On September 29, 1690, German immigrant William Rittenhouse and his associates entered an agreement with Philadelphia merchant Samuel Carpenter for land near Germantown, Pennsylvania. The twenty-acre tract lay on Monoshone Creek—later known as Paper Mill Run—a tributary of Wissahickon Creek, in what is now northwest Philadelphia.
The arrangement was extraordinary: the lease ran for 990 years at an annual ground rent of five shillings sterling. The original 1690 agreement does not survive as a contemporaneous written lease; a document prepared in 1706 records Carpenter’s earlier agreement with Rittenhouse, printer William Bradford, land investor Robert Turner, ironmonger Thomas Tresse, and their associates to use the land for a paper mill.
At this site, Rittenhouse and his partners established the first paper mill in British North America. The mill used water power from the creek and linen rags to produce handmade paper, helping meet the growing demand of the colonial printing trade. Bradford, Philadelphia’s pioneering printer, had a particularly direct interest in a dependable local paper supply.
Flooding destroyed the original mill around 1700 or 1701, and the operation was rebuilt by 1702. The Rittenhouse enterprise remained highly influential in colonial papermaking, while the original mill was the colonies’ only paper mill for roughly two decades. Its paper supported the early regional printing and publishing economy and made RittenhouseTown a landmark in the history of American manufacturing.
Image credit: “Where American paper was first made,” 1920s sketch, Library of Congress. No known restrictions.
