About 47 years ago, the late Henry Johnston bought a vacant Main Street service station and, with the help of one employee, a cousin, converted it into the Johnston Dandy Co.

Little did Johnston know then that his two-man business making different types of specialty rolls for the paper industry would grow into a worldwide business.

Today, the Johnston family business still is headquartered in Lincoln, but it has five other divisions, located in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, New York and Canada. It employs 80 people and serves customers on every continent except Antarctica.

Earlier this week, the Lincoln-based company received the state Senate President’s Cornerstone for Business Award in recognition of its commitment to the community, its employees and the state’s economy.

Local officials say the company is one of Lincoln’s hidden treasurers. Rep. Rod Carr, R-Lincoln, who resides only a few blocks from the Johnston Dandy Co., said that like many area people, he had driven by the plant for years not realizing what the company does. “I was amazed at what they do,” said Carr this week.

The company produces dandy rolls, a hollow, wire-mesh screen-covered roll that can weigh less than 50 pounds or as much as 8,000 pounds. The rolls, which mostly are made of stainless steel or bronze, measure from 7 to 72 inches in diameter and range from 24 to more than 300 inches wide.

In the beginning stages of the papermaking process, a slurry mixture of water and wood fiber runs under the dandy roll, which helps line up the fibers to better form a sheet of paper.

One of the most glamorous things the rolls do is leave watermarks in paper, says Daniel Johnston of Lincoln, who now owns his late father’s company with his brother Robert of Kennebunk, and a cousin, Kyle Johnston of Mill Hall, Pa.

Dandy rolls typically are used by paper companies who produce fine grades of papers such as bonded papers, watermarked papers, envelopes, stationary and bible paper.

Chances are the watermark people see in the paper used for U.S. Treasury checks and Canadian passports or in General Electric, IBM, Coca-Cola and Disney stationary come from the dandy rolls produced by Johnston Dandy Co.

“We actually design a lot of the watermarks with [these companies],” said the 46-year-old company president. “We have developed watermarking into portrait quality on dandy rolls.”

Johnston says the company also has developed a better process for putting together sections of mesh screening, which is virtually seamless, and is taking the company’s competitors a bit off guard.

At its Pennsylvania plant, the company makes its own mesh wire screening material called “wire cloth,” which comes in rolls up to 350 inches wide. “We weave wire similar to that of window screens, but we weave it very wide and to very tight tolerances,” Johnston said. “The screen we weave – primarily from stainless steel and bronze – goes on the dandy rolls and is used in other applications in the pulp- and papermaking processes.”

Johnston said the company is one of only a few metallic broadloom weavers left in the country. He said many companies sell the wire cloth, but have the weaving done in countries such as Mexico or overseas where labor costs are cheap.

Nine years ago, the company acquired the more than 100-year-old

H.M. Spencer Co. in Holyoke, Mass., the same dandy-roll making company that Henry Johnston broke away from nearly five decades ago to start up his own business in Lincoln.

It was in 1955 that Henry Johnston came to Lincoln with his cousin Henry Phoenix.

Johnston knew the northern Maine location in the heart of the paper industry would give him a geographic advantage over his former employer and other competitors. With the help of his cousin he bought a couple of metal lathes and a vacant service station at 158 Main St. in Lincoln and the two men started servicing dandy rolls and later began producing them.

Great Northern Paper’s mills in Millinocket and East Millinocket kept Johnston busy. Back then, Great Northern was the company’s biggest customer. Daniel Johnston said Great Northern provided his father with enough business to buy a truck to transport the rolls.

Henry Johnston was competing with some big companies, one of which even tried offering free deliveries to get business away from Johnston. But it didn’t work, because Johnston’s high-quality service beat them out and his business continued to grow, according to his son.

In the mid-1960s, Henry Johnston saw other opportunities to expand his business and customer base. He purchased what at the time was the only dandy-roll manufacturer in Canada, a division of Johnson Wire Co. in Montreal. The acquisition opened up new Canadian markets. Daniel Johnston said the division had been a “losing proposition” for its former owners, but not for his dad, who made it flourish.

In the mid-1980s, Henry Johnston bought the E.F. Cook Co. in Syracuse, N.Y., expanding his company into the paperboard industry. The company produces cylinder molds, another type of screen-covered roll used to produce paperboard, which is in cereal boxes and cardboard boxes.

Since their father died in 1989, the sons have continued to look for ways to diversify the business.

For example, nine years ago, they bought the H.M. Spencer Co. and two years ago they bought out the dandy roll and cylinder mold sections of Sinclair International in Holyoke, Mass. In 2000, they also acquired a company in Neenah, Wis., in an effort to further expand the Johnston Dandy Co.’s customer service base. Johnston says it was a strategic move to a Midwest “paper valley.”

“We carry a lot of well-known names,” Johnston said referring to the fact the company has kept the well-known names of companies it has acquired over the years, such as H.M. Spencer, E.F. Cook and Neenah Wire.

Because the Johnston Dandy Co. is tied closely to the paper industry, business is slow right now.

“But, we do plan to ride it out and push for more business,” Johnston said.He said his company has seen many mill closings during the past few years resulting in a shrinking market for his business, which is why the company continues to expand its geographic customer base and is working with other companies to develop new products.

“It is a very specialized business,” said Daniel Johnston. “We have found a true niche in the industry. We have competitors, but part of our strength is that we have diversified into different geographic areas.”