Wisconsin Hometown Stories

Wisconsin Hometown Stories: Neenah-Menasha

– This program is brought to you by the combined resources of the Wisconsin Historical Society and Wisconsin Public Television.

– On Wisconsin Hometown Stories: Two cities on the Fox River, born in the heat of rivalry. Built up by wood, wheat, and the power of water. Cities transformed by papermaking, innovation, and generations of hard work that created ground-breaking products and household words. On Wisconsin Hometown Stories: Neenah-Menasha.

– Major funding for Hometown Stories: Neenah-Menasha is provided in part by Richard and Amy Jo Aylward and the Aylward Family of Neenah, Mary and John Sensenbrenner, Bergstrom Automotive, Community First Credit Union, Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region, Daniel and Mame Heaney, Thomas J. Prosser, Theta and Tamblin Clark Smith Family Foundation, with additional support from Alta Resources, John and Katherine Davis, Jewelers Mutual Insurance Company, Kimberly-Clark Corporation, Legacy Private Trust Company, Bettie Hill, Miron Construction Company, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.

– In 1845, former governor James Doty finished up work on his dream home– a large log cabin built on Doty Island.

– The story of Doty is intertwined so much with the story of Neenah-Menasha that without him you probably wouldn’t have seen the community develop in the same way.

– Doty’s cabin, now preserved as a Neenah museum, gives an insight into the life of a former federal judge, territorial governor, and congressman. Doty also became a land speculator, perhaps best known for persuading legislators to move the state capital, from Belmont to a town site he was developing called “Madison.”

– Doty had given pieces of land to the principal leaders of the Legislature. He was very clever and a man with great foresight, even though he may not have been entirely ethical. Doty was apprenticing to a lawyer in Detroit and became the secretary to Governor Cass, the governor of the Michigan Territory, which at that point included Wisconsin and Minnesota and Iowa. And in 1820, he joined a canoe expedition led by Governor Cass and they traveled through the Great Lakes, down the upper waters of the Mississippi, and then up the Wisconsin River, and get to Lake Winnebago. And it was a beautiful, placid, smooth body of water and, of course, we know that it was even more swampy than it would be today. And they come upon Doty Island at the north end of Lake Winnebago. We call it Doty Island now– well because James Doty ultimately homesteaded it.

– Doty Island split the Fox River into two channels. And rapids on both sides were a sure sign of water power. Here, Doty could envision an ideal place for a settlement, where the river would eventually provide both transportation and power for manufacturing.

[Native American drumming] At the time of Doty’s visit, a Ho-Chunk village known as “Menashay” stood on the Island led by Chief Hootschope, also known as “Four Legs.” Across the south channel stood an immense Elm where local tribes would gather in council. A collection of artifacts, now displayed in Neenah’s city hall, shows abundant evidence of the presence of Native Americans, who have lived in the area for thousands of years. Just northwest of Doty Island, treaty negotiations began that would result in the Menominee Nation ceding a large portion of their land to the U.S. Government.

– But another part of that Treaty of 1831 was the establishment of a education program, as it was called at the time, for the Menominee. The education program established a village in around where Neenah is today to teach farming and animal husbandry. And so, there’s a series of block houses Hewn timber, squared-off timber log houses with a dovetail type joint on the end. There would have been a blacksmith shop appointed and also a mill. It doesn’t last very long, about two years. In 1836, there is another treaty that is negotiated, known as the Treaty at the Cedars, where the Menominee cede additional territory, lands now north of the Fox River, including the lands where this mission is located.

– In Madison, Governor James Doty heard about plans to sell off the Menominee village and contacted his friend and political supporter, Harrison Reed.

– Harrison Reed was the editor-publisher of the Milwaukee Sentinel. And he had been a great supporter of Doty. And apparently, Doty tipped him off as to when the land would be released.

– Harrison said, “I don’t really have any money.” He was being paid by his subscribers with things like chickens. It was a barter system. And he was just scrambling. But this was an opportunity for him to become something.

– Reed placed a winning bid on the village lands and all the structures that were there.

– Even though the federal law said that you had to pay for it in cash up front, Reed, apparently, was able to get it on credit.

