Digesting wood chips into pulp slurry is magical chemistry and one smoky,
smelly business. Huge plumes, usually white but occasionally black, arose
and drifted from the high stack. The odor was principally that of burned
sulfur, the element most intimately associated with converting conifers to
pulp and paper. Decades later, after means were found to make fine white
paper (as opposed to brown boxing material) from yellow southern coni-
fers, the U.S. paper industry would shift overwhelmingly to the Southeast.
Meanwhile West Point became the pioneer maker of pulp, and its citizens
were the earliest beneficiaries of—and sufferers from—this first successful
experiment.
The mill is situated north-northwest of West Point’s old residential and
business districts. In winter especially, cold winds blow the mill’s sulfur-
ous cloud high and low over the town. Fall nor’easters blow effluences away,
over rural and forested New Kent County. Spring winds from the Southwest
send them to rural and forested King and Queen counties, and summer
southerlies waft them over the tiny Pamunkey and Mattaponi Indian reser-
vations in upper King William County. Yet I have never met a West Pointer or
near-hinterlander who complained of the smoke or smell, even on the cold-
est February day, when chilly rains carry down sulfurous smog to streets and
kitchen doors. Smoke and foul odor signified stability and prosperity—my
father’s madeleine—and the mill was welcome. Walton Leon went to work
in the mill, as did, for a time, all three of his sons.
West Pointers became even happier with industrial life, labor, and their
new overhead environment in when another outsider knight arrived
to make the mill locally owned. Elis Olsson was an ambitious and vision-
ary Swedish-born chemical engineer with papermaking experience in both
Scandinavia and Canada. With financing from Richmond bankers, Olsson
bought out the Ohio company, renamed the pulp maker the Chesapeake
Corporation, and moved his family to Romancoke, the upriver Pamunkey-
side plantation formerly owned and occupied by Robert E. Lee Jr. By the
mid-s, Olsson had installed a so-called Big Machine to make kraft
paper (meaning strong, for boxing) from the company’s own pulp and the
region’s own pines.
Twenty years later, winter’s smoke and fumes notwithstanding, West
Point met many of the criteria Jane Jacobs would ascribe to healthy, work-
ing cities of much grander scale. I remember this West Point well, as a
small boy visiting my widowed grandmother, my aunt, her husband, and
my father’s older brother. The town was laid out as before, with three long
lateral streets extending from the York to the perpendicular state highway