To the research of papermaking history, the American paper-historian and hand papermaker Dard Hunter (1883-1966) has contributed many important publications. He wrote a voluminous general review of the history of paper, several bibliophile publications on oriental papermaking, and, last but not least, a magnificent history of early American paper mills. His extensive library on paper history and collections of paper samples, documents, and instruments form the nucleus of the Dard Hunter Paper Museum, formerly in Appleton, now waiting to be transferred to Atlanta.  In Europe too, several museums and libraries have large collections of paper-historical material, such as the paper-historical department of the Dutch Royal Library in The Hague, which has a very large book-collection and the largest collection of decorated and Japanese papers in Europe. In western Germany, the "Deutsches Museum" (German Museum) and in eastern Germany the "Deutsches Buch-und Schriftsmuseum der Deutschen Bucherei" (German Museum of Book and Script of the German Library) have large paper-historical collections. There are several other museums, of which I will only mention the recently opened paper museum at Malmedy in Belgium and the Leopold Hoesch Museum in Duren, Germany, internationally known as an important center of paper art.  lWo thousand years of papermaking started in China at the beginning of our era. Only a rather small part of this long trail has been followed by the United States. This year we commemorate that three hundred years ago the first paper mill was built in the United States. Compared to several European countries the American paper industry is relatively young. In Spain the art of making paper started probably in the 11 th century. The Italian paper industry is more than seven hundred years old, the French about six hundred fifty years. In 1986 the Dutch papermakers forgot to celebrate their four hundredth birthday. In 1989 the five hundredth birthday of the English paper industry was commemorated and in the month of May of 1990 the six hundredth birthday  A 1702 map of Holland where William Rittenhouse worked before coming to America.  HAND PAPERMAKING     of the Gennan paper industry was celebrated with an exuberant two-day feast in Nurnberg .  The Water Mill  In this lecture I have to forego a description of the technical process of papennaking by hand, but a few words have to be said about that feature of hand papennaking which immediately catches the eye: the building itself and the methods used for generating the driving power needed for moving the heavy instruments.  Paper was traditionally made in windmills or in water mills. Windmills were common in the flat western part of Holland and in some parts of western Germany. Everywhere else, including the central and southern parts of Holland, water mills were used. The American paper industry started with a water mill and never used windmills.    There are several types of water mills, the most important being the overshot and the undershot types. With outside overshot mills the water wheel is activated by the weight of water passing over and flowing from above, whereas the water wheel of the undershot mills is moved by water passing beneath its blades. Here it is not the weight of the water but the swiftness of the stream which makes the wheel revolve. Overshot mills were used when the stream had insufficient capacity. In Holland, in the province of Gelderland, most mills were situated not on natural streams but on man-made watercourses artificially lead over and above the wheel.  The Mill at Broich  The life story of America's first papermaker, William Rittenhouse, is not unknown thanks to  the studies of both Dard Hunter and the Gennan historian Alfred Schulte. There are, however,  some gaps and some errors in this story, chiefly due to the fact that both historians failed to consult Dutch archives. I have been able to fill some gaps and to correct some errors. These modest improvements will be the chief topic of my lecture.  Rittenhouse was born about 1644 in Broich, near the city of Mi.ilheim, seven miles west of Essen, in present-day North Rhine-Westphalia. Mi.ilheim was then a very small place, situated in the lordship of Broich, which was part of the duchy of Berg, Dusseldorf being the capital of this duchy. Rittenhouse is, of course, the anglicization of a German name: Rittinghausen, or, in the local dialect, Rudinghausen. His mother's name was Maria Hagerhoff, but his father's name was unknown, although some authors have incorrectly called him George. William's aunt Ermgard Rittinghausen married Mathias Vorster, brother of Adolf Vorster, member of a large and important family of papennakers and leaseholder and papermaker of a mill on the river Ruhr at Broich.  