– Reed connected with an investor in upstate New York named Harvey Jones, a glove manufacturer from Gloversville, who dreamed of building his own town. They struck a deal to own all of the land together and split the cost of improvements. At the site, Charles Doty, son of the governor, and Harrison Reed’s brother, Curtis, another supporter of Governor Doty, all pledged to help Jones with the building of a dam across the South Channel.

– You had this core of men revolving around Governor Doty, but none of them had any money. And this is just, like, a recipe for disaster.

– Mr. Jones came in with the money, and the other people in the group– other four people– were happy to take his money. Things were okay for, like, a honeymoon period, and then things went downhill very fast after that.

– Shortly after Harrison Reed mapped out a village called Neenah, Harvey Jones drew up his own settlement right next to it and began selling lots. Jones refused to pay Reed his share of the land sales because Reed owed him money for the cost of improvements, like the dam.

– Jones had the ability to create a debt that Reed couldn’t pay.

– Because of the physical nature of this location, with two branches of the Fox River draining out around an island, out of Lake Winnebago, two water powers, there was an alternative.

– Leaving Neenah and Harvey Jones on the South Channel, James Doty and his son, Charles, raised funds to buy up hundreds of acres on the North Channel, and with Curtis Reed, they platted out a village they called Menasha. Back in Neenah, Harrison Reed announced that he was suing Harvey Jones and that he still owned a share of all of the lots, which couldn’t be sold without his agreement.

– Reed was able to stop the development in Neenah, and it lasted for about 13 years.

– When Wisconsin achieved statehood, James Doty was elected to Congress. The federal government gave the new state a large land grant, to fund work on the Fox-Wisconsin waterway– a series of locks, dams, and canals on the Fox River. The government would have to choose where to build the channel– Neenah or Menasha.

– You can understand that when the federal government decided to build a channel, that meant big money because it meant people would move to that area, businesses would move to that area.

– When Menasha won the bid, bitter feelings persisted for years afterward.

– There’s a story that Doty actually turned the map upside down, and that’s the reason the North Channel was selected. I don’t know that that’s true. That’s part of the folklore, if you will.

– These were the things that became the seedbed for longstanding debate between the communities.

– Each village fought to stop the township government from paying for improvements to the other. Finally, Neenah’s village president, J.B. Hamilton, petitioned the county board to split their township in two.

– And that’s how we have Town of Neenah and Town of Menasha, with the island split by the County down the middle, like Solomon would have divided the child in the biblical story.

– As large crews of Irish construction workers began work on the canals and dams of the Fox-Wisconsin waterway, settlers began venturing up the river and casting their lot with the developing communities of Neenah and Menasha.

– The river’s always central to the story. It’s what drew people there. It’s what carried them there. It’s what fed their dreams.

– The thing I always say to people is that settlement is not Little House on the Prairie. This a very, very hard life, harder than anyone can possibly imagine. There were no roads. There were no utilities. There was nothing. But the thing that they saw here, and was the thing that made them willing to go through the hardships was that they saw this as the next Chicago.

– Like Chicago’s highly successful canal, the Fox-Wisconsin waterway would also connect the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River.

– It was the same arrangement, same transportation type of hub that Chicago was, but there was a difference– and that fundamental difference was that this was a location with water power and free power. And I don’t have to speak to any industrialist to be able to say you could start up an industry and not have to pay for the power. That is a phenomenal draw.

– Dams at Neenah and Menasha captured the flow of both the Wolf River and the Fox River watersheds, turning Lake Winnebago into a large and powerful mill pond.

– This whole waterway system that came down through here provided a limitless supply of water. It wasn’t just seasonal. It never froze solid, and so it could go all year. So anybody who was thinking that they wanted to make something would go, “This is the place to be.”

– John R. Kimberly and his brother, Harvey, bought some of the first lots in Neenah. And together, they built a double house– one half for each brother– which stands today, as one of Neenah-Menasha’s oldest homes. Using Durham boats, they hauled milling machinery up the Fox River, and built the Neenah Flour Mill, to grind wheat for the area’s frontier farmers.

– Because they didn’t have a lot of cash in the western frontier, they needed a crop that they could sell for goods and supplies and for food, and that turned out to be wheat. Wheat was the great western crop that was fairly easy to raise. Wheat was certainly labor-intensive, but it wasn’t nearly as labor-intensive as animal husbandry. Wheat, you simply had to clear the land, sow the seed, and then sit back and watch it grow, and hope that there was a good harvest and the weather cooperated.

