Frövifors Paper Mill Museum

Frövifors bruk, 30 km north of Örebro, is the site of a large board mill completed in 1981 alongside a pulp and paper mill which opened some 90 years earlier. The commissioning of the new plant was an appropriate time to preserve the old one, something which had been foreseen in surveys of historic paper mills undertaken by the Swedish Pulp and Paper Association in collaboration with historians and archaeologists.The earliest parts of the 1890s mill were constructed on the site of an ironworks of which some slag tips remain. The outstanding features of the site are the two red brick machine halls which accommodate paper-making machines installed by Karlstads Mekaniska Verkstad in 1907 and 1911, and remain virtually in their original condition. The transmission shafts and belts that until 1942 conveyed power from water turbines to the machines remain, as well as Hollanders and other equipment used for grinding pulp. The mill was filmed and photographed when it was still working in 1976, an oral history archive was compiled and the buildings are well documented. The Frövifors Paper Mill Museum Foundation was established in 1984 and has created a museum which has regional and national as well as local perspectives.The museum is not solely concerned with the mill machinery. It has a collection of 22,000 beer cans, a display illustrating how the Japanese use paper for packaging and wrapping, and a workshop where visitors can experiment with paper.Visitors to the museum can also see something of the adjacent modern mill.