by Dennis Dalman
editor@thenewsleaders.com
Dennis Molitor is determined to keep the memory of the Sartell paper mill alive and well.
He is working on a project to put informational plaques on the wrought-iron fence at Veterans Park to inform people who visit there about the historic paper mill that functioned across the river for more than 100 years.
Molitor worked at that mill for 38 years until May 2013. On Memorial Day that month, an explosion and fire at the mill killed one employee and shut down the plant. Later, Verso Paper, the corporate owner of the mill, announced it would shut down permanently. The news rocked Sartell and surrounding cities because generations of people made a good living by working at the mill. Through the years it went through many ownerships and various names, including Watab Paper Co, St. Regis Paper Mill, Champion Paper, International Paper and its last incarnation as Verso Paper Mill.
To commemorate the mill, several years ago an ambitious art project began. Various local artists, with the help of grants and contributions, used metal parts of the mill discarded during its demolition and recycling to re-fashion into art works for Sartell, such as benches, bike racks and free-standing monumental sculptures.
One of the art works was created by Joe Schulte, the industrial arts teacher at Sartell High School whose father worked at the mill, as did his grandfather. Schulte’s art work is now affixed to the top of the wrought-iron fence in Veterans Park, just across the river where the imposing paper plant stood for so many decades.
Schulte’s flat sculpture, created from a flat piece of heavy-duty steel from the mill, is about six feet wide. It’s a powder-blue color, the same color as the later additions to the mill, such as its tall condensation tower that could be seen for miles. The sculpture is a “profile” of the entire paper mill, designed “to scale,” the way it looked to viewers standing in Veterans Park. In fact, if visitors stand on a designated piece of steel in front of the sculpture (a standing place that is also a cast-off piece from the mill), they will see the almost exact outline of what used to be there across the river – the historic mill that brought so many jobs, taxes and economic success to the City of Sartell for so long.
Schulte, with a series of ingenious stencils in the steel sculpture, presents the viewer with the stenciled names of the years and names of the ownership changes of the mill, from 1906 to 2014, the year of its demolition.
Schulte based his paper-mill steel silhouette sculpture on a photo taken in 2013 by his wife, Tracy.
Dennis Molitor thinks Schulte’s sculpture is a fitting tribute to the now vanished paper mill. But at an April city-council meeting, he told the council it would be good to add six to eight information placards along the fence so that, together with Schulte’s profile art work, visitors could learn a bit more about the mill and its importance to the city, the area and the entire world with the quality paper products that were made there.
The informational placards, made of sun-proof, vandal-proof and nearly indestructible metal, would give facts about some of the plant’s operations, such as the wood yard, the hydroelectric plant, the paper machines, the power plant and so forth. The placards would be affixed to the wrought-iron fence, probably by the parking lot area on the south end of Veterans Park. Each plaque would be about 12 inches by 18 inches.
Molitor said Bill Morgan, a Sartell resident and eminent local historian, would help write the information for the placards, and artist Schulte will also have input.
The cost of doing the placard project would be anywhere between $3,000 and $4,000, adding there is no request for funding from the city. Molitor said he would have no trouble raising those funds.
This stylized steel art work by Sartell resident and teacher Joe Schulte gives visitors to Sartell’s Veterans Park an eerie glance backward in memory to the historic paper mill that used to stand across the Mississippi River. Schulte used a piece of steel from the dismantled mill to create this “sculpture” in honor of the plant’s historical and social significance.
This is another close-up view of Joe Schulte’s sculpture showing an approximation of how the paper mill and its tall condensation tower stood on the east side of the Mississippi River.
A close up of Joe Schulte’s art work shows the cut-outs that give viewers the names and dates of how the Sartell paper mill changed ownership and names through its hundred-year-plus history. This cut-out shows part of the word “International” for “International Paper,” which owned the plant from 2000 to 2006.