Here William learned the art of papermaking in the traditional German way of a four-year course of study, starting as an apprentice, working his way up to mate, with the right of becoming  Summer 1991  Old engraving illustrating an undershot mill.  master. The Broich mill was an undershot water mill, which later became a combined paper-, oil-, and cornmill, equipped with three wheels. Paper was made in this mill until 1901, but during the last years only wrapping paper for the tobacco industry was made, on a simple fourdrinier machine using home-made woodpulp. In 1906 the mill was pulled down and on the site the head office of the Ruhr Water Works was built.  Emigration to the Netherlands  In or even before 1665, William and his uncle, Mathias Vorster, emigrated to Holland. German papermakers often came to Holland, chiefly to the adjacent province of Gelderland. Here there were many paper mills and for a young man there were better chances to become a master than in Germany, where the white art was the prisoner of all kinds of superfluous and often absurd restrictions. The German papermakers generally stayed permanently in Gelderland and married Dutch women.  William was only :41 years old  emigrated, and perhapS, even yoUnger; the a,rchives give no information,jr the exact date. He and his uncle found  a papermill in the village of Coldenhove in the province of Gelcl~rland. Here youngWilUa,m met his fut4're wife,. w.,bom he marriet:Un June 1665. A chure,n record of that year mentions ' that WilIe;rn, son Q[Claas, a young $a,n ft'om Mi.ilheim liVIng atColdenhove, maIl'4.eSl G'eertruid Pieters from f�ttl'heek and that a certifi~l.ite of church-membership had been sent to Loenen where the marriage took place and where, presumably, the bride was living at that time. Loenen is a village, an important center of papermaking, not far from Eerbeek. Hall is a parish, comprising the villages of Eerbeek and Coldenhove.  The discovery of the registration of this marriage fills two large gaps in the life story of William Rittenhouse. We now know at last that his father  Four watermarks used at Rittenhouse Mill.  9 was Claas (or, in German, Claus) Rittinghausen  and that his wife, whose name was also unknown  until now, was a Dutch girl from Eerbeek named  Geertruid Pietersdaughter. In those times  surnames were not unknown but they were used  only occasionally. There is rather convincing  evidence that Geertruid (Gertrude) was a daughter  of Peter Kersten Lubberhuysen who owned a  fulling mill at Eerbeek. His son, Jan Peters, built  a papermill at ij!'rb'eek in 1668, called the  Cloister paper 'inill (pe Kloostermolen). William  and his  came to work in this new  mill il)to have had a small  JeMalhias' wife Ermgard  Riitteuha'uffien died in 1612 alld lie too remarried a   In 1678, si~ years after the death of his first wife, \tot$ter moved to Rozendaal where he found anolher joB'in (l)ne of the five mills operating there .. His nephew Willem joined him there.   . Adriaan de Ridder's brother, Lourens, took care of the sale of the paper produced in these three mills from his office in Delft. In one of these mills -probably the Copper Mill -uncle and nephew came to work, soon joined by William's younger brother, Heinrich Nicolaus, who never used his first name and was generally known as Claas or Claus, like his father. Claus Rittinghausen knew the way to proceed in life; in 1675 he married the daughter of his boss, Claasje de Ridder.  William's three children, Claus (Nicolaas, Claas), Gerrit (Gerhard), and Elisabeth, were born in Rozendaal; exact dates cannot be given because of a considerable gap in the local archives. Claus married in 1689 in America Wilhelmina de Wees from Leeuwarden, whose brother William de Wees built the second paper mill in America in 1710 at Wissahickon in Crefeld township . The name of Gerhard's wife is unknown but it may have been Maria Schoenmaker. Elisabeth married in 1691 a German immigrant, Heivert Papen, who came from Mtilheim.  On the 23rd of June, 1678, Willem Rittinkhuysen took the citizen's oath at Amsterdam. (Hunter misread the date as 1679 and the name of the secretary as "Geelrinck" instead of "Geelvinck".) There had been a few small and primitive paper mills in Amsterdam in earlier times but when William came to Amsterdam there was not a single paper mill there. As Adriaan de Ridder had died in the same year, it seems probable that Rittenhouse came to Amsterdam to sell the paper made at Rozendaal in this important center of the paper trade. Not in Germany, as has been suggested, but here in Amsterdam he may have met William Penn. And here in Amsterdam, too, he may have become acquainted with the followers of Menno Simonsz, which led eventually to his nomination as the first Mennonite preacher in Germantown, Pennsylvania, about 1698.  Mathias Vorster stayed at Rozendaal and, after tlie death of Adriaan de Ridder in 1678, he leased  ;. tlie 'Cosens Mill. He died in 1692. In the same year William's brother, Claas Rittinghuizen, moved to Bordrecht, an important trade center, presumably to establish a new selling agency for the Rozendaal paper.  