Monsey Memories: The Dexter Folder Company of Pearl River

Yitzy Fried 

Book folding is the stage of the book production process in which the pages of the book are folded after printing and before binding. Until the middle of the 19th century, book folding was done by hand and was a trade. In the 1880s and 1890s, book folding machines by Brown and Dexter came onto the market, and by the 1910s, hand-folding was rare, with one publisher declaring them to be "practically obsolete" in 1914. 

A “folder” is a machine that folds newspapers and magazines. 

In 1894, Talbot C. Dexter moved his Dexter Folder Company to Pearl River—and the Dexter Folder Company would remain in Pearl River for decades. On August 25, 1885, Dexter filed a patent for an automatic folding machine that changed the way newspapers, books, and magazines were folded and assembled. Between 1885 and 1913, Dexter filed many patents, some still in use today. 

During its heyday, an inordinate number of Pearl River residents worked for the Dexter Folder; it was a major employer in the town (in a forthcoming article, we will profile the Dexter family and its impact on Pearl River in more detail). 

By the 1950’s, the company was producing its folders in Canada, and the machines were painted blue rather than the grey/green that they used to be in Pearl River. 

The Dexter Folder Co., Inc., ceased to exist in 1956. For the time being, the factory in Pearl River, New York, had plenty of work and maybe more so from the merger, but they were not set up for the whims of those who cared more about their own aims and not the former company's fate.

More on the Dexter Folder Co, the Dexter family, and their history in Pearl River next week.