Papermills

Papermills in Xativa, Spain (1151) and Fabriano, Italy, (1276) were the first to be built in Europe and were powered by streams where the purity and quality of the water in part determined the quality of the paper that was made. In 1390 the first papermill north of the Alps was built outside the walls of the city of Nuremberg, Germany, and is pictured in a corner of a woodcut in the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493. By the middle of the 18th century papermills and papermaking had become so widespread and indispensable that Denis Diderot’s landmark Encyclopedia, a supreme product of the Age of Enlightenment, records in words and illustrates in many plates the personnel, machinery, materials, and methods used in papermaking. Papermills were always vulnerable to flood and fire and the ebb and flow of owners’ fortunes, and for these reasons it is remarkable that Hayle Mill in Kent, England, was owned and operated by the Barcham Green family for six generations, from 1808 – 1987.