Floriston, California: The Paper Mill at the Edge of the Sierra
Near Incline Village, California
Floriston sits just inside California along the Truckee River, a tiny community that briefly held one of the largest paper mills in the world. A railroad construction camp called Bronco occupied the site as early as eighteen sixty-seven. The Floriston Pulp and Paper Company arrived in eighteen ninety-nine, drawn by timber in the Sierra Nevada forests and hydropower from the Truckee River.
Seven main buildings went up, along with worker housing, a hotel, a store, a hospital, and a schoolhouse. The first pulp rolled out on May twenty-second, nineteen hundred, with one hundred fifty workers on the floor. At its peak five hundred people worked the mill, making it one of the most significant industrial installations in the high Sierra.
The mill switched to electric power in nineteen twenty-two when river flow fell too low for waterpower. On Christmas Eve of nineteen thirty, under the ownership of Crown Zellerbach Corporation, it shut down for good.