– The frontier crop soon gave rise to a thriving frontier industry. More mills went up, and production grew to become second only to Milwaukee.

– At the same time, sawmills in Neenah and Menasha began producing wooden goods, like barrels for flour.

– The sawmills ultimately, as they grew, grew more numerous in Menasha, because at the outset, there was a forest in the northwestern corner of the township.

– In Menasha, a dry goods store owned by Elisha Smith, sold locally-made wooden pails, tubs, and butter churns.

– The company that was supplying them ended up having financial problems. And so, as the supplier to him, he thought, “Well, maybe I could make a go of this.” So he ended up figuring out a way, with some other investors, to buy the Menasha Woodenware business.

– Smith shipped his goods to Chicago on a plank road built from Menasha to Kaukauna, and then by boat, on the newly-completed Fox-Wisconsin waterway. But the hopes and dreams for the big waterway project would soon come to an end.

– Here they were, drawn to the water transportation, spending the first almost two decades trying to get this underway and built, and while it was underway, the railroads come in, and, essentially, overnight make that technology obsolete. For us, the railroad builders, who were primarily the flour-millers of Milwaukee, did not want to build a railroad up to this area, because it was going to bring the competition down into their market. Who came up to this area was the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad. The railroads offered one of the first and only opportunities for cooperation that the competitive villages had, and that was when the railroad was first laid right before the Civil War. The railroad said, “Well, you’ve got all these “channels and canals and river branches “and all these bridges. We’re not paying for that.” And the two cities– villages rather– got together at that point in time and said, “Oh, we’ll pay for it.” And they actually agreed to pay for those rail trestles and all of the connection that was necessary to bring the railroad into town right at the manufacturing center right through the water powers so that they could really make the most out of this transportation opportunity. Suddenly, the Menasha Woodenware, with the wooden tubs, which was the earliest form of product packaging, went gangbusters, because they could ship these things down, they were lightweight, they weren’t heavy, the wood source was up here. And the city of Chicago was and is a national distribution center.

– Easy access to Chicago by rail, and to the Great Lakes by boat, fueled the growth of both communities. And the coming of the Civil War created high demand for both wooden goods and flour. With waves of European immigrants arriving to do the work, and with the Fox River powering the mills, industries grew in a spectacular fashion.

– By the 1870s, Menasha and Neenah had become thriving manufacturing towns, each with a retail center. The two villages grew toward each other and functioned as one place. But old feelings died hard and attempts to combine the two governments and make one bigger, more efficient city failed. In Menasha’s National Hotel, George Reed, brother of Menasha and Neenah founders, Curtis and Harrison Reed, organized the Wisconsin Central Railroad. The federal government promised to grant the railroad over 800,000 acres of land if it could build a line from Doty Island to Stevens Point, and through the northern wilderness to Lake Superior. Once completed, the Wisconsin Central carried an abundant supply of wood to the drying yards of the Menasha Woodenware Company, which now spread out on both sides of the river channel. Elisha Smith’s factory continued to make a variety of turned wooden containers for shipping products.

– And at that point, butter, you know, it was very different back then, was transported in wooden buckets of various different sizes. And they ended up making those that they would supply to the dairies that would then put the churned butter into these tubs. So he ended up turning into the largest wooden butter tub manufacturer in the world.

– In Neenah, flour millers faced fierce competition from Minneapolis, where former Wisconsin Governor Cadwallader Washburn purchased the water power rights at St. Anthony Falls. There, he built an enormous flour mill, equipped with the latest milling technology that produced huge quantities of high-quality flour. In Neenah and Menasha, most mills remained small and used traditional grindstones that produced a lower quality flour. To make matters worse, yields from area wheat farms steadily declined.

– Wheat growing was easy because it was basically kind of an extractive industry, almost like coal mining. It tapped the natural advantages in the landscape, particularly the nutrients in the soil. So what farmers tended to do, because they didn’t have a lot of money, is they would farm a couple of acres of land for a couple of years until the yield went down and then they would move on and they’d settle a new piece of land, farm that for a few years, but eventually you ran out of land.

