Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,359
By This is the grave of Byron Weston.
Born in 1832 in Dalton, Massachusetts, Weston is not well remembered today and honestly there’s not necessarily a great reason to remember him. However, he is emblematic of an important industry that we don’t think much about and so is worth a brief post. He came from the local elite, married wealthy, and made a lot of money on his own in the paper industry. He was in the Civil War and was a captain.
In the late 19th century, the Berkshires were the center of the American paper industry. Weston didn’t really develop the beginning of this industry. It had gone back to before his birth. But he was part of a larger technological advancement in the industry that applied new methods to make the region the center of American paper after the Civil War. Costs were reduced significantly, from about 40 to 50 cents per pound to about 10 to 20 cents. He was proud enough of the industry that he later wrote a history of the Berkshire paper industry. Not very exciting stuff probably, except to the historian. Speaking of that, I should note that I am drawing from Judith McGaw’s Most Wonderful Machine: Mechanization and Social Change in Berkshire Paper Making, 1801-1885 for much, though not all, of this post. Mostly, from what McGaw says, the history mostly is just a triumphal narrative of technological advancement without much reflection as to why any of it happened. I don’t guess that’s real surprising. According to McGaw, the reason for the intense technological advancement of Berkshire paper makers is much more mundane than some inevitable historical force–basically they were behind other parts of the nation and needed rapid advancement to grow their market share. Weston was hardly alone in driving these technological changes, but he was at the forefront of them, advancing as fast as anyone else.
Some of what was happening as well was the transformation from rags to wood. Even in the Berkshires, where presumably the advantage was having trees still around, rags made up a lot of the paper in the 1850s. That changed dramatically over the next decade, especially for finer qualities of paper. Weston was pretty obsessed with the cost of rags and his significant papers–allowing historians to write, which most companies do not keep because they don’t want historians to write about them–demonstrate an intense interest in lowering the cost of transforming rags into paper, which was a real process. That was also because rag prices were rising rapidly due to high demand and it was a much higher cost than labor, for instance. Most paper makers used a lot of acid and alum to bleach the paper, even though it led to a lower quality paper. Evidently, Weston avoided such corner cutting and produced a finer paper, though of course it led to higher costs.
Weston was one of these rich guys who decided to play in politics with his free time. He was so rich that it didn’t really matter. He was elected to the state legislature in 1876 and then served a term as lieutenant governor beginning in 1880. He didn’t necessarily do a lot–unless you consider upholding the interests of the rich in the Gilded Age to be a series of accomplishments. But for his lights, he did fine. He did a bunch of local charity work and was a big supporter of Williams College. You know, normal rich person stuff.
If there’s a real takeaway here, it’s that the kind of wealth and industry that Weston had was a lot more common than the extremes of, say, the railroad and steel industries, where the wealth, the corruption, and the open contempt for workers lives was of almost comical proportions. The irony here is that Weston’s grave is quite modest. But when you wander around old cemeteries, most of the big old graves are people like this–bankers and local capitalists who probably were terrible on most things–I am sure the labor relations in the paper industry were problematic at best–but without the power or even the ambition to take over the nation’s economic system. They were just happy to participate in it and drive a bit of it toward themselves.
Weston and his wife had ten children. One of their grandchildren was Julia Child. But she was born in 1912, years after Weston’s death. That came in 1898, at the age of 66.
If anyone really, really, really wants a deep dive into the details of the 19th century paper making, go check out the book from your library. I am not going that deep here. Why? Because I don’t care and it’s boring.
Byron Weston is buried in Main Street Cemetery, Dalton, Massachusetts.
If you would like this series to visit other Gilded Age capitalists of perhaps more excitement, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Leland Stanford is in Palo Alto, California and Elbert Gary is in Wheaton, Illinois. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.