Remnants of mills are all that remain of Tupper Lake's once booming logging industry. Logging and processing logs was big business in Tupper Lake from the 1890s through World War I, and it remained an important business until the 1960s. In 1900 Tupper Lake was competing with Glens Falls for the title of Empire State Lumbering Capital. Sawmills worked around the clock to process logs so thick on Raquette Pond that hardly any open water was visible. Between the Sherman and Norwood Mills in Tupper Lake, over 30 million board feet of lumber was sawn in 1900, and no other community in the state came close to these figures. The first sawmill on Raquette Pond was built by Howard H. Hobson in 1889. After it burned in 1896, A. Sherman Lumber Co. operated a new mill on the site until 1915. This mill became known as the Sisson Mill, named for the Sisson family of Potsdam, who also owned the Raquette River Paper Company. Charles Sisson, manager of the Tupper operations, was elected Tupper's first mayor in 1902. The cluster of homes and buildings on the site of the A. Sherman Lumber Company at the midway point between uptown and downtown Tupper Lake was known as Sissonville. Another site originally housed a chemical works run by Brooklyn Cooperage Company, a subsidiary of American Sugar Refining Company. Operating until 1915, it was followed by Tupper Lake Chemical Co. until 1919. The old stack there remains from the Draper Division of Rockwell International, which operated from the 1940s into the 1970s. Draper Corporation of Hopedale, Massachusetts, was the largest manufacturer of automatic textile looms in the world, and its Tupper Lake facility made maple bobbin blanks for looms used in textile plants around the globe.