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"B" is for Bowater

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"B" is for Bowater. Headquartered in Greenville, Bowater Incorporated is a world leader in the manufacture of newsprint and coated ground-wood papers. The company began in England in 1889 as a family-run paper supply business. In 1924 it commenced manufacturing paper and over the next decades went international by establishing plants in Scandinavia, Canada, and the United States. In order to bring Bowater to South Carolina in 1956, a special session of the General Assembly rewrote the state’s foreign ownership laws that had limited foreigners to holding no more than 500 acres of land. The revised law allowed Bowater or any foreign corporation to acquire up to 500,000 acres. Construction on the Catawba plant began soon. The company’s Pulp Mill No. 3 is the largest coated ground-wood machine in North America. In 1993 Bowater moved its North American headquarters to Greenville.

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Dr. Walter Edgar has two programs on South Carolina Public Radio: Walter Edgar's Journal, and South Carolina from A to Z. Dr. Edgar received his B.A. degree from Davidson College in 1965 and his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina in 1969. After two years in the army (including a tour of duty in Vietnam), he returned to USC as a post-doctoral fellow of the National Archives, assigned to the Papers of Henry Laurens.