AGAWAM, Mass. (AP) – When Abraham Lincoln agreed to debate Stephen Douglas during their 1858 campaign for the U.S. Senate, he reached for a sheet of Southworth paper on which to write his acceptance.

Times have changed, but lawyers, business executives and college students looking for their first job are still printing their resumes and presentations on Southworth Co.’s paper.

And in an era where businesses flicker in and out of existence, the 165-year-old family firm, with $30 million in annual sales, is a survivor, but not an anachronism.

“Papermaking is an old business,” said President David C. Southworth, the fifth generation and ninth Southworth to head the company. “But we are still small enough to be very entrepreneurial.”

The company’s niche has long been high-end business papers still made the old-fashioned way: out of cotton instead of wood.

The e-mail age has hit the paper industry hard, especially the high-end market, but it has also created new opportunities, said Southworth, who sees a leveling out of the market, buoyed by the growth of small and home businesses.

“There will never be a paperless office,” he said. “It’s just a matter of finding new applications and new ways of selling.”

David Southworth, who answers to 70 family members with shares in the nation’s 50th oldest family owned company, according to Family Business magazine, admits he has an impetus shared by few other CEOs.

“After five generations, you don’t want to be the one to botch it up,” he said.

Fewer than one out of three family businesses survive the second generation and fewer than one in 10 reach a fourth generation, said Paul Karofsky, executive director emeritus of Northeastern University’s Center for Family Business.

“We have no statistics on a fifth generation,” Karofsky said. “It’s very rare.”

Still, Southworth, one of a handful of survivors out of the hundreds of paper companies that once made western Massachusetts the hub of the industry, can only boast to being second-oldest in the region.

The Cranes of Dalton-based Crane & Co. have ruled the currency paper and high-end cotton-fiber personal stationery market for 200 years. They have a generation on the Southworths.

The company has been moving with the times since the 1870s, when Philo Remington, son of firearms manufacturer Frederick Remington, first marketed a typewriter. The Southworths quickly developed special papers for it, and for decades, Southworth was the sole supplier of paper to the Remington company.

Now it’s doing the same for the computer age. Among its newest papers is a line made specially for printers, aimed at eye-catching presentation books to accompany executives’ Powerpoint presentations.

“It’s like ice cream,” Southworth said. “Chocolate and vanilla will always be the favorites and most of the paper we sell will probably always be white or ivory, but you have to have the 20 other flavors.”