A ground-breaking ceremony was held on July 17, 1911, for the new plant, a $600,000 investment by J. Spaulding and Sons. Operations began on April 1, 1912, with 40 employees. The daily capacity of the plant at the time was five tons of fibre sheeting and one ton of fibre tubing. Around 1924, the sons changed the name of the company to the Spaulding Fibre Company. In the 1930s, they added a second product at the Tonawanda plant: Spauldite, a "me too" phenol formaldehyde resin material made to compete with Bakelite. The trademark now owned by Spaulding Composites can be applied to laminates made with other natural or synthetic resins as well. After Huntley Spaulding, the last of the three brothers, died in November 1955, the Spaulding Fibre Company became part of a charitable trust previously set up by Huntley and his only sister, Marion S. Potter. The trust was created to disburse their remaining wealth within 15 years of the death of the last sibling. Marion S. Potter died on September 27, 1957. The company in Tonawanda flourished under foremen, superintendents and workers from the local blue collar workforce. It also attracted new residents who came for the jobs. One was Richard Spencer, who left the oil fields of Bradford, Pennsylvania, to be a superintendent for two decades. He managed through several labor strikes and periods of economic unrest for the company. In 1956 the Tonawanda plant completed an expansion that doubled the paper mill and the vulcanized fibre-making capacity of the plant. In addition, after the death of Huntley Spaulding, corporate offices relocated to Wheeler Street from Rochester, New Hampshire. In the 1960s, the Tonawanda plant added a third product line, Filawound (fiberglass) tubing. The 50th anniversary of the Wheeler Street Plant in 1961 was marked by a special 22-page section in the "Tonawanda News". The Wheeler Street Plant reportedly covered , employed 1500 workers, and had an annual payroll of $9,000,000. The company paid $153,818 in city taxes that year and was Tonawanda's largest tax payer. The plant was nearing its peak, but there was more expansion to come. In 1966, the charitable trust sold the Spaulding Fibre Company to Monogram Industries. The Tonawanda plant began a slow decline during a period of industrial restructuring and product and manufacturing changes.