– And pretty soon, it wasn’t economically viable. What took its place was paper– paper production. And they had the power to do it. But they also needed clean water, itself, in the manufacturing process of paper. They needed to be able to rinse the pulp to make sure the pulp was clean. And water was used throughout the manufacturing process.

– Taking a chance on the promise of a new industry, Neenah entrepreneurs purchased some papermaking machinery, and built the city’s first paper mill.

– That was the first financially successful paper mill in the state of Wisconsin. And so, there were local investors who really took serious note of this.

– Four investors pooled their money and formed a venture called Kimberly, Clark and Company to build a second paper mill.

– It was Alfred Kimberly and his business partner, Havilah Babcock, C.B. Clark, a hardware store owner, and Frank Shattuck, a traveling salesman out of Chicago. They purchased a water power site on the Fox River, tore down a flour mill, and constructed the Globe Paper Mill.

– Initially, they were creating paper primarily out of rags.

– They brought rags up from Chicago, and they had picking rooms where you pick out the pockets and the buttons and all those other things and these were all ground and dissolved.

– Processing rags into pulp made a paper of the highest quality.

– They marketed this as a source of making newsprint. Every municipality worth its salt had at least two newspapers and very often four or more.

– Newspapers were expanding, magazines were expanding, print catalogs, things like that, and this required so much paper and there just weren’t supplies. They were able to go into markets like Chicago and Milwaukee, these big metropolitan centers that were really expanding rapidly.

– It was for the company, it was for the community, and this part of the state, an economic perfect storm.

– Kimberly-Clark expanded into Appleton, partnering with a mill that used a new technology to grind wood for pulp. They built the Atlas Mill and produced the first paper in the Midwest made from trees. And there, papermakers experimented with new methods to make new kinds of paper and pioneered a new process to use chemicals to break down wood.

– And it was after that that they expanded again and again and again and again because they really found that they had it down.

– Success in papermaking required a great sales force, required innovation in terms of technology, and it required research and development. And those three things are money intensive.

– They funneled all their money back into operations. They took almost nothing out themselves for pay or living extravagant lifestyles or anything like that. They could buy timber rights and they could buy water rights and these were the keys to their future success.

– The Neenah-based company expanded rapidly, building new mills at several water power sites in the Fox River Valley.

– A couple years later, they built the Vulcan Mill next door to the Atlas Mill. And they also bought the Genesee Flour Mill, and they changed that over to the Tioga Paper Mill.

– Back in Neenah, they constructed the Badger Mill. After that, they tore down the Neenah Mill and reconstructed that into a very large mill. They built the Telulah Paper Company, and then they ran out of water power in Appleton and Neenah. And then, they bought more water power in what was called “The Cedars,” and they built a company town and named it Kimberly.

– They built a very large pulp mill there. After that, they bought more water power at De Pere, and there they created the Shattuck and Babcock Mill.

– Other companies also built paper mills in Menasha and Neenah, drawing large numbers of immigrant workers, who kept the mills running day and night.

– So it was so successful that it spread outward and shaped the entire region. And so, although Neenah and Menasha had remained small, its impact on northeastern Wisconsin has been enormous.

– Decades of paper-making and other manufacturing industries created unprecedented wealth in Neenah and Menasha. Industry owners tended to build stately homes in Neenah because property taxes there were much lower. Menasha taxpayers struggled for decades to pay off the city’s debt, taken out to encourage railroads to build there. Menasha industrialists built on the Neenah side of Doty Island because we didn’t have the railroad bonds sitting on our backs, and the property taxes were less. So Neenah became known as the city of mill owners. Menasha is a city of mill workers. But both cities are mill towns, and there’s no way around it. And what that means is that you have a handful of people sitting on top of the pile, and the vast majority of everybody else just getting by.

– To bridge the gap, industrialists and their families gave back and used their wealth to address some of the most pressing problems of the day.

– There was this understanding that you have to make it work. You have to somehow or another make sure that everybody is accounted for.

– Women in Neenah and Menasha formed a very strong backbone for the life and times of their society. They had a very deep philanthropic streak and a very deep quest for education. They came together and they formed societies and clubs.

