A company founded 68 years ago in southeastern North Carolina is expanding into new territory.
 
Atlantic Corp. of Wilmington, also known as Atlantic Packaging, has formally agreed to buy International Paper’s three largest paperboard converting facilities, which are located in Greensboro, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, and Sturgis, Michigan, the company announced Thursday. Total, the purchase consists of 800,000 square feet of facility space and 67 acres.
 
“This is a real game-changer for our company,” said Rusty Carter, president of Atlantic Corp., in a news release. “Overnight, this gives us a major presence for all of our business segments in the Southeast, Northeast, Midwest and soon the Southwest, with a planned new facility in Dallas, giving us a full national footprint. That is big for everyone at Atlantic. It makes us national in every way.”

The company's Dallas operation will start off smaller than the three that will be bought from IP, "but we anticipate in three to five years that Dallas will certainly be on a similar scale," Carter said in an interview Thursday. Atlantic currently has converting facilities in Tabor City, Charlotte and Charleston, South Carolina.

Founded in 1946 by Tabor City Tribune publisher W. Horace Carter, Atlantic currently has 750 employees and 12 branches across the Southeastern United States, Dominican Republic and Central America, according to Rusty Carter, the company founder's son. Atlantic supplies packaging products and equipment to consumer products manufacturers nationwide, but its headquarters and local operations are at 806 N. 23rd St. in Wilmington.
 
After the purchase, Atlantic will employ more than 900 people and will be one of the largest converters of bleached paperboard in North America, the release said.
 
“We enthusiastically welcome the IP [International Paper] employees to Atlantic and look forward to the many opportunities ahead for all of us,” Carter said in the release. “It is an honor for us to be working so closely now with our longtime supplier IP.”
 
The acquired IP facilities turn bleached paperboard, produced primarily at IP mills in Riegelwood, Augusta, Georgia, and Texarkana, Texas, into forms that can be used by the printing and box-making industries.
 
“This transaction offers considerable marketplace advantages for both companies,” Greg Gibson, vice president and general manager of coated paperboard for International Paper, said in the release. Through this deal, Gibson’s company “gains significant supply chain flexibility to support our Carolina and Everest brands and job opportunities for our employees in three facilities.”
 
The sale is expected to close Sept. 30, Carter said. 

Atlantic began as a weekly newspaper in Tabor City that is still published today as the Tabor-Loris Tribune. W. Horace Carter, who died in 2009, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1952 for an aggressive newspaper campaign against the Ku Klux Klan.

"He would be overwhelmed at the thought that we would or could even do a transaction with someone as large as IP, let alone of this magnitude," Rusty Carter said of his father. "He would be very proud of the company . . . And his emphasis would be on how many families we employ and how many families have benefited from this growth."