The region’s abundant pines would provide an economic boost. Many of his fellow Southerners knew little but farming and lived hand-to-mouth even in the best of times. His native South had been hard-hit by the stock market crash, bank closings, and other financial catastrophes. In the precarious economic climate of the 1930s, the paper industry had little incentive to venture elsewhere.įor Herty, the incentive was the Great Depression. The forest and white paper industries had been built around the less sappy-and quickly dwindling-hardwoods of the northern United States and Canada.
Visionary and entrepreneur, twice president of the American Chemical Society, he expounded an idea which was revolutionary in that time: Southern pines could be grown as crops and made into excellent white paper.įor decades the prevailing wisdom held that southern pines were too gummy to be used for anything but cardboard and other brown paper. Herty had championed, cajoled, and shepherded a watershed event in the centuries-old history of papermaking. Seven months later, nine other newspapers followed suit. Less than a year after Charles Herty opened his research lab, a Georgia weekly called the Soperton News printed its March 31, 1933, edition on experimental paper made from southern pine trees. Charles Herty’s Vision: Producing Paper from Pine Trees
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