– In 1906, in response to a devastating earthquake in San Francisco, women in Neenah and Menasha formed the Emergency Society.

– The Emergency Society started as a group of women who wanted to do something to help the victims of the San Francisco earthquake. So they got together to sew clothing for the victims. And when that need was finally over, they went on then to do things within their communities.

– The Emergency Society formed a new organization, the V.N.A., or Visiting Nurse Association to address the public health needs in Neenah and Menasha.

– They formed this organization. They hired a nurse. Her name was Ida Heinecke. And each month, she made visits to individuals in the community. I think initially it was more related to women and childbirth because there was no real healthcare for them following up after they’d given birth. And no one telling them how to take care of a baby.

– Ida Heinecke cared for poor and immigrant families and helped them adapt to American culture. At first, she made her rounds on foot, until the communities pitched in to buy her a car. Making over 2,000 calls a year, Heinecke fought smallpox, scarlet fever, and when a doctor was unavailable, delivered babies herself.

– At the time the V.N.A. began, construction started on a new hospital for the community, funded by the family of Theda Clark. Daughter of Kimberly-Clark founder C.B. Clark, Theda lived a privileged life, but also attended the local public schools. She developed a keen sense of community responsibility from the example set by her father, a former Neenah mayor, and member of congress.

– Her father was so adamant about her helping her community, and being community-minded, and thinking of the future of the community. She’s saying things like, “I know the perfect spot for a library,” years before it’s built.

– Clark led the campaign to build a new public library in Neenah and donated the land for the site. But it was her experience of personal loss that fueled her vision of a hospital, which would serve both communities.

– Community members’ health issues, including her own father’s death, probably impacted her when she thought about the community and what it needed most. F.C. Shattuck, a neighbor, he died from complications of appendicitis. Her friend, Helen Kimberly Stuart’s first child died after birth. Her next door neighbor, D.L. Kimberly, died from complications of having back surgery performed in his home. There was no hospital. And maybe in her mind, she thought, “We could’ve prevented this.” And then, unfortunately, she died just following the birth of her first child. She hemorrhaged to death over the course of a day or two.

– In her will, Theda Clark provided funding for the building of a hospital, to be carried out by her brother, Bill.

– The Clark family covered the hospital’s losses through the crucial first decade. After that, both communities began providing generous support. In Menasha, another philanthropist, Elisha Smith, president of the Menasha Woodenware Company, and employer of over a thousand workers appeared before the City Council. Smith announced that he would provide all of the funds needed to build the Menasha Public Library, and furnish it with books. He also informed the council that he would donate 24 acres of land for a public park.

– After the community learned of the generosity of Mr. Smith, thousands of people decided to gather and march to his house. There were speeches, the mayor talked, two bands provided music, and Mr. Smith came to address the people. And he said that any person will live longer and be happier in this world by doing something to help mankind. And Mr. Smith passed away the year after the library opened. And he was so revered that his funeral procession stretched over a mile.

– By 1905, three of the four founders of Kimberly-Clark had passed away, and John Alfred Kimberly had retired from active management.

– And so, the constant for Kimberly-Clark was a man named Frank J. Sensenbrenner. Frank J. Sensenbrenner is born in Menasha and Sensenbrenner was kind of a classic American success story– dropped out of school in 8th grade, kind of kicked around for a little bit. He found his way into papermaking doing bookkeeping for Kimberly-Clark in several of their mills. Sensenbrenner calls himself the general manager, but he’s really the chief executive. He’s calling the shots. One of his most important accomplishments is that he realized that chemistry was going to be the basis of success for Kimberly-Clark.

– In 1914, the company hired an Austrian-born chemist named Ernst Mahler. Mahler had studied at the top paper-making university in the world in Germany and had many contacts at the school.

– And so, Mahler was able to bring this back to tiny Neenah, Wisconsin and create a staff that was solely focused on innovation in paper-making. This is a manufacturing company, and the paper-making process is heavily manufacturing-based. When you think of taking giant trees, and stripping them down to nothing, turning them into a pulp soup with chemicals, and then that eventually becoming paper– this is a heavy manufacturing process. And under Mahler’s leadership, they’re able to really turn this heavy manufacturing company into a first rate R&D company. And that’s fueling everything.

