HOLYOKE -- A manufacturer in Connecticut recently called James Sagalyn, owner of Holyoke Machine, looking for repairs on a giant drive shaft for one of the production machines in his shop.

For the first time since Abraham Lincoln was in the White House, Holyoke Machine can't help.

In February, Sagalyn closed Holyoke Machine, a machine shop founded in 1863 that built the "Hercules" water turbines that helped make Holyoke famous and whose foundry cast doors for the U.S. Capitol building.

The end of Holyoke Machine leaves just one company, Badger Roll and Machine in Green Bay, Wisconsin, working on the same large industrial rollers that Holyoke Machine worked on.

A day-long auction set for Aug. 3 will sell all the shop's tools and equipment. The building at 514 Main St. is for sale but won't be part of the auction.

At the end, Holyoke Machine had about 25 employees, down from twice that in the 1990s. The company had support staff like customer service people and engineers as well as machinists.

"We had a good crew," Sagalyn said. "We felt a responsibility to bring in more work for them and keep them busy. It got harder and harder."

Sagalyn said he laid them off. Some retired like he plans to do.

Machine shops up and down the Pioneer Valley call continually for more skilled machinists, saying they can't grow to keep up with orders. But  those growing shops are in aerospace or medical devices, Sagalyn said. They aren't serving paper and textile businesses.

And his equipment is too big to work on anything that could go on an airplane. That equipment includes now-idle lathes capable of turning paper machine rolls that are up to 70 inches in diameter, 40 feet long and weighing as much as 30 tons. That also includes hydraulic presses 40 feet tall and capable of exerting 3 million pounds of pressure.

Sagalyn said some of the buyers for that equipment may be overseas. But the presses, which extend 20 feet underground, may be tough to sell.

"I might have to cut them off at ground level and sell everything for scrap," he said, ruing the prospect of getting pennies a pound for the presses.

Domestic textile and paper manufacturers, Holyoke Machine's bread-and-butter customers, are largely gone now.

"There wasn't enough volume to sustain the business," Sagalyn said while strolling through the shop floor, where every tool, press and lathe already has an auction tag. "The market has changed. I tried to sell the business and just couldn't do it."

Founded in 1863, Holyoke Machine had been the oldest manufacturer -- if not the oldest business, period -- in Holyoke. Hampden Papers, 100 Water Street, is now probably the oldest manufacturer in Holyoke. It was founded in 1880.

Holyoke's Meridian Industrial Group was founded in Holyoke as J&W Jolly Inc. in 1881. PeoplesBank was founded in 1885.

"The technology we are working with is all from the early part of the last century," Sagalyn said. "The paper makers we work with all have machines from the 1920s, '30s and '40s."

Holyoke Machine was born when the city was greatly expanding its manufacturing base and manufacturers needed heavy equipment. Sagalyn's father, Irwin Sagalyn, closed the foundry and switched focus to paper-related equipment soon after the Sagalyn family bought Holyoke Machine out of bankruptcy in 1948.

Holyoke Machine's specialty was manufacturing and repairing, grinding and balancing all types of rolls used to make, emboss or polish such items as coated paper, paper napkins, wallpaper, decorative and gift wrap paper, textiles, and magnetic tape.

Think of the design imprinted in a paper napkin or the texture pressed into wallpaper. Holyoke Machine made the machines that embossed those designs.

They also did machine work on other long and complicated pieces of industrial equipment like drive shafts for power generation plants.

But the need for large paper-making equipment is not as great as it once was. In the last year, Sagalyn said, he lost two big customers in Maine, including a mill created to make glossy magazine paper for The New York Times Sunday Magazine.

Declining advertising and the rise of the internet means publishers use less of that paper, there are fewer manufacturers and they use their equipment less, Sagalyn said.

Local customers at the end included Hazen Paper in Holyoke and Sullivan Paper in West Springfield and East Longmeadow.

"It is a sad story," said former West Springfield Mayor Ed Sullivan, an executive in his family business, Sullivan Paper. "In our business the pie is only so big. And it doesn't get any bigger."

Foreign competition means profit margins are thinner. So customers for paper are less likely to order fancy embossed foils for their packaging, for one example, Sullivan said.

"Back when paper was king in Holyoke, people located close by, whether it was machine shops or support services," Sullivan said. "Working on this stuff is a lost art."

A lost art he still needs.

"We now look through the whole country to do things that Holyoke Machine used to do for us," Sullivan said. "It was one part of the business you didn't have to worry about because when you were dealing with them, they would do it right."

If there was a problem, the Sullivans could call Holyoke Machine and a crew would come to the factory in an hour or two. Now Sullivan will rely on Badger Roll for the big rolls or companies in New Jersey or elsewhere who can do some of what Holyoke Machine used to do.

"Its a tremendous loss to our industry and to our area, quite frankly," Sullivan said.

Holyoke Machine Auction by Jim Kinney on Scribd

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