When The Mobile Register printed on paper made from okra

Ruins of the paper mill that made paper from okra plants.
The Mobile Register printed at least one edition on this paper.

Around 1868, Willis Gaylord Clark retired as an owner of The Mobile Register.

In 1852, Clark, a native of New York, had been a 24-year-old lawyer in the office of Campbell & Chandler and editor of The Southern Magazine. He served as a leader in Mobile’s Whig Party and for a time edited The Mobile Advertiser.

During the Civil War, the Advertiser and the Register merged under the ownership of Clark and John Forsyth.

A successful Mobile politician, businessman, author and newspaperman, Clark also served as a trustee of the University of Alabama. The university’s Clark Hall is named in his honor.

After leaving the Register, Clark turned to making paper at his mill in Beaver Meadows in northern Mobile County. For a time, the mill experimented with making newsprint from the fiber of the okra plant. The Register satisfactorily printed at least one edition of the newspaper on paper made from okra plants in Clark's mill.

Paper can be made from almost any plant fiber. Using agricultural plants such as okra, however, creates tremendous problems of supply, transportation and storage of the plants for processing. Large amounts of land also are needed to grow the okra. Eventually, tree fiber proved much more practical and economical.

The photos in this post show all that was left of Clark’s paper mill in the late 1980s.