First Mummy Paper Mill in Gardiner

In 1858, a correspondent from the Journal of Commerce who was visiting the Great Falls Mill in Gardiner complained about the smell of the rags. He noted in the Northern Home Journal  of 12 August 1858:

            "Yesterday I visited, in company with Mayor Woods, of Gardiner, the two principal paper factories, and I was astonished in looking at the millions of pounds of rags piled up in warehouses or spread over acres of ground to find that a portion of them had arrived from Alexandria, in Egypt. They were the most disagreeable odiferous old clothes that I have ever had the misfortune to smell., This, doubtless , was owing to the fact hat a part of them were in a damaged state. The Egyptian rags were had been collected from all the corners of the Pacha’s dominions—from the living and the dead. How many cast-off garments of howadjis and hadjis; how many tons of big, loose, Turkish, ragged breeches; and how many head pieces in the shape of old doffed turbans, the deponent sayeth not. But the most singular and the cleanest division of the whole filthy mess came not from the limbs of the present generation of travelers—pilgrims, peasants, soldiers and sailors of Egypt—but were the plundered wrappings of men, bulls, crocodiles and cats, torn from the respectable defunct members of the same.

What a scene to call up the grim past! And what a desecration too, to take the garments of pharaohs, Rameses, and of sacred bulls, holy crocodiles, and pious cats, and mingling them with the vulgar unmentionables of the shave-pated herd of modern Egyptians, to ship them to the other side of the world—to a land which Ptolemy’s map had no room for—there to grind them up to the music of the cogwheels and the falls of the Cobbossee Contee."

The Great Falls Mill was the first to make mummy paper in Gardiner, Maine, but it would soon be followed by others.