The Watervliet mill that made the cards in your deck

There’s a decent chance your grandparents shuffled a deck of cards that was made in Watervliet. The town sits where the Paw Paw River drops enough to turn a mill wheel, and people had been harnessing that current since the 1830s — first for sawing the local timber, and after the timber ran out, for making paper.

The Watervliet Paper Company took shape in 1910, put together mostly by Kalamazoo investors who reopened an idle brick mill that engineers called one of the best-built plants in Michigan. By 1912 it was turning out fine coated paper — the smooth, glossy stock with a slick surface that takes ink and color cleanly. That specialty made the place. Watervliet paper went out across the country as the covers of the Sears, Roebuck catalog, as labels and wrappers for names like Wrigley’s gum and Campbell’s soup, as sheets that became U.S. postage stamps, and as a staggering number of playing cards.

For a town this size, the mill was the whole economy. By 1960 it employed around 470 people, and its tax bill quietly paid for a big share of the schools, the fire and police, and the local hospital. When the mill did well, Watervliet did well — and everyone knew it.

It made its last paper in 1994, and the silence that followed was the kind small mill towns dread: the largest employer gone, the riverfront an industrial husk. The buildings came down in 2002, and in 2011 the old dams were pulled so the Paw Paw could run free again. Stand on the riverbank now and it’s just water and trees. But for most of a century, the smooth feel of a fresh catalog cover or a brand-new deck of cards started right here, on the banks of this quiet little river.