Technically, I could have folded this story about my visit to the old Norman paper Company into the larger story about my photography in Holyoke, Massachusetts, but the now abandoned site of this grand, old paper mill is so vast and so impressive, that I felt it deserved a gallery of its own on my website.
The Norman Paper Company was founded in 1891, in Holyoke, a city that once produced an astonishing 80 percent of all the writing paper that was used in the United States, and boasted some of the largest paper, silk, and wool mills in the world. The Norman Paper Company’s Holyoke location consisted of nine enormous buildings with several huge smokestacks that filled an entire city block and drew their power from the Connecticut river that flows through the city.
Alas, by the 1930s the factory was largely abandoned as the U.S. paper manufacturing sector declined nationwide (more about this in the article on Holyoke) - a decline that has continued apace during the last hundred years, as paper has become cheaper to manufacture in other parts of the world, and demand has plummeted as a result of a shift to digital media.
It’s hard not be impressed at the sheer scale of this old mill, occupying as it does a roughly 5 acre site on the bank of the Connecticut River. As the city seeks to reinvent itself once more, new uses for the hundreds of thousands of square feet of workspace within the mill are being considered. In keeping with some of the new economic modalities of the 21st century, part of the space inside the mill has been leased to a company that cultivates and manufactures marijuana for medical and recreation use, and at the time of writing, there is a proposal on the table to convert a part of the mill into a data center that could take advantage of the plentiful clean hydroelectricity that the city’s utilities are now generating from the waters of the Connecticut River.
© Gordon Webster
Using the link below, you can browse a curated set of images from The Norman Paper Company in a gallery at my website, from which you can purchase photographic artwork in multiple formats. If this work resonates with you and you haven’t already done so, please consider subscribing to get future project updates.
