The Scott Paper Company pioneered the manufacture and marketing of toilet paper and paper towels. It was incorporated in Pennsylvania on December 21, 1905, as successor to the Scott Paper Company, Ltd., organized in October 1879.

In Philadelphia, the company was founded by brothers Clarence Scott (1848-1912) and Edward Irvin Scott (1846-1931) as a general wholesale jobbing business in coarse paper products such as wrapping paper and paper bags. The company carved out a niche cutting and packaging toilet paper, which individual retailers sold under their own brand names.

E. Irvin Scott's only son, Arthur Hoyt Scott (1875-1927), joined the business in 1896 and began its transformation into a modern enterprise. After incorporation in 1905, the company began the mass production of toilet paper under a few brand names and introduced paper towels. The company began an extensive consumer advertising program in 1906 and constructed a large paper mill and factory in Chester in 1910.

The company began a backward integration program in 1927, when it purchased the Nova Scotia Wood Pulp & Paper Company, Ltd. In September 1936, it joined with the Mead Corporation to organize the Brunswick Pulp & Paper Company in Georgia. In 1940, it acquired two mills and timberlands in Washington and Oregon with the purchase of the Anacortes Pulp Company and the Coos Bay Pulp Corporation. It purchased the Marinette & Menominee Paper Company properties in Wisconsin and Michigan in 1941 and the Medway Hydro Electric Power Company in 1942.

Expansion continued after World War II, with the acquisition in 1945 of the Automatic Paper Machinery Company, makers of Cut-Rite wax paper. In 1951, Scott Paper purchased the Falls Paper & Power Company of Wisconsin and the Soundview Pulp Company of Washington. In 1954, it acquired the Detroit Sulphite Pulp & Paper Company properties of Detroit and its subsidiary, the Driftwood Lands & Timber Limited of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.

Also, in 1954, Scott Paper acquired the Hollingsworth & Whitney Company, which had been founded in Boston in 1862 and incorporated in 1882. Hollingsworth & Whitney manufactured wrapping papers and bags at plants in Massachusetts, Maine, Alabama, and through a Canadian subsidiary-owned timberlands in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. In 1965, Scott acquired the Beveridge Paper Company group, including the Plastic Coating Corporation, which made coatings for paper and wire, and the Tecnifax Corporation, which made blueprint and copier papers. Scott Paper merged into its longtime rival Kimberly-Clark Corporation on December 12, 1995.