The glory days of Sandusky’s Paper District are mostly gone.
In its heyday, though, the paper district didn’t just employ many Sandusky residents. It could even produce poetry.
Pierre Drewsen, a chemical engineer with the old Hinde and Dauch Paper Company, wrote a sonnet praising the machines that make big rolls of paper, such as the ones the Sandusky Register is printed on. According to a handwritten note Drewsen sent in February 1939 to Sandusky Library librarian Dorothy Keefe, the poem was printed in the June 1935 issue of “The Paper Industry.”
To the Paper Machine
A monument to human thought you stand
Niagara like. Unceasingly you roll
Over your frames a clean, unwritten scroll
On which the future’s deeds will leave their brand.
What messages will glide throughout the land
Inscribed upon your white! From pole to pole,
What goods wrapped in your film will seek their goal
Within our shores, or on a foreign strand!
The sturdy lads who feed your tanks and turn
Your wheels; who guide your wires and blankets straight,
Show in their well drilled movements small concern
For those forgotten men, who, long and late
Toiled through the night o’er bench and board to earn
Oblivion — that your product might be great!
— Pierre Drewsen
No doubt the English majors among you recognize that Mr. Drewsen penned a Petrarchan sonnet.
Will future English majors have to be told what “paper” is?
