Paper Mill
In anticipation of increased trade through the Panama Canal, the Apalachicola Northern Railroad extended its network from Chattahoochee to Port St. Joe in 1910 with plans to load large ships with goods to be taken through the canal, advertised as the “Panama Route”. When the depression hit, business dropped off and the railroad was in bad shape financially. Alfred I. DuPont purchased the struggling railroad in 1933 and created the St. Joe Paper Company. Dupont drew up elaborate plans for the development of his mill town as “The Model City of the South”, and then died. Ed Ball took control of the company in 1935 but never acted on the master city plan.
Construction began in 1936 and from 1938 to 1996, the company operated a paper mill at Port St. Joe, Florida. The company invigorated the local economy following the depression, employing thousands and paying good wages, but wreaked havoc on the environment. The mill released sulfurous exhaust and dioxin, a byproduct of the paper bleaching process that is a carcinogen. By the 1950s, the company was drawing 35 million US gallons (130,000 m3) of water a day from the Floridan aquifer, seriously depleting the water table. St Joe Paper also clear-cut millions of acres of old growth forest, engaging in silviculture to replant the areas with slash pine. The practice decimated the native longleaf pine stands, reducing the species to "2 percent of its former range." Because of this, the United States Department of the Interior designated parts of the region a Critically Endangered Ecosystem.
Under Ball, the company also kept workers at the mill racially segregated.
Ball continued the trust's aggressive land purchases throughout the 1940s and 1950s, sometimes for "mere dollars an acre" and landholdings reached 1,200,000 acres (4,900 km2). Most of the land was situated between Tallahassee and Pensacola, but there was substantial acreage in southern Georgia. The paper mill was most profitable in the 1960s, with products being directly marketed to company-owned box plants.
Read more about this topic: Edward Ball (businessman)
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