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One by one, black cars with tinted windows pulled up to the parking lot in the shadow of the paper mill. The governor of Ohio exited one car. One U.S. senator appeared, then the other. They were joined by the congressional representative from the district and the state attorney general.
The lineup of heavy political hitters had turned out in early April to show their support for the 850 employees who had been delivered a gut punch days earlier, when the private equity firm that owns the Chillicothe, Ohio, mill announced it was closing the plant in 60 days.
The politicians had come to deliver encouragement, but also good news.
The newly elected senator Bernie Moreno told the crowd that he’d just received a phone call from a top executive at the private equity firm promising that the facility would remain open until the end of the year, giving it more time to find a new owner.
The mill’s rescue was not assured, Mr. Moreno and the other politicians cautioned. But it was hard to find anyone in the crowd not buoyed by what Mr. Moreno called “a day of hope.”
“It was amazing,” said Jeff Allen, the president of the union local and a third-generation papermaker, who also addressed the crowd this April. “I’m sitting there with the governor, two sitting U.S. senators, the district congressman, all the state officials — my votes didn’t put any of them in office. Historically, this union supported Democrats. And yet here are all these Republicans supporting us.”
This could be a new paradigm, he thought.
Donald J. Trump’s promise to revive manufacturing in the United States had appealed to working class voters around the country last November, including many of Mr. Allen’s co-workers. Now, here was Mr. Moreno, a Make America Great Again standard-bearer, forcefully pounding the table for union jobs.
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In a matter of days, it seemed that Mr. Moreno had — almost Trump-like — bent a private equity titan to his will, threatening in a blistering letter to conduct a federal investigation into the portfolio of businesses held by the firm, H.I.G. Capital.
When Mr. Moreno announced on the stage that the firm’s chastened leaders had given the workers another six months, he added that he would be rolling up his sleeves to help find a buyer. The senator gave Mr. Allen his cellphone number and said an aide would be moving to Chillicothe to provide boots-on-the-ground help.
As Ohio continues to carve a new economic path, that April rally provided a vision: As an ever-deeper-red state, the home of central MAGA characters like Vice President JD Vance, the gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and Mr. Moreno, it could muscle its way to greater prosperity not only through a boom in artificial intelligence data centers across the state — but by turning back the clock through tariffs, coal and industrial manufacturing.
It might be too late for the steel mills in Youngstown, the rubber plants in Akron and the glass factories in Toledo.
But maybe, Mr. Allen hoped, the paper mill in Chillicothe would be different.
A Steady Decline
South of Columbus on U.S. Route 23, the paper mill’s 475-foot-tall, red-and-white-ringed smokestack is visible from miles away.
For more than a century, the paper mill was owned by the Mead family, the maker of notebooks for generations of schoolchildren.
Chillicothe was the epitome of a company town. The Mead Company built a swimming pool that cost 25 cents for workers’ families to use and supported two amateur baseball teams on fields it built.
There was a time when workers would cash their paychecks at the Paint Grill, a watering hole next to the mill where they could throw back cold beers and wrap both hands around a Paper Maker, a double-decker cheeseburger with 10 ounces of ground beef.
But millwork took a physical toll. If you’ve been at the mill long enough, you know a story or two about a gruesome injury or death. Then there are the swing shifts, overtime hours, and missed birthdays and anniversaries, too many to count.
The 1990s marked the beginning of the mill’s steady decline. With the dawn of the digital age, there was less need for paper.
The mill underwent a steady churn of owners. Three of its last four owners have been private equity firms, including H.I.G. Capital, which manages a $70 billion portfolio. Three years ago, Miami-based H.I.G. bought Pixelle Specialty Solutions, which operated the mill.
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In the paper industry, private equity has often followed a familiar playbook: Buy a distressed asset on the cheap and load it with debt, some of which is used to pay the private equity firm. Then, in a few years, the private equity firm sells the company or declares bankruptcy.
As the mill changed hands over the years, it was rarely good for the rank and file.
Interviews with more than two dozen current and former employees describe the last 25 years as a period of underinvestment, poor management and declining morale. There have been more than a dozen mill managers in the last two decades. Maintenance and engineering departments withered, and in late 2022, about 90 veteran millworkers retired suddenly, creating a knowledge deficit that further crippled the operation.
There were safety issues, too. In June, the Chillicothe Fire Department was called in to help extinguish a fire that had started when sawdust piled up on an electrical panel. It was the second time in 15 months that the department was called in to help because the company’s own firefighting unit was overwhelmed, according to Chillicothe Fire Department records.
‘Lecherous, Self-Serving’ Behavior
Mr. Moreno, whose family emigrated from Colombia when he was a child, made his fortune building an auto dealership empire in northern Ohio.
He was elected in 2024 after an expensive, sharp-elbowed campaign in which he leaned heavily on support from Mr. Trump. Mr. Moreno narrowly beat out Sherrod Brown, a liberal Democrat and stalwart union supporter, with 50.2 percent of the vote.
