Eastern Corporation (Bangor, Me.)

The Eastern Corporation owned paper mills in Brewer, Orono and Lincoln, Maine. The company began in the 1880s in Brewer as a sawmill, with a sulfite pulp mill built in 1889 to use waste products from the sawmill. In 1896, the company, now called the Eastern Manufacturing Company, began to make both chemical wood fiber and rag paper at the site, later changing the emphasis to the manufacture of fine business papers. In 1915 the company acquired the Katahdin Pulp and Paper Company in Lincoln and in 1930 purchased the Orono Pulp and Paper Company. In 1939 the company was reorganized as the Eastern Corporation, with executive offices in Bangor and sales offices in Boston, New York, Chicago and Atlanta. Eastern Corporation became the Eastern Fine Paper and Pulp Division of Standard Packaging Corporation in 1958. In 1969 the company became part of the Eddy Paper Company of Ottawa. Financial difficulties led the mill to enter bankruptcy protection in the late 1990s and it closed completely in 2004.