Cottonwood Paper Mill / Deseret News Paper Mill / Granite Paper Mill
Salt Lake Co. | Utah | USA
Watersource: Big Cottonwood Creek.
Cottonwood Paper Mill / Deseret News Paper Mill / Granite Paper Mill
Exit I-215 onto E 6200 South St./Sh 190 at the Old Mill Golf Course. Make an immediate right turn onto S 3000 East St., then a left on to S Big Cottonwood Canyon Road. The mill is across from Old Mill Park (a development) at Old Mill Circle
The mill was built in 1883 under the direction of Henry Grow on land purchased by The Deseret News Corporation in 1880 at the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon.
The newpaper was trying to become independent of eastern paper companies by producing their own paper at their own mill.
The first paper was produced solely from rags at the Sugar House mill, at now 2100 south and Highland Drive, beginning about 1860. George Goddard was called by Brigham Young to go about the territory to gather rags from the populace to provide the raw material for paper-making. In his many rag campaigns from 1861-64, he managed to solicit about 500,000 tons of rags.
The new location at Cottonwood Heights, otherwise known as Butler or Butlerville was ideal in that aspen logs from the Parley and Cottonwood Canyons would be pulped and added to the rag content to produce the paper for newsprint. Butler was an area of fruit growing, dairy feed processing, poultry raising, and later mink ranching.
Linen, cotton, hemp, even wallpaper was used with the wood pulp, water added, poured into molds , then dried. The mill yielded about 5 tons of paper per day.
Charles Lambert, mill manager, sold the mill to Granite Paper Co. in 1982. On April 1, 1893, the mill caught fire near midnight. The mill had closed early that day. Many thought the alarm was an April Fools prank, so was it was largely disregarded until it was too late. Large quantities of rags and finished bundles of newsprint paper were on hand and the mill went up in flames within about one hour. Much paper had not been deleived to the Deseret Newspaper because of muddy, impassable, spring road conditions.
The mill was partially rebuilt as an open-air dance hall known as the Old Mill Club in 1927. It operated into the 1940's. In the 1970's & 80's, it was annually used as a haunted house and occasionally as a craft boutique. It was declared an historic site by the Daughters of the Utah Pioneeers in 1966. The city of Cottonwood Heights condemned the structure in 2005, so its future is undecided and questionable.