A Brief History of Allied Paper

The history of Allied Paper dates back to 1921 when a group of old line paper companies merged. They included the Monarch and King mills in Kalamazoo and the Bardeen Mill in Otsego. The combined output of 10 paper machines and 34 coating machines immediately placed Allied in the top producers of book paper in the nation. See articles about the merger. More than 1500 employees were producing 250 tons of paper daily by 1925.

By 1937, twenty-five percent of Kalamazoo's workforce was working in area paper mills. The demand for book paper had continued strongly during the depression so few workers were laid off, even though most mills ran at reduced capacity and hours.

In September 1955 it was announced that Allied Paper has been acquired by Thor Corporation, a maker of household appliances. It was to be a division of Thor, which renamed itself the Allied Paper Corporation. The existing officers were retained. At this time, Allied was the fourth largest employer in Kalamazoo County behind The Upjohn Company, Sutherland Paper Co and Fuller Mfg. Co.  Allied's profit in 1954 was $1,367,410.

In 1956 the Bardeen Mill was closed and Bryant Mill in Kalamazoo was leased with an option to buy. This large and successful mill dated back to 1895. It was acquired by Time Inc. of New York (the publishers of magazines Time and Life) in 1945. They invested heavily but sold the mill to the St. Regis Paper Company in 1946.  Since the Bryant Mill produced coated and uncoated book papers it was considered to be a good fit within Allied Paper.

In 1958, the company decided to specialize in three areas of production: book papers, business papers and school supply papers. The Allied book paper lines then included grades from the thinnest bible paper to heavy book paper for novels. Business papers include forms, mimeo, duplication and offset for reproduction machines, bond, carbon insets and special coated papers for electrostatic office copiers. School supply papers include notebook filler, construction and drawing paper, pads, envelopes and reproduction and typing papers.

The 1960's could be said to be the zenith of Allied Paper. In order to gain a foothold in the business forms industry, they started purchasing business forms printing companies in 1960 and operated plants for this type of manufacture in Dayton, Ohio; Denison, Texas; Kansas City, Missouri; Leipsic, Ohio; Los Angeles, California and Petersburg, West Virginia. Allied's sales in this field were over $22 million per year. In support of the school supply paper manufacturing effort, Allied in 1965 purchased plants in Marion, Indiana and Chicago, Illinois. These plants used over 15,000 tons of paper per year and had sales of approximately $10 million per year.

In 1963, Allied built a pulp mill In Jackson, Alabama. It  produced pulp at a rate of 470 tons per day, much of which was shipped to Kalamazoo. In 1965 a paper machine was added at Jackson at a cost of $11 million. It produced up to 250 tons of paper per day. During 1967, Allied acquired the Rex Mill in Kalamazoo and then sold most of it to another paper manufacturer, the Eaton-Dikeman Company, within 6 months of the purchase.

There were many local strikes in the 1960's. A movie was filmed at the Bryant mill in 1965 by the American Bible Society, titled "The Spirit in the Tree". Kalamazoo continued as Allied headquarters under the leadership of Dr. Ward Harrison. He invested heavily in new equipment, including the first vertical papermaking machine in the U.S.

In 1969 Allied Paper was bought by the Smith-Corona-Marchant (SCM) Corporation (Wikipedia page) and became the paper-making division of that entity. At that time, local Allied employment was 1,300. Total Allied employment in the United States was 2,880 people.  Allied hooked into the Kalamazoo sewer system and pollution in Portage Creek was greatly reduced. A new headquarters building on Portage Road was completed in 1975 but the King mill had closed in 1970 and the Monarch Mill closed in 1981, leaving just the Bryant Mill operating in Kalamazoo. It took until 1977 to demolish the King Mill and the Monarch Mill was razed by 1982.

In 1986, SCM was bought by Hanson PLC (Wikipedia page), a British conglomerate, but by then the Bryant Mill was losing money and described as a troubled company. Much of the reason for the red ink was that book papers, the mainstay of the mill, were not high-priced commodity items and there were larger, more efficient mills now making them for a lower cost that Allied could make them for in Kalamazoo.

On December 31, 1988, Hanson completed the sale of the Allied Paper Bryant Mill to Michael Gallenberger, an Illinois businessman who formed a company called Performance Papers. The name of Allied Paper had lasted from 1921 until 1988 in Kalamazoo but had now become history. The pulp and paper mill in Jackson, Alabama were sold to Boise Cascade. In 2007 the Jackson mills, along with other Boise Cascade paper mills, were bought by Aldabra 2 Acquisition Corp, which changed it's name to Boise Paper Company.

Go to Performance Papers and Portage Paper Page

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