Emigration to America  Wilhelm Rittinghausen emigrated to America before April 1689; the exact date is unknown. Here he anglicized his name as William Rittenhouse so that there are three official spellings of his name: a German, a Dutch, and an English spelling, apart from the local German dialect forms. William chose Germantown in Pennsylvania, now part of Philadelphia, as his  This partial family tree ofWilliam Rittenhouse shows the connections between 5 papermaking families; Rittenhouse, Vorster, de Ridder, Lubberhuysen, and de Wees,  Maria _~ Claus Maria Mathias Adolf Hagerhoff Rittinghausen Rittinghausen Vorster Vorster  Peter Kersten Lubberhuysen Adriaan Lourens   home, The fervent propaganda of William Penn for his colony will have convinced William of the advantages of this colony over other parts of America, and Germantown may have been chosen for being a settlement of Germans. Also, economical considerations will have induced  William to en:tigrate to America: he will have realized he one and only papemiaker r~!~erida., Iihas been alleged that Rittenhouse tPet;William Penn in Germany but as he was then,'�tl11>a 90y i~lseems more logical that duringnIs,, Awsterdam,~illiam was  informed aboll,t Penn's  Rittenhouse built his paper mill in I690 in the  part of Germantown that later became part of  Roxborough Township, To finance the enterprise  a company was formed in which the only printer  in the Middle Colonies, William Bradford, had a  part. He was given the exclusive right to buy the  paper to be produced. In May 1691 both William  and his son, Claus, were naturalized.  Contact with Holland was not completely lost. In the family archives of the Rittenhouse family there is a receipt dated 7th May 1698 for 22 guilders paid for a pair of moulds for "our uncle William Rittenhouse", which is signed by Johannes and AdolfVorster. Papermaking then still being in its infant years, we may assume that there were no mould makers in America and this receipt suggests that the first moulds used by Rittenhouse were of Dutch origin. Another example of Dutch-American contact is a letter written in a Dutch-Gelderlandish dialect, insufficiently dated with only three figures: 179. The letter, now also in the Rittenhouse family archive, is directed to her brother in law William Rittenhouse by Claertgen (Claartje) Duetmaen, undoubtedly a sister of William's Dutch wife using, as normally done in Holland, the surname of her late husband. The letter contains some details of the doings of her family and ends, in translation, as follows:  Dear brother in law, I do not know more to  write but a heartfelt greeting to you and all  the other friends and wish that God may  keep us and that we may meet in the  hereafter as it is not thinkable that we will  see each other here because we are far from  each other -once more greetings also from  our Aenten and her husband and also  greetings to all the friends, your affectionate  sister Claertgen Duetmaen.  William's son Claus (Nicolaas), then an adult young man, worked together with his father and, as William grew older and spent more and more time on religious affairs, Claus became the factual manager of the mill. In 170011701 a flood swept this mill away but it was rebuilt immediately. As Bradford had not contributed to the financing of the reconstruction of the mill, father and son Rittenhouse decided to terminate the monopoly of Bradford and to buyout all partners. They became sole proprietors of the  Summer 1991  mill and soon after they acquired the site of the  mill on a lease of 975 years.  William Rittenhouse is not only important for  being the first American papermaker; he also  played an important role in American church  history. In the same year that his mill was built,  1690, William was ordained preacher of the  Mennonites and exercised his religious duties  until his death in 1708. Shortly before his death,  on the 18th of February 1708, William accepted,  after long hesitation, a de facto nomination as  bishop of the Mennonite community but he died  before he could fulfill his new duties and his wife  died at about the same time. Whether his unfore seen death means that he cannot be considered to  have been the first Mennonite bishop ("elder") in America is a question about which far more  learned people than I still disagree.  William's son Claus had already taken over the  management of the mill. He also followed the  example of his father in church matters and became, sometime after 1712, a ministe)i ,of the  Mennonite church. He died in 1734. "  Initials carved in stone over one of the windows of the Rittenhouse homestead, indicating its existence in 1707. The initials refer to William Rittenhouse and his son Claus.  II

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