WIPING YOUR butt, in ancient Rome they used a wet sponge on a stick. Unless you were wealthy, then you’d use a handful of wool with drops of rose water. In Alaska they used snow and moss, in Hawaii coconut husks, and in Iowa they ran a corncob between their butt cheeks. We all grew up with toilet paper, but for millennia mankind has been hopelessly inadequate when it came to dealing with the final phase of processing their food. No wonder Parisians invented perfume. People smelled. Grass, gravel, sawdust, shells, or just their fingers – staggeringly uncomfortable and shockingly unsanitary.
Until, in 1857, Margreet Bogart of New York urged her husband to finally get his therapeutic paper off the press. Each sheet bore his name, Gayetty, and he sold them in units of five hundred sheets. Toilet paper was born, at last. We don’t know much about Gayetty himself, but he did marry a descendant of Teun Bogaert of Leerdam, and the Bogarts were New York royalty. Teun himself was married to Sarah Rapalje, eldest child of Jan Joris and Kaatje Rapalje. Those two were on the very first ship with immigrants from Amsterdam, and Saartje was born the very first immigrant baby on American soil. The Rapaljes and the Bogarts were America’s first celebrities.
BUT THE Dutch toilet paper touches didn’t stop there. Printer BT Hoogland & Sons, of the Hooglands from Maarsseveen, sued Margreet’s husband. The Hooglands were the real owners of the American patent on toilet paper, they claimed, and they won in court. That was a mixed blessing, though, because the first toilet paper was not that successful. It was made of hemp, and hemp came with tiny splinters. Many a bum wiper discovered they had cause to find this unpleasant.
Therefore many wealthier Americans did what English lords had been doing for a long time. They reached for their bookshelves. They tore pages out of their books and relegated them to toilet paper. The larger majority of not-so-rich citizens did something similar, using newspapers. For years, this was a reporter’s fate: his news story ended up in the sewer by way of the reader’s ass. Sewer journalism was originally a literal phenomenon.
THE WITH head and shoulders biggest producer of book and newsprint in those days was Gerrit Schenck in Maine, descendant of Roel Schenck of Amersfoort. One in six American butt wipers by the end of the nineteenth century used a newspaper printed on Gerrit’s paper. His Great Northern Paper Company in Millinocket, Maine was the largest in the entire world. Still two schools in the two towns Schenck built around his factory bear his name today, but paper is no longer made there. Now it is wooden toothpicks. These also have a function in the digestive process, but at the front end.
Eventually, the demand for newspapers and books in the smallest room ended a century ago when the Northern Tissue Company in Wisconsin began producing the toilet paper we know and use today. The modern rolls of soft, splinter-free paper now carry names like Quilted Northern. Along with Angel Soft, they reach by far the most American derrieres, and for those with firsthand experience: that soft touch, that really is a Dutch touch. The country’s largest paper manufacturer, toilet paper included, is Charles Koch. He is the grandson of grandpa Hotze Koch of Workum, Friesland.
