Background

Hugh Joseph Chisholm was born on May 02, 1847 in Chippawa, Ontario, Canada, the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. He was the son of Alexander Chisholm, who had come from Scotland as a boy, and his wife, Mary (Phelan) Chisholm.

Education

Chisholm attended school in Ontario. His education was terminated with the death of his father.

Career

At the age of thirteen Chisholm commenced his business career as a newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railway. His unusual industry and thrift enabled him by the time he was sixteen to secure control of newspaper distribution along the whole Grand Trunk system, and in partnership with his brothers, he was a pioneer, if not the originator, in this country “of the transportation publishing business, producing railroad maps, tourists’ guides and albums descriptive of routes of travel”.

In 1865 he moved his residence to Portland, Maine. Shortly after his arrival in Portland he became interested in the manufacture of pulp, and this industry in connection with his railway news business drew his attention to the manufacture of paper. He organized the Somerset Fibre Company, in 1881 the Umbagog Pulp Company at Livermore Falls on the Androscoggin River, and in 1887 the Otis Falls Pulp Company on the Androscoggin.

In the early eighties he became convinced that the upper reaches of this river offered unlimited water power and excellent advantages for the manufacture of paper. With a group of associates he purchased an eleven-hundred-acre tract, founded the Rumford Falls Power Company (1890), and then, to provide an outlet, took over the moribund Rumford Falls & Buckfield Railroad, which he speedily rehabilitated and opened to traffic as the Portland & Rumford Falls Railway in 1892. Thus were laid the foundations of a town, which by that year had a population of three thousand and all of the features of an up-to-date industrial community. On the site of the new town were established the Rumford Falls Paper Company, the Oxford Paper Company, the Continental Paper Company, and other concerns which Chisholm organized or in which he was heavily interested. He co-founded the International Paper Company in 1898. Shortly after its organization, he became president, holding that office from 1899 to 1910 and serving as chairman of the board of directors, 1907-1909.

In addition to his interests in paper manufacture and railroads, he was a director of banks, power companies, and many other concerns. Chisholm not only had the ability to create communities, but he was desirous that his mill villages should be decent places in which to live. In the neighborhoood of one of his plants at Strathglass Park, near Portland, Maine, he established a community of model houses for his employees, and at Rumford Falls he was instrumental in founding Rumford Mechanics’ Institute, a center dedicated, November 9, 1911, to “physical and mental development, social and moral improvement and the cultivation of an equality or more intimate relationship and acquaintanceship between employed and employer”. The extent of his interests led him to move to New York City, which was his headquarters for a number of years prior to his death.

Achievements

• Hugh J. Chisholm became a prominent figure in the paper industry of the late nineties and took an important part in the formation of the International Paper Company, a combination which controlled about thirty of the leading Eastern newspaper and pulp mills as well as large areas of forest land. He created the first forest management program for the company and developed a planned community for the workers in his mills.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Atlantic City Cantata

    (Dust jacket art by E. McKnight Kauffer.)

  • A Man And The Paper Industry: Hugh J. Chisholm, 1847-1912
  • The tariff on paper

Connections

In 1872 Chisholm married Henrietta Mason of Portland.

Father:

Alexander Chisholm

Mother:

Mary (Phelan) Chisholm

Spouse:

Henrietta Mason

References

• Maine: A history : a facsimile of the 1919 edition