The production of tissue products first at B. F. Perkins & Son, then the Japanese Tissue Mills, later renamed American Tissue Mills, spanned about 61 years, including its Stony Brook Facility at South Hadley. This is a brief chronology of the real estate, including some businesses that operated in the various factories after the demise of the American Tissue Company.
The real estate holdings of American Tissue Company were sold with Bankruptcy Court approval to Aaron Krock Associates in Worcester in late 1953 for approximately $750,000.
Mr. Krock promptly sold the former storage building on Winter Street to Plastic Coating Corporation of Holyoke and South Hadley. Holyoke real estate investor Jeremiah T. Downing of J. T. Downing Realty Company purchased two additional parcels on Winter Street. Both transactions occurred in January 1954.
The former Stony Brook division of American Tissue Mills in South Hadley was sold to Marcalas Company of Patterson, New Jersey. The company was a large producer of wax and tissue products. The company may be familiar to many as Marcal Paper. This sale occurred in March 1954, so there were three property transactions over two months. Marcal Paper operated at the site until September 1973, when it closed due to rising pulp prices. The successor business, Stony Brook Paper Company, operated until it failed in February 1978. The property was developed into condominiums in the early 1980s.
Mr. Krock completed his fourth sale of former American Tissue Mills real estate in September 1954, when New York investors, the South Hadley Paper Company Inc., purchased the mill for over $100,000. The property included a brick 40,000-square-foot plant, a one-story warehouse, a two-story wood-frame Superintendent’s building, and 13 acres of land.
Within 10 months, the Pearl City Paper Co. stopped operating. In March 1956, the Vermont-based papermaker Guilford Paper Company purchased the plant for $46,000. The mill operated from April to October 1956 and abruptly closed. In February 1957, three Springfield business investors paid $41,000 for the property and planned to open under the corporate name, Woodbridge Paper Mills. This enterprise also did not survive long, as from the spring of 1959, Bon-Ami Inc. of Manchester, Connecticut, began manufacturing tissue paper under contract with Woodbridge Paper Mills. On January 24, 1963, a massive explosion, followed by a fire, destroyed the plant, which had not operated for several months.
The final holding was the American Tissue Company’s main building on Crescent Street. In December 1955, Alderman Samuel Resnic purchased the offices and manufacturing plant for under $200,000. On October 16, 1968, a massive fire destroyed the portion of the building at the corner of Appleton and Crescent Streets. The building was not salvaged or replaced. The remaining two building segments along Crescent Street remain in commercial use.
Citations:
Newspapers.com (paid subscription): Citations: Holyoke (Massachusetts) Transcript & Transcript-Telegram; Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican; publication dates and pages are shown.
Ancestry.com (paid subscription): Price & Lee Holyoke, Massachusetts, City Directories
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