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.

Chiyanne Cotter
It was a dark and rainy day when we went to the Eastern Fine Paper Mill.  Before we went into the mill, we were separated into groups by homeroom teachers

As I walked through the creaking door into the old, smelly, musty Paper Mill I felt like I was walking into a cave and then running into a great, big, scary, ugly, beast because of the noises of the drops of water and the rats, snakes, and pigeons. When we went into the first room I stepped onto some old, rusty, pipes and as I stepped on them it sounded like bones of a human snapping in half.  Throughout that first room it was really chilly and dark.  Also in that first room I heard a squeaky noise run by my feet so I looked down at my feet and there was a big, fat, hairy rat!

As we were walking to the second room, down the hallway, I felt a water drop fall on my face and I thought a pigeon had pooped on my face but it wasn't poop luckily it was just water.  In this second room at the top of the stairs was where they made the paper, so there was a lot of paper all over the ground.  I wonder how much paper they made in a day.  There were cardboard boxes stacked up about three yards high against walls all over the room.  I heard clangs of metal from people stepping on the metal.  We stopped because the tourists wanted to tell us some facts about this room.  

The third room that we went into was warm and empty.  Since the room was so empty, as the people talked among themselves, there were echoes all through the room.  This room was extremely enormous and it smelled really bad!  It smelled like rotten eggs!  There wasn't anything interesting in that room except for paper and dust all over the place. There was so much dust that it made everyone cough a lot! So, we ended up leaving that room.  

We walked in to another room that had collapsed on two of the sides but not in the middle.  The whole seventh grade stopped because the tourists stopped.  The reason why tourists stopped is because they wanted to tell us a little about this room.  Tom Newman, the head tourist said, "The reason why the sides collapsed is because the sides rotted."  I wonder why big rushes of water were coming into the collapsed sides.  In this room there was a lot of wind pressing up against my friend Brittney Kelly and me.  As the wind pushed up against us Brittney said, "It's really cold I want to get out of this room now!"  "So do me," I said back to her.  Finally about five minutes later we went out of that rusty, moldy, dirty room and quickly walked into the next room.

In the next room if you looked all around there would be metal upon metal.  This room had an oily smelly in it and that smell made me want to get out very quickly.  Also there were playing cards on the floor left over from the men playing cards before they shut the mill down.  There was a bathroom in that room but there was no sink.  In the bathroom I saw a dead bird!  I think that's just plain disgusting, do you?  As I looked over to the left of me, there was a big tree stump that had a hollow hole in the middle of it bigger than the size of a silver half dollar!  The walls had signs and words that were painted all over them.    After about three minutes later we wondered off into the next room where I ended up seeing a snake in the broken elevator! Sooner or later we ended up walking by the big machines that turned the paper around and around in circles.  These machines were big enough to be an up above ground pool!  Then there was this big tall ladder that stood about eight feet in the air so that they could put the paper in the machine.  On the floor in this room there was oil all over the floor.  Also Ms. Ward lost one of her children in her group, Skyler Donlin. We found him though, he was in a different group with some of his friends after Ms. Ward said, "Do not wonder off with anyone else."

Finally we walked into the next room with Skyler after the tourists toured the last room.  This last room had a big red freight elevator door that was scratched with workers' names and dates from years ago.  When I looked at it, I saw my dads' name carved into it.  My dad worked for a few years until he got fired.  Walking past peeling layers of paint, exposing six or seven coats in blue, green, and teal all of us visitors visited the old offices the people had in that last room.  Several minutes later we made or our way back though the mill and out the after our two hour tour.  

Back on the buses we went, waiting for Caroline Hall and Tony Bischoff to get done being interviewed.  As they both got back on the bus the teachers counted the number of students to make sure that we didn't lose anyone in the Paper Mill on both buses.  Then the bus in front of us led the way back to Brewer Middle School as the people on both of the buses were waving goodbye. Still, on this very day, Thursday, October 26, 2006, everyone at BMS people talk about the two hour tour we had on that day Thursday, October 12, 2006.      

Last updated: