Moye Print Shop

While paper is made out of wood pulp today, it would have been made from cloth in the first half of the 1800s. The first wood pulp paper mill in the US opened in 1867. A family would keep all of their small cloth scraps to make into anything useful for their home and sell them to a papermaker or mill.

In 1456, Gutenberg, of the Gutenberg Bible fame, invented the printing press - the first in Europe with mechanical moveable type. His bible used parchment that had to be made with the skins of 300 sheep, which was incredibly expensive and impractical for one book. To fix this problem, the use of making paper from linen rags came about. China also used silk as a means of paper from early on. In America during Westville’s time period, paper would primarily be made as a cotton and linen blend, with book paper being mainly made with cotton.

Paper was much more expensive than it is today. Looking at old letters, they have mistakes crossed out, ink stains, and even lines of text crossing vertically what someone had already written horizontally! It makes letters hard to read for historians but is fascinating proof of how valuable paper was to the people living in the 19th century.