– A new opportunity for the company emerged with the rising price of cotton, as an insect called the boll weevil spread throughout the south.

– So Kimberly-Clark scientists want to find a way to turn logs into cotton, and the opportunities for this kind of product seemed unlimited. So James C. Kimberly and Mahler head back to Europe on a fact-finding mission, right before World War I breaks out. But while they were there, they used Mahler’s connections, they talked to a lot of scientists, learned some things about the chemistry of paper-making, and they think, “Wow!” They have kind of the key now. And company lore has it that Kimberly and Mahler are high-tailing it across Europe and back to the United States, just as World War I is breaking out. They come back to Neenah, and they were able to adapt the German process to the American trees and that led to the ability to make this kind of fluffy cotton wadding, and they call it “Cellucotton.”

And they realize this could be used in hospitals right away. So Sensenbrenner sends out a team of sales people to talk to Midwestern hospitals, asking them to test out this new product. And almost instantly, they realized, “This is better than cotton.” It’s more absorbent, it’s cheaper to make, and the Red Cross needs absorbent wadding for bandages and in surgery, and the Army War Department needs the same materials.

– Kimberly-Clark won a contract to sell cotton wadding, at cost, for the war effort, and huge orders came in.

– The Armistice ends the war in 1918, and the Army and the Red Cross immediately stop the contracts. And so Kimberly-Clark has tons and tons of excess Cellucotton and they don’t know what to do with it.

– Kimberly and Mahler traveled to Sears and Roebuck in Chicago, where they hired a salesman named Walter Luecke to figure out a new use for the product. Luecke found a letter in the company files from a group of French nurses, who gave him a suggestion.

– This wadding you’ve been sending over– we’ve noticed that women are using this for sanitary napkins, so you’ve got a real opportunity to create a product that’s necessary.

– Despite the need for the product, marketing it meant breaking through strong cultural taboos, in businesses run mostly by men.

– When consumers wanted to buy products, there was usually a table or a glass barrier between the clerk and the consumer. So the consumer had to ask the clerk for all their products. This was such a cultural taboo, men weren’t willing to even stock the product, let alone talk about it. So they had to overcome this barrier. Kimberly-Clark tried direct sales– they tried to sell it directly to women, they tried to get women to sign up. It’s such a taboo topic that women won’t even take free samples.

– The company gave the unmentionable product a new name– Kotex– and overcame the reluctance of national magazines to run their ads. Sales were slow. But a decisive breakthrough came, after creating a new way to buy it– with the product placed on top of a counter, next to a coin box.

– Customer puts the coin into the box, takes the box away. No conversation. And this was revolutionary, not only for Kimberly-Clark and this product but for the buying process in America. Self-service was not a thing that people understood or ever did, and so this was one of the first self-service opportunities that people had, and it kind of changed the way people thought about shopping.

– Kimberly-Clark soon developed another consumer product based on its wartime research. Using the filter material developed for gas masks, researchers developed an absorbent tissue called Kleenex.

– At the time, the cosmetic industry is exploding. Women are starting to wear makeup. They need a way to remove the makeup, a way to remove cold cream, They create Kleenex as a cold cream remover, put it out into the marketplace, and what they find is that sales are flat. When they went in to focus groups and talked to consumers, they found that two-thirds of the people who were using Kleenex weren’t using it as a cold cream remover, they were using it as a disposable hankie. So, immediately they launch a new advertising campaign and totally rebrand Kleenex as a disposable handkerchief. And this allows Kimberly-Clark to create a market, and then dominate that market right away.

– Kleenex would go on to become one of the best-known products in American history. And its pop-up box, first made by the Menasha Printing and Carton Company, became a design classic.

– It’s not necessarily that that box was some innovation that transformed the world, but for this particular product, in this particular time, there was just some kind of magic to that thought: that when you pull one up, another one’s waiting for you.

– While Neenah and Menasha became well-known for making many kinds of paper, other industries, like the Jersild Knitting Company, made an abundance of different products. Early foundries, like the Bergstrom Stove Company, began to specialize, producing a full line of stoves, for both cooking and heating. And as communities like Menasha improved their streets, the Aylward Sons’ Foundry branched off from stoves, and into municipal castings, like storm sewers to drain newly-paved roads.

