A small Blair County town, known for the sonorous spring that runs through it, might soon become the new birthplace of American money.

But it's just as likely that Roaring Spring, tucked in a limestone valley south of Altoona, will find that history remains on someone else's side.

Roaring Spring, the locals say, is home to a subterranean lake, which gives rise to the spring for which the town is named. Throughout the town's history, the spring has powered mills to grind grain and to make paper, and there are two paper mills now, run by Roaring Spring Paper Products and Appleton Papers Inc.

It's Appleton, headquartered in Wisconsin, that wants to take a crack at making money -- or at least the paper it's printed on.

"It is something that we would like to explore," said Bill Van Den Brandt, Appleton spokesman.

You may recall from elementary school that U.S. coins are produced mainly at mints in Philadelphia and Denver. And if your memory is really sharp, you also may remember that the Bureau of Engraving and Printing produces paper currency at plants in Washington, D.C., and Fort Worth, Texas.

But only a true currency buff would know that the paper itself is made in just one place -- Dalton, Mass., by a family-owned stationery firm, Crane & Co.

Fulfilling one of the oldest government contracts, Crane & Co. has been shipping its special mix of nonwood-based paper, about a quarter linen and three-quarters cotton, to Uncle Sam since 1879.

Appleton hopes to get in on the action, but to do so, it will have to rewrite a unique American business story and reverse more than 230 years of U.S. history.

While the Crane & Co. federal currency contract dates to only 1879, the company actually has been making money, so to speak, since 1775, when Stephen Crane, father of company founder Zenas Crane, sold paper to an engraver named Paul Revere. On it, according to company lore, Revere printed some of the earliest paper money in the American colonies.

Can Appleton's Roaring Spring plant compete with that historical link?

Appleton's behind-the-scenes play for the currency job, or for at least a portion of it, marks a rare challenge to the Crane Co.'s multigenerational stranglehold on the contract.

"Obviously, it's an important hunk of business to Crane," said Crane spokesman Peter Hopkins. The current contract is worth $340 million, according to Claudia Dickens, a spokeswoman with the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

Appleton says splitting the contract between two or more vendors makes sense in an age of terror threats. If paper production were interrupted in Massachusetts, it would be important to have a secondary production plant.

Mr. Van Den Brandt said Appleton had been upgrading its security-product manufacturing capabilities. In the paper industry, "security products" resist tampering and counterfeiting through the use of high-tech watermarks, embedded threads and metal fibers, and machine-readable micropatterns.

Tamper-proof paper products have a variety of uses -- transit passes, deeds, pharmaceutical labels, passports, driver's licenses, cash register receipts, checks, pretty much any item that you wouldn't want someone to replicate. Including, of course, U.S. currency.

Security products are a "growth business," Mr. Van Den Brandt said. As home computers and the counterfeiters who use them become more sophisticated, paper suppliers must come up with new products to thwart them.

As part of its effort to play a larger role in that market, Appleton two years ago acquired the United Kingdom's BemroseBooth, a company that makes security vouchers, parking tickets and other items. Appleton sees the currency contract as another big step in that direction, and as a way to offset shrinking revenues from fax paper in an age of e-mail.

Crane's contract with the feds runs through July 2006. Last month, the federal government released an RFP -- request for proposal -- for the next paper manufacturing contract, which would run through 2012.

The RFP allows the winners a two-year window to install production equipment. The Roaring Spring Appleton plant would need to invest $70 million in new equipment to handle the contract.

But Crane is challenging this language in the solicitation, hoping to wipe out the two-year window and protect its business.

The company's chief executive officer, Lansing Crane, offered a statement on the legal maneuvering through an assistant: "We welcome competition, [as] long as no one is asking for preferential treatment. ... We believe in fair and open competition, and trust that we will continue to be successful on the merits of what we have to offer."

Not only would Appleton need the two-year ramp-up period, it also would hope to secure a financing package from Pennsylvania. At stake, the company says, are 50 new jobs and some of the existing ones.

The winning bid, or bids, will be announced next fall.

Crane survived its only other recent competitive scare. In autumn 1996, the federal government proposed subsidizing other companies to help supply the currency paper. The solicitation, then as now, called for a two-year start-up window, but with the help of Sen. John Kerry and other Massachusetts politicians, Crane held onto the contract.