Corner Brook: 100 Years with a Pulp and Paper Mill

SHOW NOTES 

The paper mill in Corner Brook is a hundred years old

Sources

◘ Alex Kennedy, “Here Are Some of the Newest Mayors in Western and Northern Newfoundland,” CBC, October 2, 2025, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/chaisson-corner-brook-mayor-1.7649828 ◘  

◘ “Bowater,” Wikipedia, June 7, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowater ◘ 

◘ Harold Horwood, Corner Brook: A Social History of a Paper Town, Newfoundland History Series 3, Breakwater, 1986 ◘

◘ Kruger, “Our Locations,” Kruger, 2018, https://paper.kruger.com/locations/ ◘ 

◘ Maddie Ryan, “Kruger Celebrates Corner Brook Paper Mill’s 100th Anniversary with $700M Investment Plan,” CBC, July 25, 2025, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/corner-brook-pulp-paper-100-1.7594413 ◘ 

Transcript

The town I was born and grew up in in Newfoundland is what some might call a one-industry town. That doesn’t mean of course that it doesn’t have any other businesses, some of them major, but nothing in town compares to the paper mill in Corner Brook.

I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s, but the paper mill is older than me and was a fixture in the city all through my time there. One of the details I remember is the blowing of the whistle. Presumably this was to alert workers to the beginning of the first shift and the end of the last one. There were three: one at 7:45 am, one at 8 am, and the last one at 5 pm. I imagine the first one in the morning being a big spur to anyone lolling around in the morning, having another cup of coffee or a slice of toast.

“Holy Jesus, Maxine, pack me lunch box so I can get goin.”

The mill has been a huge boon to Corner Brook and has had long periods of steady leadership and investment. It also has an excellent location, on an inlet of the Bay of Islands leading right out into the Gulf of St. Lawrence and ultimately the Atlantic Ocean. The mill also benefits from a more general and obvious fact: the island of Newfoundland is full of trees. On almost any major or minor highway, and even on many large streets, when you drive on them there are trees to your right and left. And of course from trees come pulp and from pulp comes paper.

The mill has had two major owners over its history, its founder, Bowater’s, which has since merged with another company. Bowater’s founded the mill in 1925 and so this year is the one-hundredth anniversary of the mill in the city. Bowater’s sold it to a private Canadian firm called Kruger in 1984. Kruger owns three other mills in Canada (all in the province of Quebec). It has committed itself to Corner Brook not only with the original purchase, but also by investing more to expand and improve operations. The latest was just this past July when it announced $700 million for, among other things, “[modernization], adding a new pulp storage facility, the upgrade of site infrastructure and the implementation of chip handling and receiving equipment,” as well as the installation of “a biomass unloading and drying system.”

Like many Corner Brook kids growing up there, I had a couple of summer jobs at the mill. One involved using a huge metal hook to grab small pieces of cut trees that were floating near the shore of the Humber River, and setting them on the beach. In my other job, another summer, I worked inside the mill doing testing of paper. I don’t remember the details now, but I think it had to do with ensuring there were the right proportions of chemicals and other content. I would be given a sample of paper from one of the huge rolls and put it through various tests.

During one or other of those summers I also worked in the noisy, wet heart of the mill as well. One job was at what was called the “charging floor,” where I would stand at an open hole that fed the logs directly to the pulping machine. That was hard work. I also worked at the “drum barkers,” where, dressed in rubber waterproof clothing head to toe—and with a helmet on the head—I walked along the gangplanks of the gigantic drums that tumbled the trees around and removed their bark. My job was to hose down areas where too much bark had built up.

That was about fifty years ago, so I’d guess the technology, so to speak, has changed now. Less chance of a fifteen-year-old falling in and getting his bark removed, or ending up going down into the hole of the charging floor and perhaps ending up as a watermark on a page of a newspaper.

It has not always been good times for the mill. In the early 1980s, some of the machines were modernized but others were shut down. Then in 1983 the mill closed down the famous “Number Seven” machine, effectively putting a third of the workers out of work. One writer says that the timing was bad:

The closedown came at a time when alternative employment was hard to find, and there was a depression in nearly all kinds of manufacturing throughout North America. Construction and manufacture of construction materials … had almost come to a halt in the early ’80s.

Things have much improved since then. Kruger is a major company worth about $475 million (USD), but to put things in context, the largest paper mill company in the world, International Paper, with its headquarters in the United States, is worth about $24 billion (with a b). So Kruger is not a giant multinational, but successful in Canada (and Corner Brook).

I visited Corner Brook last month and you can’t miss the mill there, on the west side of town and right on the harbour. A couple of stacks send out what I’m told is steam. And the town overall looks in good shape, with some new construction done, and some construction in process.