Southland Paper

Southern pine is a sticky, spindly tree that grows weedlike in every abandoned field, reproduces a stand of timber (unlike the North's mighty, slow-growing spruce and fir) in 15 or 20 years. It has long been used for kraft (boxes and wrapping) paper.

Savannah's late, great Chemist Charles Holmes Herty spent the last eight years of his life trying to make commercial newsprint out of Southern pines. In his laboratory he found a process that worked, but he died in 1938, before the South's lumbermen could build him a mill. What kept Dr. Herty at his labors (and excited many a Southern businessman) was the prospect of another rich, new industry to help along the South's industrial revival.

Three weeks ago, in Lufkin, Tex., the Daily News went on the street printed throughout on Southern-pine newsprint. It was the first newspaper ever to use a commercially made Southern-pine paper. Last week the Dallas Morning News followed suit, ran off an edition on 35 tons of Southern newsprint. By week's end, seven carloads of the paper Dr. Herty labored to perfect had been delivered to the Morning News press rooms.

The seven carloads came (as did Lufkin's paper) from a new $6,000,000 newsprint plant, built by Southland Paper Mills, Inc. outside of Lufkin. Southland Paper was financed by sale of $1,742,000 worth of stock (of which Southern newspaper publishers took $425,000) and a $3,425,000 loan from RFC. His publisher-stockholders contracted with President Ernest Lynn Kurth, onetime lumberman, to take his entire output for five years.

Paradoxically, though Lufkin's newsprint sells for only $40 to $50 a ton,* it is harder to make from Southern pine than are more expensive papers. (Texas shortleaf pine yields a newsprint thicker, less pliable than standard newsprint.) Southland's 50,000 tons a year will be no more than a drop in the 3,000,000-ton bucket of the U. S. newsprint market. But if Southland's product becomes generally acceptable, the South's newsprint industry may be due for at least a boomlet.

Because there are not enough trees in the South to supply all, or anywhere near all, of the newsprint used by the U. S., and because foreign newsprint is duty-free and hence can go a long way to meet a domestic price, all this failed to alarm Canadian newsprint makers. Meanwhile, the South was already trying for its second newsprint plant. Tennessee Valley Paper Mills, Inc., promised a $2,500,000 loan from RFC, was trying to raise an equal amount from private investors.

* Canadian newsprint, which supplies 75% of newsprint for U. S. papers, currently sells at $50 a ton.

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