Berlin paper mill on the Androscoggin
— — the city the trees built, and the river that carried them.
Not only on a wall.
“Brick mill buildings and tall stacks along the Androscoggin River in Berlin, New Hampshire — the old paper city tucked into the eastern shoulder of the White Mountains. For more than a century the Brown Company and its successors turned spruce and fir from the North Country into pulp and paper here, and the river ran the colour of whatever was being made that day. The big pulp mill closed in 2006. A tissue mill in Gorham still runs downstream. The brick and the water remain. from the studio
Berlin paper mill on the Androscoggin, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Berlin sits on the Androscoggin River in Coos County, the northernmost county of New Hampshire, about thirteen miles north of Gorham and the northern edge of the White Mountain National Forest. Founded as a logging town in the mid-nineteenth century and incorporated as a city in 1897, Berlin grew around the pulp and paper industry that the Brown Company built along the river. The city long called itself the City That Trees Built. Population peaked above twenty thousand in the 1930s and has fallen by more than half since the mills closed.
The mill district is brick: rectangular pulp and paper buildings, sawtooth roofs, brick stacks rising above the riverbank. The Brown Company's Burgess sulphite pulp mill, completed in 1900, was once among the largest of its kind in the world. The main pulp operation closed in 2006 and most of the largest stacks came down between 2007 and 2014, though portions of the mill complex remain along the Androscoggin. The river itself carved the narrow gorge that the city was built into.
The mill era ran roughly from the 1850s through 2006, with the long Brown Company decades from 1888 to 1968 as its peak. After successive sales the main Berlin pulp mill closed permanently in 2006. A tissue mill operated by Gorham Paper and Tissue still runs about six miles downstream in Gorham. The federally protected Androscoggin River Wild and Scenic stretch begins upstream, and the city now markets itself around four-season access to the White Mountains and the Northern Forest.