Following his mother's death in 1851 and the completion of the waterway project in 1852, Babcock found work as a box boy at a local dry goods store where he also slept at night, as his widowed father had begun farming with a new wife six miles from town.

Shortly after the Reliance Mill was up and running, Kimberly became interested in the manufacture of paper, and on the strength of his partnership with Babcock the two men brought together a group of investors to form a joint stock company.

After several unsuccessful attempts at organization with a changing roster of players, the large number of prospective shareholders was cut down to four equal partners: Kimberly, Babcock, Charles B. Clark, and Franklyn C. Shattuck.

Babcock, standing six feet tall with the brooding good looks of a Midwestern Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights), similarly assisted a dedicated following of local women in adapting current fashions to flatter their personal attributes.

A voracious reader in spite of his limited education, and possessed of artistic sensibilities, Babcock was also a talented tenor and soloist in his church choir.

Although it pained him to be separated from them, all five became graduates of Eastern colleges, his daughter Caroline also studying sculpture under Daniel Chester French at his studio in Manhattan, and later at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

A great hunter and fisherman, Babcock encouraged a taste for the out-of-doors in his children, taking them and their friends on annual camping parties at Eagle River, Wisconsin.

Those children that remained in Neenah were either founders or major contributors to the YWCA, the Boys' Brigade, Theda Clark Hospital, the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum, the Emergency Society, Oak Hill Cemetery, the First Presbyterian Church and the Visiting Nurse Association.

Two years later, while the newly incorporated Kimberly & Clark was building a third mill in Appleton, the family moved in with the interior still largely bare plaster walls.

Principal among the stories were those of the Etruscan goddess Pomona (mythology) and William Morris' "The Defence of Guenevere," both of which challenge the conventional roles and identities of men and women, and which taken together Babcock wove into a devotional to the love he and his wife Frances shared.