Ed Aylward would split off from the family company, and start what would become the Neenah Foundry, which grew to be one of the largest in the state. And as cities around the country installed water and sewer systems, manhole covers, from the Neenah Foundry, became an iconic part of the streetscape, in all 50 states, and many countries.

[cast iron clangs]

The George Banta Publishing Company was started by George Banta, Senior, and greatly expanded by his son, George, Junior. But it was his mother, Ellen Pleasants Banta, who took the first steps to grow the business, which became one of the largest printing companies in the country. It all began in George and Ellen’s home, where George printed forms for his insurance business with a small press on the dining room table. Eventually, Ellen convinced him to start a storefront business in Menasha, which grew with local trade.

– He had some health challenges and so he would go off to the Southwest, sometimes for months at a time. So, it fell to his wife, Ellen, to take over running the company. And this was unheard of at the time for a woman to run any kind of enterprise. One of her brothers had moved east, and got in on the ground floor of Quaker Oats. And he saw an opportunity, in his position there, to throw some business in the direction of his sister.

– So when they were set to come up, Mrs. Banta came in and told everybody, “You run every print press in the plant.”

– Just take paper– blank paper, used paper, whatever– and run it through whatever number of presses they had at the time so that they looked exceedingly busy.

– And here was this din of activity and stuff going on! And, as the story goes, the Quaker Oats people said, “Man, if they’re doing this up here, they really must know what they’re doing.” And so, it was this sham that got them their first big break. But it was Mrs. Banta who did it.

– George Banta Publishing would soon become a national leader in printing books for schools, universities, and the military. But it was a contract to print soap wrappers that helped to launch another industry, the Menasha Printing and Carton Company. Purchasing its own equipment, the company expanded into printing millions of bread wrappers. And after the National Biscuit Company first packaged their Uneeda crackers in a printed paperboard box, Menasha Printing and Carton joined a growing revolution in food packaging. They focused next on making printed cartons for ice cream makers, and also cartons for butter makers, nationwide. The business bought so much paper from the Marathon Corporation in Wausau that the owners there decided to buy the company.

– And while their name didn’t survive– In merging, Marathon moved here, which tells you how big the production was here.

– Marathon Corporation became a major manufacturer of packaging and consumer products, like waxed paper. The packaging revolution became bad news for the Menasha Woodenware Company, as demand for wooden containers like cracker barrels and butter tubs plummeted.

– It’s falling out of favor, you know. The world was changing, and they stumbled upon this product called “corrugated.” And they were one of the first companies to invest in a corrugator. Not understanding a lot about it, they literally had to make a shift to this new product.

– So, there was a lot of production and work within those two cities that was available to almost anybody there. I kept going down to Gilbert’s to put in my application, and, finally, I got a job there. I started on March 10th, 1937. I worked in the finishing room, and they would bring the reams of paper from the cutting machine. First, it was sorted to see if there were any bad spots on it. And then the ladies would fan it up and count it. And we would seal ’em up like a package. And sometimes, I would go home at Noon. We had a bowling team, and we got to go to the tournament one year in La Crosse. Gilbert used to have parties. I made a lot of nice friends. It was a lot of fun.

– And most of the industry were all locally-owned people. The Kimberlys and the Clarks from Kimberly-Clark lived in Neenah. And George Banta lived in Menasha. But those people met their workers and knew them on a first-name basis. They went to church. Saw them at church and the school functions and civic functions. I know my dad told me that sometimes they’d only have work for two days a week, but nobody got laid off.

– The connection that everybody had in making it work was very prominent in those days. You had to have people stirring the pulp. You had to have people printing the paper. You had to have everybody. Even if you were a secretary, you had a sense of ownership because it was in your town. It was in your hometown, and you were helping make it go. It was all one big operation.

– In recent decades, the homegrown, and often family-run companies of Neenah and Menasha, faced intense competition from industry giants.

– It used to be believed that the economy here, based on paper, would provide endless stability. But they weren’t thinking of a digital world, where paper has somewhat less significance than it did before. And everybody, no matter what your business is, has to look at reinventing yourself, repositioning yourself.

– To compete in a global marketplace, the companies faced growing pressure to get big by acquiring other companies or sell out.

