed straw left over from the process of creating potash, a fertilizer. A mixture of rag with straw, which has lower cellulose content than cotton, yields more durable paper. In 1829, newsprint companies such as the Niles Weekly Register and the Philadelphia Bulletin began to print on straw newspaper (Valente 2010).
Fig. 8. Newspaper. Niles’ Weekly Register, March 7, 1829. Baltimore, Maryland: Hezekiah Niles & Son. 16 pp. (17-32), 6 1/4 x 9 7/8 in.
How did manila paper emerge? Arguably, out of necessity, when the failure of over 600 banks brought financial hardship to the paper industry during The Panic of 1837. Machine mill paper-makers Lyman Hollingsworth and James Whitney, of South Braintree, Massachusetts, could not afford to buy rag and turned to discarded, raw material from fishing ships. They created manila-colored paper by combining materials such as old manila rope, rag-bale ropes, hemp sails, canvas sheets, and torn rope bolts into a cylinder-wire machine (Valente 2010).
In the 1830s, the invention of the tandem dryer began to reduce the demand for handmade paper. The tandem dryer made machine-produced paper smooth by simultaneously drying and pressing it. With greater smoothness than handmade paper, and the accessibility of this technology, machine-made paper began to overtake the market (Valente 2010).
References
This brief history of paper production in the United States refers to scholarship by A.J. Valance, conservator and paper historian. Valence writes, “With regard to preservation, we need to know exactly when changes in print paper occurred, and how to identify the various types…understanding their history puts us on track to making the right choices” (Valente 2010, p. 209).
For a broader history of paper, Hubbe and Bowden’s “Handmade Paper” provides an illustration-filled elaboration of papermaking materials and processes. Lastly, to discover more about the mills that produced Hook papers, this webpage and the conservation students from the exhibit referred to Gravell, Miller and Marsh’s identifications in their “American Watermark” compilation.
Hubbe, M. A. , and Bowden, C. (2009). Handmade paper, review, BioResources 4(4), 1736-1792.
Colonel Hook Papers 