In an interview this summer, Mr. Moreno said his “north star” was his father-in-law, who went to work at the U.S. Steel plant in Gary, Ind., the day after his high school graduation, raised a family, owned a car, took vacations and retired “with total dignity and no debt.”
“Sometimes people think the American dream is Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk,” he said. “But most Americans aspire to have a good, normal life.”
Mr. Moreno had held the office for only four months when H.I.G. Capital announced in April that it would be shuttering the paper mill. The announcement not only blindsided the workers, but was a shock to the state’s political leaders, who in recent years have aggressively sought to stanch the bleeding of blue-collar union jobs.
Some voiced their anger. Others pledged support for the workers. Mr. Moreno jumped in with a fire-breathing letter to H.I.G. Capital’s top executives that hit on a familiar populist theme: Regular folks are losing out — in this case, to rich guys in Miami.
“I’m here to inform you that such lecherous, self-serving and destructive behavior must end now,” Mr. Moreno wrote, noting that H.I.G. Capital had driven several companies into bankruptcy.
He demanded to know the financial terms of the acquisition, the yearly balance sheets for the mill and how much top executives profited. He also threatened to pursue Department of Justice and Department of Treasury investigations of companies owned by H.I.G. Capital.
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“I was extraordinarily pissed off,” Mr. Moreno said.
But that anger had a short shelf life. On the morning he spoke to the crowd in April, Mr. Moreno took a call from Brian Schwartz, a co-president of H.I.G. Capital, from inside a Chillicothe doughnut shop.
Mr. Schwartz, sounding apologetic, agreed to keep the plant open until the end of the year while helping find a buyer, according to Mr. Moreno. (H.I.G. Capital never announced the six-month extension. Mr. Schwartz did not respond to messages seeking comment.)
The senator was determined to find a new owner. He helped stir up a steady stream of potential buyers who were led around the paper mill. Some of the biggest names in the paper industry had a look, according to two people familiar with the visits who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the visits were supposed to be confidential. They included International Paper, Smurfit Westrock and Packaging Corporation of America. (The companies declined to comment or did not respond to an interview request.)
But the mill would have needed hundreds of millions of dollars in investment in new or reconfigured machines over the last 15 years in order to pivot from its primary product: carbon-less paper that has largely been made obsolete with the digitization of finance and medical forms, said a former plant manager who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he still works in the paper industry.
Faced with this reality, H.I.G. couldn’t even give the mill away.
Tyler Rajeski, the chief executive of Twin Rivers Paper in Madawaska, Maine, told his local Town Council in May that he had been offered the chance to “buy Chillicothe for a dollar, and I said no.”
We Are Not ‘Just Dumb Rednecks’
Mr. Moreno returned to Chillicothe again on the first Saturday in June — not for a rally, but to deliver grim news to the union’s leadership: H.I.G. Capital would be closing the mill on Aug. 10, not at the end of the year, as the private equity firm had promised him.
Mr. Moreno said he had come to understand H.I.G. Capital’s plight. The mill had been hemorrhaging customers (and employees) since it announced the closing, and it was costing the firm millions to keep it open even for a few more months.
“I’m a business guy,” Mr. Moreno said. “I understood that they were on a path that couldn’t be reversed. You realize it’s a monumental amount of money they would have to invest to turn it around.”
Many of the millworkers were less understanding. The mill had provided generations with solid union wages and health care. It also gave them a sense of identity and pride of place.
Working a union job at the mill is as good as it gets for someone who isn’t much interested in leaving Chillicothe or going to college. Wages start around $25 per hour, and overtime often pushes pay into six figures in a place where money like that goes a long way.
“I didn’t want you to think we’re just dumb rednecks,” Thomas Hamner, 27, said in an interview in June, a few days after a discussion at the union hall with a group of his co-workers veered into why so many of them had chosen not to leave Chillicothe, either to go to college or to pursue other opportunities.
“I know a lot of really smart people who work low-budget jobs,” he added. “We’ve all stayed here because it’s our home and we don’t leave. People here stick together.”
Mr. Hamner didn’t have much growing up. Shortly after he graduated from high school, his grandfather, who had worked at the mill, helped him get a job there.
Mr. Hamner earned about $90,000 last year, but it was barely enough to keep pace with his spending and debts. He got a new tractor to work the five acres of rocky land he’d bought, but fell behind on payments and sold it for pennies on the dollar. The announcement in April that the mill would be closing came a week after Mr. Hamner learned that his wife, Shalynn, was pregnant with their second child. Their older son, Waylon, is 3.
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The uncertainty over what’s next weighs on Mr. Hamner.
“The only time it hit me is when I came to the realization that if my son wants a juice box or cupcakes, I can buy it for him,” he said in August.
But he’s not sure how long this will be true.
