PLANTING OUR ROOTS: 1899-1969
Paper doesn’t grow on trees. And it isn’t made from trees alone, either. It requires vision, commitment and, in the case of Sonoco’s founder and his son, a good dose of determination.
That founder, of course, was Major James Lide Coker, a man who valued education as much as he did hard work and self-reliance.
When he and his oldest son James Lide Coker Jr. first set out on this journey, the signs didn’t exactly forecast our current success.
In the 1880s, Hartsville, South Carolina, was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it kind of place. A town of no more than 300 people. No railroad. No knowledge of how to use the local pine trees for pulp. And no desire by pulp makers to use it.
James Lide Coker Jr. was intent on finding a way.
Father and son proved to be just as dependable as the trees in Hartsville, and when the railroad finally arrived in 1889, Major Coker funded a trip to New York where James Jr. immersed himself in the art of papermaking.
Under a contract with the American Sulphite Pulp Company, James Jr. gained access to the brand-new sulphite process. He learned how to prepare the wood by “chipping” it into small pieces, make the sulphite (fondly known as “liquor”), use sulphite to “digest” the wood and clear it of lignin and other substances, and “blow” the digesters to drain the resulting pulp.
When he returned, he succeeded in applying that process to Southern short leaf pine trees, making use of the resources in his own backyard—an early glimpse of our lasting commitment to sustainability.
There were hiccups along the way. Shipping to northern manufacturers was not financially possible. The Cokers had to build their own paper machine, which was a huge investment. And when they did, the resin-heavy short leaf pines gummed up the works, producing paper that was more or less unusable.
The Major himself wrote to an associate: “As for our mill, it looks very dark and uncertain.”
Eventually they fixed the resin problem. The older logs left to age didn’t carry nearly as much resin. Even so, by 1897, Major Coker was nearly broke, his investments being largely unprofitable.
It was in this moment, with his back against the wall, that the Major made a decision that truly paved the way for where we are now. He chose to pivot and begin producing paper cones for the textile industry. And the rest is, well, quite a bit of history.
In 1899, he founded the Southern Novelty Company, which became Sonoco a couple of decades later to match the shifting, increasingly globalized world. By then, he and James Jr. had already built a legacy of doing things the right way—efficiently, sustainably and with the drive to get better and better and better. Some years after James Jr.’s death in 1931, the Southern Pulp and Paper Journal published a tribute naming him “the South’s first pioneer in the making of pulp and paper from the woods of that section.”
Imagining a conversation with his great-great-grandfather, current CEO Howard Coker says he’d tell the Major: “Let me show you what your son did and what his son did … what my father did [from] the foundation and that little seed, that little acorn, that you planted.”
People build businesses. It’s how father and son, sleeves rolled up and likely covered in pine resin, set the tone for 125 years of Sonoco. It’s how we’ll build our future.