St. Joe Paper Company
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| Public | |
| Traded as | : JOE |
| Industry | Real estate development |
| Founded | 1936 |
| Headquarters | Watersound, Florida |
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Key people
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Jorge Gonzalez- President and Chief Executive Officer Marek Bakun- Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Kenneth M. Borick- Senior Vice President - Chief Legal Officer K. Rhea Goff- Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer |
| Products | Residential, Commercial & Rural Land; Forestry Products; Resort Operations |
| Revenue | > US$ 14.6 million (January 1, 2012- September 30, 2012 |
| Website | http://www.joe.com/ |
The St. Joe Company (: JOE) is a land development company headquartered in Watersound, Florida. The company had been headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, United States, and is Florida's second largest private landowner, owning about 567,000 acres in the state as of November 2012.
The company was founded in 1936 as part of the Alfred I. du Pont Testamentary Trust by du Pont's brother-in-law Edward Ball. Prior to its establishment, the trust had already begun land purchases, making its first one in 1923. During the land booms in South Florida, the company acquired still-cheap land in the Florida Panhandle. In 1933, du Pont's purchased the Apalachicola Northern Railroad. Apalachicola Northern had extended its network from Chattahoochee to Port St. Joe, Florida, in 1910, hoping to take advantage of increased shipping trade through the Panama Canal. However, when the Great Depression hit, business dropped off significantly. Du Pont purchased the struggling railroad and made plans to use the infrastructure to build a paper mill, leading to the foundation of the St. Joe Company. Du Pont drew up elaborate plans for the development of his mill town as "The Model City of the South", but died before it could be completed. His brother-in-law, Ed Ball, took control of the St. Joe Company in 1935 but never acted on the master city plan.
Construction began in 1936 and from 1938 to 1996, the company operated a paper mill at Port St. Joe, as St. Joe Paper Company. Land purchases continued throughout the 1940s and 1950s, often for "mere dollars an acre" and St. Joe eventually owned more than one million acres (4,000 km²). The company invigorated the local economy following the Depression, employing thousands at its paper mill, but wreaked havoc on the environment. The mill released sulfurous exhaust from sulfate pulping and dioxins, an unintended toxin generated by the chlorine bleaching process used to make white pulp. By the 1950s, the company was drawing 35 million gallons of water a day from the Floridan Aquifer, seriously depleting the water table. St Joe Paper also clear-cut millions of acres of old growth forest, engaging in silviculture to replant the areas with slash pine. The practice decimated the native longleaf pine stands, reducing the species to "2 percent of its former range." Because of this, the United States Department of the Interior designated parts of the region a Critically Endangered Ecosystem.
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Wikipedia