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.

Andrew Kitchen
You never knew what you'd find in the Eastern Fine Paper Mill. More debris, clutter and scraps you'd ever see. It was like walking into a trash dump, with all the paper scraps you could ask for.

The storage room had moldy wood scattered throughout the room. Let's not forget the puddles, the holes in the walls and the rust on the metal. But that was not the worst; just try walking into a room with enormous gaping holes located where there were once huge paper machines. Just one slip near the holes looked like it would bring you down into a different dimension-it was that big. Fortunately for all our sakes, there were guard rails blockading the holes to another world. There were holes everywhere, almost like Swiss cheese, with water spurting through them from the rain, let's just hope it was rain.

It was pretty obvious that the workers never had enough time to leave. They left remnants of food and drinks behind. There was a half full Coke bottle perched on a work table, there was a McDonald's box lying on the ground near the large holes. Seeing all of that really made me think, "I wonder what else they left here?" Later I found myself wandering in a room that had a peculiar smell, sort of like a basement, it turned out to be sort of like a basement (go figure). I glanced to the left and saw a red wall engraved with names of the workers that worked there in the past.

My last stop there was in another part of mill. It was in this room with all sorts of broken down machinery. It turns it out was the energy source of the mill. There was sludge on the ground and the room smelt all musty. And to my surprise, I saw a dead pigeon. Well, after about two hours of wandering through parts of the 336,000 square feet mill, I've learned a plethora of information about it. But there was one thing that came into my mind just as I got off the bus, which left me disappointed that it didn't come into my head sooner. "Is the mill haunted?"

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