At the time of RCI’s sale, Mark Williams was only 58. “I was a ‘non-continuing’ employee,” he said, adding, “selling RCI was not a retirement event, so I started considering next steps right away.” His first target was a company in the core and tube business, CorPak. Mark had eyed the company as an acquisition while still President of Rich- mond Corrugated, seeing the core and tube business as a natural adjunct to RCI’s corrugated products line. The impending sale to Hood put those talks on hold, and by the time the sale was closed in 2017, CorPak’s owner, Bob Connor, had already sold to Corenso North America in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin. Connor, however, knew of Cauthorne Paper – he was one of its principal core suppli- ers – and he referred Mark to John Lewis, the company’s owner. “I knew about Cauthorne, but it really wasn’t on my Cauthorne Paper (CONT’D FROM PAGE 1)
radar right at the get-go,” Mark recalled. “But once I start- ed talking to John [Lewis] and started the due diligence process, the more I learned about the company, the more I thought it was a good fit for me.” Cauthorne was founded in 1912 by Ross Adolphus Cau- thorn – the “e” would later be added to the name. The company was founded primarily as a paper merchant, sup- plying printing papers to the commercial print market and newsprint to newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal, The Richmond Times Dispatch and The Washington Post . In the 1930s the company added its first converting capa- bility through the acquisition of a sheeter, thereby differen- tiating itself from its competitors of the day by the ability to offer custom size sheets. In the succeeding decades the Cauthorn family relinquished ownership, and the company would eventually relocate to its current location in Ash- land, where it now occupies 45,000 square feet of space
for converting, warehousing and offices. In his purchase of the company, Mark Williams became Cauthorne Paper’s sixth generation of ownership. Mark has established the new Cauthorne Paper Company on the values of “Steward- ship, Thoughtfulness and Persistence,” and all three are evident to the most casual of visitors. In a recent presentation at Cau- thorne’s quarterly employee meeting, Wil- liams summed up the company’s current business model: “Cauthorne Paper Compa- ny converts rolls and sheets of paper, pa- perboard, and other nonwoven materials to customer specifications.” Approximately 77 percent of the company’s business is in this type of converting, Williams says. An- other 13 percent of sales are in converting customer-owned inventory, wherein a cus- tomer sends in its own material to be slit, sheeted or trimmed to a specific size and returned to them. The remaining 10 percent, he said, are what he calls “as is” sales, dis- tributing finished paper products to end us- ers or other resellers. A New Vocabulary The lineup of capital equipment need- ed to serve Cauthorne’s diverse customer base required Williams to master an entirely different glossary of technical and mechan- ical terms. The company’s heavy-metal ros- ter consists of three Slitter-Rewinders: a 48” Goebel Rapid D precision slitter; a 72” Cap- co surface winder; and a 72” Jennerjahn JLS 73. Cauthorne also employs equipment familiar to the corrugated business, namely, a 1972-vintage Bobst SP 1260E platen die cutter, rebuilt in 2019 with subsequent up- grades – the most recent taking place last
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18 February 9, 2026
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