Point’s rescue began while my father was a schoolboy. A brilliant Swedish
paper chemist and entrepreneur appeared and, with the help of some Rich-
mond bankers, erected a pulp mill, the South’s first. For a few years the mill
chipped and pulped local pines and sent their product to an Ohio mill for
finishing as paper. Then the Swede expanded his Chesapeake Corporation
with a ‘‘Big Machine’’ to roll paper in West Point, and the town’s future was
secure.^16 My father worked at the mill a short time but spent most of his
life elsewhere. Yet when I was a child and we drove up to visit, no matter
the weather, my father would roll down his car window as we approached
the bridge and the mill and inhale huge gulps of the sulfurous air, loudly
proclaiming his pleasure in returning home. Sometimes heavy smoke from
Chesapeake’s stacks drifted low over Kirby Street, where daddy and his sib-
lings and their daddy had been born and raised. My sisters and I gagged
and protested, but to our father, this was the taste and smell of security and
prosperity. Ole starvation was meaner than ole air pollution, sulfur his en-
chanted madeleine.