In the middle of October, 2006, the Grade Seven students at Brewer Middle School took a field trip to a building that they had seen from a distance for most of their lives, but had never visited up close. The tour guides were various city officials and the future developers of the old paper mill. It was raining quite hard and the students were poorly equipped with flashlight, which added to the overall effect of the visit. What follows are the essays, as written, by roughly half of the students. The essays are presented as written by the students, hoping to preserve their turns of phrase, their usages and their idiosyncrasies as writers.

Alex Charalambous
The 7th grade went on a big field trip to the Eastern Fine Paper Mill on October 12, 2006. We arrived at the mill around 9:00 a.m. and stayed till about 12:00 p.m. When we first got inside it was all dark, and creepy, but I also could smell sawdust and dirt.

I stuck with my best friend Matt and we were afraid at the first couple seconds, because we walked down a long, dark, brick hallway with its paint peeling off. That wasn't the worst part though, we looked down toward the ground, and we noticed that the wall didn't go all the way down to the floor, and the last two or three inches of wall was covered by fencing. We were just hoping that no mice or rats would start scampering across or feet, or up our legs.

When we got to the end of the hallway we walked past a HUGE pile of clothes that were all dirty, and wet. They smelled like a dead rotten carcass lying in the water, it was HORRIBLE!!!!

This was a very scary moment for me, it almost made me feel like I was in a dark, and nasty cave which has been abandoned for the past 20 years. It was a gold mine of memories from years to end, it was so calm. We got to the first room of the mill, and it was like something you had never seen before. It was the storage room of the factory. You would have thought that before the workers left they would have taken, and sold the rest of the paper that they had made. But to answer that question it was no, they had tons and tons of cardboard, and paper stacked up all through that room. It was the quickest rush of people getting out of a building that I had ever seen.

Ending that, we went back down another spooky and dank hallway until we stopped to see a dimming light shining down the top of a large, wooden, rickety set of stairs. We set ourselves for the stairs, and took our first step onto the stairs. It was one of those times where you would have a flashback, and see all of those workers walking up and down the corridors, and the stairs. We managed to reach the unbelievable room at the top of the stairs, it was so cool. We saw some of the fantastic, old, and rusty machines that have been just sitting in that one room for the past couple years. When we walked across the dimmed, spooky room there were rusty wires, and pipes sticking out of the ground. I tripped over them twice, and it was annoying. We went back down the large, wooden, rickety set of stairs, and walked down another set of stairs to the damp and dusty basement. It had big, cement beams sticking all the way up to the 12 foot ceiling. The ground was covered with about one centimeter of icky, old, brown water that probably has been just sitting there for the worst couple of years that you could ever imagine.

Down those spooky old stairs there was a big red freight elevator door. It was like a horror movie because it had their names scratched all over the front of the big red door. The door was about an average size of somewhere near 7 by 5 feet. It had names of people that have been working there since 1943 to 2004, and ill tell you there were some weird names of people that were on that door.

When we went back up the stairs, we went back the way we came from at the VERY beginning of the massive and amazing field trip. We went back through the storage room, back down the dank old hallway, and back out the front door of the factory. It felt like we were in the Twilight Zone, because when we reopened the door it felt like I was almost knocked out cold, and I was floating up to the dear old heaven. The only thing I could see at the moment was a bright white light shining through my eyes like my mom turning the lights on in the morning to wake me up.

If you really want to know my favorite part of the trip, because I didn't tell you it during the story, I will tell you. It is pretty graphic so you might not want to read any further on, but if you do here it is.

It was all of a sudden when we were walking down the empty corridor I heard a pretty loud shriek of scarce, it was not too loud but I could still hear it from like 20 feet away. We were all pushing, and shoving just to crowd around it, and laying down right there in front of my feet was a dead pigeon which looked to have had its head bashed in, or off. It was a horrible sight to see, there were feathers, and remains spread all over the ground. It looked like someone threw a rock at about 70-85 miles per hour right square into its forehead, because there was no head on the bird while it was just sitting there on the freezing cold, wet ground.

We all walked out of the building, and piled back onto the bus, and we slowly drove off, away from that huge piece of history lying on the banks of the Penobscot River. Soon, and sadly to come, there will be all kinds of different buildings put up in place of the giant, historical Eastern Fine Paper mill.

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