How paper was made at Chelsea Mills

The making of paper required many steps. These drawings made at the Chelsea Mills show the various processes used during the mid-nineteenth century to make paper.

First, the rags were sorted to separate colored cloth from white. A lot of this work was done by women. During the 1880's there was a cholera epidemic among rag sorters that was blamed on mummy wrappings. (They had nothing to do with it, it was the unsanitary living conditions which caused it. Cholera cannot survive long enough to be transmitted in this way.)

After sorting, the rags would be cut into smaller pieces in order to make reducing them to pulp faster. They would also be beaten to remove dirt and other materials from the fabric. Rags usually did NOT arrive at the mill in any sort of clean condition. From there they would go the grinding tanks.

Next, the rags would be boiled in order to thoroughly clean them and start the breakdown process of cloth into fiber pulp.  Machines were used to begin the process of tunring the rag bits and pieces into a mixture of water and fiber. The fiber slurry was poured into a huge tank where it was further beaten until it resembled very fine oatmeal.

The next stage was grinding the rag pulp until it was a fine slurry of water and particles of fiber. This pulp would then be fed from the tanks into the machine which actually sieved it, dried it and turned in into paper. The machine was called a Fourdriner machine and was a very large improvement over hand sieving the paper.

The final steps would be adding a coating to the paper to make it "finished" and then it would be sent along the line to the cutters, who made uniform piles of paper from the great rolls coming off the machines. This was another job that women could do in the mills.

As the century moved on more and more of the works was done automatically by machinery, but the rag sorters remained as only a human eye could pick out colors from white.