Visitors to my neck of the woods will soon have even more to keep them occupied than horse racing, hiking and other Adirondack activities, and the excellent Wild Center natural history museum. Via The Saratogian, International Paper’s old Hudson River Mill administration building in Corinth is being converted into a papermaking museum.

The historic 1905 structure is on the Pine Street site, where 17 mills merged on Jan. 28, 1898 to form IP, the world’s largest papermaker. ... Demolition of the old mill, which closed permanently nine years ago, began in June and will take roughly a year to complete. ... Corinth native and Daniel Webster College history professor Steve Cernek has been charged with developing the museum, which could take several years. Many artifacts have been held in storage since the mill’s closure.

One of the historic aspects of the mill was that the original 1870 Hudson River Pulp & Paper Mill was the first time that pulping and papermaking were colocated in the same facility. In fact, the use of wood rather than cotton or linen rags for papermaking was still a fairly new process at that time. If it weren’t for a shortage of cotton and linen, the original materials for making paper, we may never have even had wood-based papermaking. (If things had developed differently, it would be interesting to see those signature lines in e-mail messages, “Think about your discarded underwear before printing this message.”) And, actually, wood-based papermaking was inspired by nature itself: the idea came in the 18th century when physicist and naturalist René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumer observed wasps chewing on wood, “pulping it,” and turning it into paper-based nests. (There is no word on whether Réaumer was also the inventor of Raid.) The rest is history. For more information on the museum project, visit www.hudsonrivermillproject.org.