A present from Christmas trees
During a lecture in Germany 30 years earlier, Herty had heard that the sulfite process could be applied to the Tannenbaum the Germans used as Christmas trees. Herty reasoned that, like these trees, younger pines in the southern United States would be less gummy than mature ones. Moreover, the pines’ fast growth rate would make it possible to cultivate the trees, creating a renewable resource.

At age 65, when most of his contemporaries were retiring, Herty was ready to test his ideas and launch a new industry.

The newsprint that became the history-making edition of the Soperton News was a product of Herty’s ability to inspire: his staff, who split into two 12-hour shifts and worked seven days a week to make enough pulp for the test; the newspaper publishers, who bought into his dream at $40 per ton knowing their established northern suppliers charged $32 per ton; and the businessmen who provided cold storage and refrigerated train cars to transport the pulp to a Canadian mill, whose owners produced the finished paper at no cost to Herty. Thus began a new era in papermaking. Fifteen pulp and paper mills were built in the southern United States between 1935 and 1940, simultaneously breathing life into the south’s devastated economy and slowing the destruction of the north’s hardwood forests.