In 1844 a jobbing house was opened in Chicago by Oliver Morris Butler to dispose of the paper made at his St. Charles Mill. Several years later J. W. Butler, the present head of the J. W. Butler Paper Company, was placed in sole charge of the Chicago branch. Oliver Morris Butler was also a part owner and president of the Lockport Paper Company, of Lockport, Illinois, a successful plant erected for the manufacture of Straw Board, and he remained active in the trade up to the time of his death, which occurred in 1888. ♦Genealogy of the Butlers as paper-makers♦ The store which he established in 1844 and put under the management of his younger brother, J. W. Butler, touches closely, through him, his ancestors, and their earlier years as paper-makers, nearly the whole of the nineteenth century in the line of the paper industry in this country. That this direct branch of the Butler family may have had even earlier identification with paper-making is not improbable; the family line is clearly and directly traceable as continuous residents in America back to the earlier half of the seventeenth century, only a few years subsequent to the Pilgrims’ landing, but the meager records of our earliest settlers seldom speak of their vocations, and our first positive knowledge of the Butler family’s connection with the paper industry is early in the nineteenth century. CHAPTER IV EARLY METHODS OF PAPER-MAKING “As far as the East is from the West,” so great is the difference between the methods and processes of the slow-going Orient and those that prevail in the Occident. It is fully a century and a half since Berkeley gave expression to his faith in the high destiny of the West: “Westward the course of empire takes its way; The four first acts already past, A fifth shall close the drama with the day; Time’s noblest offspring is the last.” ♦Progress of the West♦ As the years followed each other swiftly in the past, it became strikingly evident that the world must look to the Occident for industrial activity and progress, and for the practical application of new inventions and discoveries. And yet, through the inevitable exception that proves the rule, we occasionally find East and West working along strikingly similar lines. The making of paper by hand, as carried on in our own country in early days, and to a limited extent at the present time, furnishes such an exception. In many respects, the process is not unlike that followed by the Chinese in making paper from the bark of the mulberry-tree, which has already been described in the preceding chapter. In either case, whatever the material employed, the first step, which was of prime importance, was to remove from the fibers all glutinous, resinous, or other superfluous matter. The fibers are the slender, elongated cells, the enduring portion of the plant that gives to the paper its strength, toughness, and elasticity. ♦Decomposition of rags♦