Paper Counting

I've made more than a few boxes in my time from flat cardboard but the object was to store or display. I've also been involved in moving a library twice, and my mother's wool shop once, all those occasion requiring well labelled cardboard boxes.  My last job also involved a move but  by that point  I had left libraries far behind and only had a mini research library, CDs and a computer, ah how times change, it was a breeze.   So there are all my cardboard experiences without even mentioning that of moving house  however I have never stood and made boxes all day for a living as in this week's Sepia Saturday prompt.  I have no boxes to show but

"Counting the paper at Barrow Paper Mills, Salthouse"

do have someone counting paper at the Barrow Paper Mills in pre automated days. Look at those stacks towering behind her. No dangerous moving machinery but don't forget the horror of  paper cuts, she looks as though she has kept clear of those judging from her happy demeanour.  All that can be heard is the soft rustle of paper.  The place she works in was constructed in 1889 as the Barrow Chemical Wood Pulp Company, it imported logs by ship and moved them from the port by train to the mill.  They chopped the logs boiled them with sulphur to make pulp which was supplied to paper mills. A few years later (1892) paper making machines were installed and the firm renamed Killner Partington Paper Pulp Co  and they started to import pulp rather than make it, then in 1919 the firm was reorganised as Barrow Paper Mills Ltd. They made cartridge paper, printing paper, and in a link to this week's prompt, coverings for carboard boxes and lastly high quality fine paper for books.

The company who employed 400-500 people, 200 of them women, would close in 1973.  One of the men who was part of decommissioning and moving the machinery at that time, Terry Hesseltine, remembers it as a happy place to work although the conditions were "hot and sticky with a smell of bleach and wood-pulp".  

Barrow Paper Mill works and Cavendish Dock, Barrow in Furness 1929

 Here is the Barrow Paper Mills in 1929 from the "Britain from Above" resource.  You can see the train steaming into view top left, trains still go past the site which is now derelict but always referred to as Salthouse Mills despite the paper mill having long gone.  All sorts of things have been suggested for the area, the latest was a waterfront residential. development but the economic climate and cost of cleaning up a brownfield site means its acreage is still unused apart from a few small businesses.  Wood pulp is still shipped into the Barrow port but it is going into the opposite direction of this site and the Kimberly Clark factory making paper tissue branded with the Andrex puppy.