Dard Hunter (1883-1966) is considered by many to be the father of hand papermaking in the United States. Hunter travelled extensively around the world, learning about papermaking and collecting artifacts related to the topic. He wrote several books on hand papermaking traditions, and also studied other paper-like materials such as papyrus and amatl.

In 1911, Dard Hunter visited London, where he became fascinated with early European papermaking and printing. He returned to America to set up a shop in Marlborough-on-Hudson, New York. In printing his first book in 1915, The Etching of Figures by William Bradley, Hunter continued to practice the creed of the Arts and Crafts Movement, whose proponents believed that a hand-crafted object was inherently more desirable, beautiful, serviceable, and worthy of human endeavor than anything made by a machine.

After moving to Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1919, Hunter decided to devote his life to researching, collecting, writing, and publishing the world's history of hand papermaking and printing. Over the next ten years, he published three limited-edition books at his Mountain House Press. Their titles were Old Papermaking (1923), Literature of Papermaking (1925), and Primitive Papermaking (1927). In 1928, he started up a second paper mill in Lime Rock, Connecticut. Although a commercial failure, Hunter's Lime Rock Mill nevertheless became the inspiration for many of the successful handmade paper mills in the United States today.