Georgia-Pacific

• 1. Introduction

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  Georgia-Pacific began not with paper mills or tissue factories, but with a single wholesale hardwood lumber yard in Augusta, Georgia, on the 22nd of September 1927. Owen Robertson Cheatham founded the company that day, naming it the Georgia Hardwood Lumber Co. Two years later, the United States fell into the Great Depression, and the fledgling business nearly collapsed under the weight of vanishing demand. By 1934, the company had just five employees. From that skeleton crew in the depths of an economic catastrophe, Georgia-Pacific would eventually grow into one of the world's largest manufacturers of pulp, paper, tissue, packaging, and building products. How a near-failed lumber yard became a $21 billion prize for one of America's most powerful private companies is a story of relentless acquisition, sharp legal maneuvering, environmental controversy, and a portfolio of household brand names that most Americans use without ever knowing who makes them.

• 2. From Lumber to Pulp

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  Sawmills and plywood plants came first, added piece by piece across the years following the Depression. Georgia-Pacific claimed its first foothold on the West Coast in 1947, and the following year rechristened itself Georgia-Pacific Plywood and Lumber Company to signal a broadened ambition. The name changed again in 1956, to Georgia-Pacific Corporation, a cleaner banner for what had become a genuinely national enterprise. The pivot into pulp and paper came in 1957, driven by Robert B. Pamplin, a new president who would steer the company for two decades. Under Pamplin, Georgia-Pacific built a kraft pulp and linerboard mill in Toledo, Oregon. That Toledo mill holds a singular distinction: it is the only pulp and paper mill the company ever built from the ground up. Every other mill in the portfolio arrived through acquisition, a pattern that would define Georgia-Pacific's growth for the next half century.

• 3. The Acquisition Machine

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  Union Lumber, then owned by Boise Cascade, fell into Georgia-Pacific's hands in 1973. US Plywood followed in 1987, then American Forest Products Corporation in 1988. The pace accelerated in 1990 when the company absorbed Great Northern Nekoosa, and then in 2000 came the largest deal yet: the Fort James Corporation, itself a product of earlier mergers involving Fort Howard Corporation, James River Corporation, and Crown-Zellerbach. Alongside these expansions, Georgia-Pacific also shed assets when it suited the strategy. California operations and surrounding timberlands in Martell were sold to Sierra Pacific Industries in 1996. California timber lands went to Hawthorne Timber in 1999, and remaining timber lands passed to Plum Creek Timber in 2000. In August 2001, four uncoated paper mills and their associated businesses were sold to Canadian papermaker Domtar. The company that had once employed five people was now large enough to sell off entire business units while still remaining a manufacturing giant.

• 4. The Koch Industries Deal

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  On the 13th of November 2005, it was announced that Koch Industries would acquire Georgia-Pacific. The deal closed on the 23rd of December 2005, with Koch paying $21 billion in total. Shareholders received approximately $48 per share, and Georgia-Pacific was removed from the New York Stock Exchange, where it had traded under the symbol GP. The acquisition transformed Georgia-Pacific from a publicly traded corporation into a privately held, independently operated subsidiary. Koch Industries is one of the largest private companies in the United States, and folding Georgia-Pacific into its portfolio gave it a major presence in consumer tissue products, packaging, and building materials. The Georgia-Pacific Tower in Atlanta, where the company's headquarters have long been housed, remained the nerve center of the operation after the transition.

• 5. The Texas Two-Step

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  In November 2017, Georgia-Pacific turned to a legal maneuver called the Texas Two-Step to manage a serious liability problem. The company divided itself into two separate entities, then transferred all of its asbestos liabilities into a newly created subsidiary named Bestwall. Bestwall then relocated to North Carolina and filed for bankruptcy. The bankruptcy filing froze more than 64,000 personal injury claims against the company. The tactic is controversial because it uses corporate restructuring to shield the profitable main business from litigation while placing victims' claims into a separate, cash-limited entity. Georgia-Pacific's use of the Texas Two-Step drew significant attention to the maneuver and the legal debates surrounding it. Two years after the restructuring, as of fall 2019, the company as a whole still employed more than 35,000 people across more than 180 locations in North America, South America, and Europe.

• 6. Brands at Every Price Point

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  Quilted Northern and Angel Soft are both Georgia-Pacific toilet paper brands, but they compete in different price segments. Quilted Northern sits at the premium end; Angel Soft is positioned as a value offering. The same tiered approach applies to paper towels, where Brawny is the premium brand and Sparkle serves budget-conscious shoppers. Vanity Fair covers premium napkins, while Dixie Insulair, PerfecTouch, and Ultra handle tableware. On the office side, Advantage, Image Plus, and Spectrum are all Georgia-Pacific office paper names. Building and remodeling products carry a different set of names: ToughRock, DensGlass, DensShield, Wood I Beam, and Plytanium, among roughly a dozen others. Discontinued brands include Soft n' Gentle, Zee, and Mardi Gras, the last two covering napkins and paper towels. The breadth of the portfolio means Georgia-Pacific products appear in bathrooms, kitchens, job sites, and office supply closets, often without any visible connection back to the parent company.

• 7. Environmental Record

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  The Fox River in Wisconsin and the Kalamazoo River in Michigan are two of the most significant environmental remediation sites linked to Georgia-Pacific, both involving the cleanup of PCBs. In 2007, the EPA announced legal agreements requiring Georgia-Pacific and Millennium Holdings to address an estimated $21 million in environmental damage to the Plainwell Impoundment Area. A separate settlement required an additional $15 million of work on the Kalamazoo River Superfund Site. Georgia-Pacific is also contributing to dam removal as part of the PCB cleanup effort on the Kalamazoo. In 1995, according to reporting by Stephen Engelberg in The New York Times, Georgia-Pacific lobbied successfully for a Senate Judiciary Committee amendment that halted a pending EPA investigation involving the company, arguing that the EPA was applying present-day standards to decisions made years earlier. Critics believed the move could allow Georgia-Pacific to avoid installing pollution controls at many of its plants. The company's paper mill in Crossett, Arkansas became the subject of the 2016 environmental documentary film Company Town, which alleged that improper waste disposal had caused a cluster of cancer cases in the surrounding community. Set against this record is a separate distinction: Georgia-Pacific is the largest user of de-ink fiber in the world, and its subsidiary GP Harmon trades in recycled material.

• 8. Modern Investments

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  On the 10th of January 2010, Georgia-Pacific signed an agreement to acquire Grant Forest Products' oriented strand board facilities in Englehart and Earlton, Ontario, along with OSB plants in Clarendon and Allendale, South Carolina, for approximately $400 million. The transaction did not close until July 2013, after clearing Canadian regulatory review and a US court process under the Hart-Scott-Rodino merger review framework. In 2025, the company added Anchor Packaging, a prominent manufacturer based in Northeast Arkansas. In May 2026, Georgia-Pacific announced a $191 million modernization of the Englehart, Ontario OSB mill, backed by a $10 million investment from the Ontario government. The project is expected to preserve more than 220 jobs at that facility. The Georgia-Pacific Foundation Scholarship Program for Employees' Children had, by 2013, awarded nearly $10.5 million in college scholarships to children of company employees since the program began in 1988, a benefit that has run quietly alongside decades of corporate growth and controversy.