Somass River Bridge, Port Alberni on Highway 4
The first paper mill in BC was built on the Somass River in 1894. The small water-powered plant could produce 50 tons of paper a day using rags, rope and ferns as raw material. Poor equipment for handling wood and a lack of rags forced the mill to close in 1896. Only the grinding stones remain to mark this industrial venture.
A small mill located on the Somass River, run by Herbert Carmichael, was the first to produce paper in BC in July, 1894.
The mill was slow getting started. They had used machinery from England, but it was rag machinery and thus useless in reducing wood to pulp. So, instead of using wood to make paper the company used rags, waste paper, old rope and ferns gathered from Victoria and Vancouver.
The chief product of the mill was wrapping paper, with small quantities of building, tissue and manila paper produced. There was a great demand for the products, especially the building paper, in the growing settlements of Vancouver Island.
The mill employed 12 men plus a manager and an ox teamster. The wage for unskilled labour was 25 cents an hour. The paper machine ran 10 hours a day and at capacity could produce about 50 tons in that time.
Eventually the inability of the machinery to digest the wood and the exhaustion of supplies of rags forced the operation to close in 1896. Carmichael's pioneer paper mill was a precursor to the huge wood pulp and paper mills that became a major part of Port Alberni's industrial base in the twentieth century, after the technology to grind and digest the wood fibre had been advanced.
