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five tons of book paper a month. In 1879 another depression hit and Denison almost went bankrupt as contracts for paper were not renewed. His chief problem was his inability to see or adequately prepare for fluctuations in the national economy by keeping a reserve of capital. As a result, his mills went into receivership. With only a fistful of new government contracts, which he managed to get some fifteen months into the depression, Denison was able to get his mills out of receivership and back into operation. Unfortunately, he began overextending himself all over again by building mills at Canton and Poland.

The Canton mill should have been a success. Denison had learned his lesson with the failure of his Norway mill when his poplar supply had dried up and had negotiated contracts with area lumber companies for mill waste.

In addition, the town of Canton aided him with a substantial tax abatement. By the end of 1880 the Canton mill was producing five tons of pulp a day. Then Denison again turned to buying poplar from farmers. By 1882 production was at two hundred tons a month, and two years later this had more than doubled. The problem was that Denison had again used up his capital and couldn’t meet his immediate payrolls. What he had done was invest in a company that produced rifles. When it went belly up due to a minor recession, Denison found himself unable to buy logs or pay his employees. Denison subsequently lost all his plants. The only one that survived into the twentieth century was the Poland plant, but it was under new ownership.

Adna Denison ended up as a buyer for the newer companies that were opening in Maine such as the giant In(cont. on page 44)

(cont. from page 43) ternational Paper Company. For the rest of his life, he hovered over the paper pulp industry like a prophet of doom, declaring that, based upon his own experiences, industry expansion was all too rapid.

Adna Denison’s ventures into the wood pulp paper industry were definitely ahead of their time, and Denison was clearly in the vanguard of one of Maine’s most profitable industries. His inability to foresee the vagaries of shifts in the economy in no way, however, detracts from his being a visionary as far as the paper industry was concerned. It also in no way detracts from Norway’s claim to being the birthplace of the state’s wood pulp paper industry.