1919-06-28-sc-p9-talc-mine-west-of-reardan

June 28, 1919 Spokane Daily Chronicle Page 9:

Makes Waste Lumber Into Useful and Valuable Paper

Inland Empire Paper company plant.

The raw material—the pulp wood—for the Inland Empire Paper company’s plant at Millwood costs over a quarter of a million dollars a year,

All this wood is obtained within a half circle, of approximately 150 miles radius to the north, east and south of Spokane, from such points as Elk River, Troy, Avery, Cataldo, Clark’s Fork, Eastport, Port Hill, Boundary and Velvet.

The wood used would be more or less wasted otherwise, being mostly too small for saw timber and otherwise undesirable. The principal woods used are white fir, hemlock, spruce and cottonwood,

Purchases are made from every one, from the smallest ranchers to the largest lumber companies, and in lots from the wagon load or sleighload hauled from the foothills to a couple of thousand cords in a bunch.

About 2000 tons of lime rock each year is purchased from the Silver King Limestone company at Bayview, on Lake Pend Oreille. The pulp filler we use to give gloss and finish to our book paper comes from the plant of the Western Talc company, just west of Reardan. The coal, some 20,000 tons a year, comes from the Corbin mines in British Columbia.

Practically all of the discarded high-grade paper, magazines collected in the Inland Empire—as well as three times as much more shipped in from “the coast—is used here. So when the housewife collects her old magazines and sells them, they come here, the ink is removed, and the pulp recovered to use again in book paper.

Our sulfur comes from Texas and our bleaching powder from California, so that aside from chemicals, our entire purchase price for materials is spent right here in the Inland Empire,

But our largest item of expense is labor. Including our camp operations we employ directly upwards of 315 men, and 75 per cent of the quarter million dollars spent for materials goes for labor indirectly. Our mill is a good illustration of what a manufacturing plant can do for a community in bringing in and keeping dollars busy at home.

INLAND EMPIRE PAPER CO.

Treasurer and General Manager.