“At least at this point in his life, I can say Waylon was spoiled and taken care of. I’m not sure I’ll be able to say that with the next one.” (Winston, their second son, was born a few weeks ago.)
In late July, a job fair had more than 70 businesses with displays set up inside the local college basketball gym. Cornerstone Caregiving. Diamond Power. Stewart Glass. Ohio Department of Corrections. Victoria’s Secret. A sheet metal apprentice program.
And on and on.
Mill employees, some wearing pulp-spattered work boots, walked up and down the aisles of the job fair waiting for a conversation starter. To some it was like speed dating. Hi. What do you do at the mill? What kind of work are you looking for? Here’s a list of the jobs we have available.
As the job fair drew to a close, it became clear that even promising leads likely included a pay cut and required a much longer commute or even relocating.
Mr. Allen, the union president, spent much of his time arranging a training session for a few dozen workers, hoping it would bolster their skill set — and their qualifications for another manufacturing job.
“I know the names to the faces,” he said of the millworkers. “They mean something to me.”
Not the ‘White Knight Solution’
By early September, all that remained at the mill was a skeleton crew that did little more than keep the lights on. Hundreds of workers had received their last paychecks and had started calculating how to stretch out their severance checks while they looked for what’s next.
By then, Mr. Moreno knew what would become of the site even though he was not ready to disclose it publicly. It wasn’t the “white knight solution” he had hoped for. But it was “still a much better solution than doing what my opponent probably would have done — gone down there, organized a protest and gone home,” Mr. Moreno said, referring to Mr. Brown.
“I’m not willing to sit back and say it’s too risky because what if something doesn’t work out? I gave it my all,” he said.
Asked about his more conciliatory approach with H.I.G. Capital, which never turned over the financial details he had requested, Mr. Moreno said: “I applaud H.I.G. for how they’ve been since then. I don’t take anything back of what I said in that letter. I take nothing back what I’ve said publicly. It took that to get us to this point.”
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But Mr. Brown, his Democratic opponent in the race last year, said that a broad coalition should have been involved, including union, city and county leaders, to exert pressure on H.I.G. Capital. He said Mr. Moreno showed his allegiance when he voted for Mr. Trump’s tax bill, which has tax benefits that will be a boon for private equity executives, like the ones at H.I.G. Capital.
“You can make speeches — we all do,” said Mr. Brown, who is running for Ohio’s other Senate seat next year. “You can write nasty letters. You can call them out on the Senate floor. But if you’re not willing to vote and hold their feet to the fire on tax issues, they don’t really care.”
An Answer, and More Questions
Last month, Mr. Moreno arrived in town to make a grand announcement: The mill had been bought by the U.S. Paper Mill Company, a subsidiary of U.S. Medical Glove Company.
A few dozen former paper mill workers crowded around a lectern in front of two rubber-glove-making machines that had been hastily installed in a vast warehouse where Mr. Moreno was to speak. The workers, most of them dressed in jeans, T-shirts and work boots, stood elbow to elbow with local political leaders and businesspeople in suits and polished shoes.
The workers were eager to hear more about the new venture, which Mr. Moreno told the crowd was just a start. In time, the company might employ 1,500 people and ensure that hospital gloves around the country, the boxes they are shipped in and the machines that make them in other countries would be manufactured in Chillicothe. He praised Mr. Schwartz, the H.I.G. Capital executive, who he said had agreed to contribute $5.5 million to a fund for the laid-off workers — though almost all of it won’t be distributed for five years. The price U.S. Medical Glove paid for the mill facility was not disclosed.
But Mr. Moreno declined to answer two fundamental questions: How many jobs would there be to start, and what would they pay? Neither could John Todoroki, the owner of U.S. Medical Glove, who did not address the crowd.
Mr. Todoroki, who peppers conversations with expletives, is not the button-down type. He said in an interview after the ceremony that he would try to pay workers close to what they were making at the paper mill and that he did not want to say publicly how many people he would be hiring.
“The plan is to see if my plan is going to work, and we won’t know for 30 days,” he said.
And then what?
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“I’m like an old dog with a bone in my jaw,” Mr. Todoroki said. “I don’t let go.”
Several former workers who attended the ceremony said they were hopeful that the new jobs would be a good thing for Chillicothe even if they had little idea what the jobs were or how much they would pay. Callbacks would not be based on seniority — as the union had negotiated. And what about health benefits, overtime and vacation pay, which might be as many as five weeks?
Unlike the jobs at the old paper mill, these new jobs would not be unionized. As of Thursday, the new company has 70 employees.
“It’s anger, and it’s hurt,” said Mr. Allen, the now former union president, who was laid off at the end of August. “That was my life. I went there when I just turned 19. And here I am, 56. I’m angry at the whole process, and I’m hurt for all those employees.”
Mr. Allen said Mr. Moreno had called to inform him about the sale. Then the senator’s aide extended an invitation to speak at the ceremony celebrating the new ownership. Mr. Allen never responded.
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