Scott Paper Company

The Scott Paper Company was incorporated in Pennsylvania on December 21, 1905, as successor to the Scott Paper Company, Ltd., organized in October 1879. The company pioneered the manufacture and marketing of toilet paper and paper towels.

The company was founded in Philadelphia by the brothers Clarence and E. Irwin Scott as a general wholesale jobbing business in coarse paper products such as wrapping paper and paper bags. The company soon carved out a niche cutting and packaging toilet paper, which was sold by individual retailers under their own brand names.

E. Irwin Scott's only son, Arthur Hoyt Scott, joined the business in 1896 and began its transformation into a modern enterprise. After incorporation in 1905, the company began the mass production of toilet paper under a few brand names and introduced paper towels. The company began an extensive program of consumer advertising in 1906 and constructed a large paper mill and factory in Chester in 1910.

The company began a program of backward integration in 1927, when it purchased the Nova Scotia Wood Pulp & Paper Company, Ltd. In September 1936, it joined with the Mead Corporation to organize the Brunswick Pulp & Paper Company in Georgia. In 1940, it acquired two mills and timber lands in Washington and Oregon with the purchase of the Anacortes Pulp Company and the Coos Bay Pulp Corporation. It purchased the properties of the Marinette & Menominee Paper Company in Wisconsin and Michigan in 1941 and the Medway Hydro Electric Power Company in 1942.

Expansion continued after World War II, with the acquisition in 1945 of the Automatic Paper Machinery Company, makers of Cut-Rite wax paper. In 1951, Scott Paper purchased the Falls Paper & Power Company of Wisconsin and the Soundview Pulp Company of Washington. In 1954, it acquired the properties of the Detroit Sulphite Pulp & Paper Company of Detroit and its subsidiary, the Driftwood Lands & Timber Limited of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.

Also in 1954, Scott Paper acquired the Hollingsworth & Whitney Company, which had been founded in Boston in 1862 and incorporated in 1882. Hollingsworth & Whitney manufactured wrapping papers and bags at plants in Massachusetts, Maine, and Alabama, and through a Canadian subsidiary owned timber lands in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. In 1965, Scott acquired the Beveridge Paper Company group, including the Plastic Coating Corporation, which made coatings for paper and wire, and the Tecnifax Corporation, which made blueprint and copier papers. Scott Paper was merged into its longtime rival Kimberly-Clark Corporation on December 12, 1995.

From the description of Minutes of dissolved predecessor companies, 1882-1973. (Hagley Museum & Library). WorldCat record id: 86123735