– Perpetual growth and expansion is beyond what a family-owned operation can really maintain for very long.

– Some companies, like Gilbert Paper, were sold, sold again, and finally closed.

[brick and metal crashing]

– One exception was the Menasha Corporation, formerly Menasha Woodenware. Hit by a catastrophic fire, the descendants of founder Elisha Smith, continued to rebuild and grow the company.

– I think the way they did that when you look at the history, was, “How do we innovate? How do we make ourselves relevant in a changing market?”

– At Kimberly-Clark, CEO Darwin Smith transformed the company by selling off paper mills and timberlands. He then plowed millions of dollars into developing a new product, called Huggies.

– Darwin Smith gambled the entire future of the organization on this disposable diaper. And so, Huggies is really the product that drove them to the next level, moving away from papermaking completely to a full-on focus on consumer products.

– His gamble paid off, with company sales exceeding $4 billion dollars in 1985. Smith then sent shockwaves through the entire state, when he announced he was moving the company headquarters to Texas.

– And so, our pride took a hit, I think. And the community was worried about it. But, most of the jobs stayed here. Their manufacturing facilities were and are still here.

– The old rivalry between the two cities continued to play out, mostly in sporting events.

– But in 1972, studies showed that taxpayers could save over half a million dollars a year by becoming one city. Put to a referendum, the plan was soundly defeated. Since that time, the two cities have merged their fire departments, and this led to another merger– of a long-standing tradition in both communities– the Santa float.

[festive beach music]

– Merry Christmas! Ho! Ho! Ho!

[police sirens] Merry Christmas! Ho! Ho! Ho! Merry Christmas!

– When the condition of their downtown areas became a hindrance to further development, both cities encouraged efforts to restore some of their historic buildings, and preserve the character of their retail centers.

– Alongside the old canal, Menasha constructed a new marina, which made the area more attractive for waterfront development.

[traditional powwow vocals, drums,rattles,shakers]

– In Neenah, the renovation of Shattuck Park now brings many people to enjoy the downtown area and has also attracted new investment nearby. On this day, members of the Menominee Nation held a powwow, in the same place where the federal government once built a village for them.

– We talk about the circle, and completing the circle, so it’s kind of– coming back here is kind of like doing that in some sense, and completing that circle that we’ve left, we’ve come back.

– A series of public-private partnerships, like this industrial park in Neenah, created new jobs for residents of both cities.

– The City of Neenah also partnered with the Wisconsin DNR to take down the former Bergstrom Paper Mill and clean up the site. This cleared the way for building a new headquarters for the Plexus Corporation. And near the old water power sites, a group of local investors partnered with the City of Neenah to build a series of office towers that now bring hundreds of workers to the city center.

– The investment group also partnered with the City of Menasha, adding a new office tower in the heart of the city.

– The Visiting Nurse Association continues the legacy of Ida Heinecke, and also continues to benefit from Neenah-Menasha’s long tradition of philanthropy, receiving support to provide services for senior citizens.

– And sponsors from both cities recently funded the building of a new Boys and Girls Club in Menasha.

– It’s asking, “Do you want to buy it?

– Both cities continue to make many different kinds and grades of paper, and a variety of paper-based products.

– And while the Fox River no longer provides a source of power for industry, it remains a source of beauty for the cities. Easy access to the river and to Lake Winnebago improves the quality of life for everyone. Both cities take pride in their large water-front parks, set aside by farsighted leaders throughout their history.

– I think if you look back and then look at today, and look ahead to tomorrow– which is always so important is to position yourself properly– it’s pretty clear that the community is what the citizens make it. And that’s something to be aware of. And in this case, it’s something to be proud of.

– Major funding for Hometown Stories: Neenah-Menasha is provided in part by Richard and Amy Jo Aylward and the Aylward Family of Neenah, Mary and John Sensenbrenner, Bergstrom Automotive, Community First Credit Union, Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region, Daniel and Mame Heaney, Thomas J. Prosser, Theta and Tamblin Clark Smith Family Foundation, with additional support from Alta Resources, John and Katherine Davis, Jewelers Mutual Insurance Company, Kimberly-Clark Corporation, Legacy Private Trust Company, Bettie Hill, Miron Construction Company, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.