Paper Mill

address: Ružić Street
Period: Historicism
Kind: Immovable material heritage
Century: 19
Year: 1827
Purpose: industrial

The administration building was erected in 1827. It has been preserved until today, but in modified form.  It is a two-storey building, built to the greatest extent with reinforced concrete, with wall additions made of brick.  The stone decorations on the door and window lintels have been preserved. A very specific detail is the roof lantern, placed above the triangular pediment. The lantern ends with a roof turret that has an iron pointer with the four cardinal directions.The story of the Paper Mill is the story of the first major industrial enterprise in Rijeka. It all started with the 1st of September 1821, when Andrija Ljudevit Adamić bought the Lučica Mill, located opposite of Zvir. Adamić bought the mill in order to use it for starting the planned paper manufacturing plant. Besides Adamić, the co-founder of the Paper Mill was the Briton William Moline. In 1824, Moline bought off the mill and the paper manufacturing plant from Adamić. He paid 19,000 forints for them. This manufacturing plant employed eight workers. By using hydropower, paper was produced exclusively from cloth rags. After three years, Moline sold the factory for a price of 20,000 forints to the English entrepreneur Walter Crafton Smith, who subsequently, together with his partner Charles Meynier, started the industrial production of paper in Rijeka. In October 1828, the factory changed its name to Smith & Meynier. Although raw material for paper processing remained the same, the new owners modernized the factory. In 1827, they acquired a Fourdrinier papermaking machine, which was known as an exceptional machine and, already in 1833, they purchased a steam engine and thus increased production. Due to the innovations in the production process and the quality of the paper, the Paper Mill received numerous awards on national and international trade fairs: in Vienna 1835, Pest 1842, London 1851, Munich 1854, Paris 1878, Barcelona 1888 and so on. In accordance with its progress, the factory expanded and the number of workers increased. In the 1870s, the factory employed approximately a thousand workers.

The Paper Mill complex was built largely in the 1820s, but major architectural changes were made in the 20th century. At the time of its construction, the factory was state-of-the-art and it operated very well. The complex also owned the first steam engine in the Balkans, another proof thatit was keeping up with the times. Apart from technology, the factory also had an advanced social policy: as early as in 1877, it established the first pension fund for workers. After the Croatian-Hungarian Settlement, the factory supported Hungarian interests and continued its good collaboration with that country. At the turn of the century, the factory was strongly hit by economic crisis. At that time, a new entity entered the ownership structure of the Paper Factory – the Ungarische Papier A.G. With the arrival of this joint-stock company, the plant’s steam and hydropower drives were modernized and, by World War I, the number of employees doubled. After World War I, the owners of the factory changed, the factory was incorporated into the paper company Jela, industrija papira, and after that it became property of the First Croatian Savings Bank (Prva hrvatska štedionica) and the local council committee of the directors’ council of Smith and Meynier on Sušak.The period after the war brought a new revival of the factory; it produced cigarette paper along with silk and Bible paper, copy paper etc. Sales of the manufactured products once again spread all over the world: United States, Argentina, Romania, Egypt, the Middle and the Far East. After World War II, the factory was taken over by the national government. Today, the complex is abandoned.

Valorization:

Today there is a dental laboratory in the Paper Mill administrative building. The building was partially devastated during the construction of the Power Plant in the 1930s, however, it has been kept to this day in a quite good condition.