Tamarack Falls Paper Company 1902-1998

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TAMARACK FALLS, WISCONSIN
TAMARACK FALLS PAPER COMPANY
1902 – 1998
and the people who made the paper

For ninety-six years the mill whistle blew at seven, three and eleven, and the whole town set its clocks by it. On Friday, March 27, 1998, at three in the afternoon, it blew for the last shift change, and about four hundred people stood in the parking lot in the sleet and listened to it, and then went home.

My name is Lyle Haugen. I ran the No. 3 paper machine, first as fifth hand and at the end as machine tender, from June 1962 until that last day. Thirty-five years and nine months. My dad was in the wood yard for thirty-one years before me, and my grandpa helped pour the concrete for the dam.

When the mill closed, the state paid for a bunch of us to take classes at the technical college over in the county seat. I picked computers, because my granddaughter said I should. This page started out as my homework for the Internet class. The instructor said to make a page about something I knew about. I only know about one thing.

THE MILL, SHORT VERSION

1902	Lumbermen from Oshkosh dam the Marten River and build a groundwood mill at the falls. The pine is mostly gone, so they're going to make paper out of what's left.
1916	No. 1 and No. 2 paper machines running. Newsprint, mostly.
1948	No. 3 machine goes in, and the mill switches over to coated paper, the shiny kind for magazines and catalogs. Old No. 3 was my machine. She ran fifty years.
1967	No. 4 machine starts up, the big one. The company builds a new office and puts in a Little League field by the river.
1974	The most people ever on the payroll: about 1,100, in a town of 4,500.
1989	The family sells out to a big company from back East. New signs on the gate.
1996	Sold again, to a company out of Ohio. Nobody from the new outfit ever comes up to see the place until the fall of '97.
Oct. 1997	They come up and call everybody into the finishing room and tell us. Too old, too small, too far from everything. They're moving the orders to their newer mills.
March 27, 1998	Last reel comes off No. 3. 612 people lose their jobs.
Today	The buildings are still standing, empty. The stack is still there. You can see it from the highway, and so far nobody has the money to take it down.

WHAT IT WAS LIKE

People who never worked in a mill think it's a factory. It's more like a ship. A paper machine is as long as a football field and it never stops, day and night, Christmas included, except when something breaks. On the wet end the stock comes out of the headbox onto the wire, almost all water, and by the time it gets to the dry end, after the presses and the felts and a whole building full of steam-heated dryer cans, it's paper, rolling onto the reel faster than you can run beside it.

The crew on a machine went by rank: machine tender, back tender, third hand, fourth hand, fifth hand. You started at the bottom, cleaning up broke (that's paper waste, it goes back into the pulper) and you waited for somebody above you to retire or die. It took me nineteen years to get to tender. Nobody thought that was unusual.

When the sheet broke, everybody ran. You had to get the tail threaded back through the whole machine, hot, loud, fast, and the tender yelling. A good crew could do it in minutes. We were a good crew.

Then there was everybody else: the wood yard, the grinders, the coaters, the supercalender crew, the winders, the finishing room girls who wrapped and labeled every roll, shipping, millwrights, pipefitters, electricians, the powerhouse, the lab, the nurse, and the guard at the gate who knew every car. And the smell. Visitors made faces. The old men used to tell them that's what money smells like.

We worked seven to three, three to eleven, eleven to seven, and swung shifts every week, so half the town was always asleep in the daytime. Kids learned to be quiet.

THE LAST DAY

We knew for five months, so it wasn't a surprise. That doesn't help as much as you'd think.

No. 4 went down on Wednesday, the 25th. No. 3 ran till Friday. The last reel came off at a little after one in the afternoon. It was coated paper, just a regular order for a printer in Chicago. Somebody got a box of markers and we all signed the end of the roll before it went to the winder. Bernie Radtke, who had forty-four years, the most of anybody, wrote his name and his dad's name and his grandpa's. Then he shut her down himself. We let him.

Then we cleaned up. You'd think you wouldn't bother. But you don't leave a machine dirty. You just don't.

SINCE THEN

About a third of us were old enough to retire, and did. Some got on at other mills, down in the Fox Valley or over in Wisconsin Rapids, and drive an hour each way. A few of the young families moved away. Thirty-some of us took the classes. Marv Pfeiffer is a welder now. Tou Vang from the finishing room is at the tech college full time studying to be an electrician. I work three days a week at the hardware store on Main Street and do this.

The cafe across from the gate closed in June. The Legion lost half its members. St. Adalbert's and the Lutheran church are both talking about sharing a pastor. The Little League field is still there. The Lions Club mows it now.

It isn't all sad. People have been good to each other. When Gene Wiese's house burned in January the whole third shift from No. 4 showed up with hammers. That's how it always was, and the mill closing didn't change it.

MILL PICNIC — AUGUST 14, 1999

Thanks to everybody who came to Riverside Park on Saturday. We counted 430, and people came from as far as Arizona. Brats by the Lions, pie by the ladies of St. Adalbert's, and the Historical Society brought the old mill whistle, which the company gave them in the spring. Merle Voigt rigged it up to his air compressor, and at noon he blew it. You should have seen people's faces.

Same time next year. Watch this page.

THE ROLL
The names of the people who worked at the Tamarack Falls mill, by department, with their years. I'm up to 52. There were thousands over ninety-six years, so this will take a while. If you or your folks worked there, send me the name. There's a list at the bottom for the ones we've lost since the closing.

You are visitor number

since I put this up in September 1998. More people than ever worked at the mill.

E-mail Lyle | The Roll

Lyle Haugen · [email protected]
Last updated August 21, 1999