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.

Deaven Smith
As I walked off the bus, with the pouring rain on me, I start to wonder what the mill would be like. Will I fall off into the gigantic holes? Will I see scary dark hallways? As I thought, I stared at the mill as we walked towards it. We entered into the mill, it was dark, smelly as if an engine just broke down, and was also spooky. I walked with my buddies and figured out that I should take out my flashlight and watch where I am going. When I took it out someone told me to watch out for a pipe but it was too late and too loud to hear.

After we got out of the room we went to another room. It was even more pitch black than the other room. There were boxes full of paper they made some time ago. I also saw supplies and hundreds of more boxes. As we went by the boxes I wondered. "How long ago did they make these papers? Where is the paper maker? When I thought of those questions I found out that they gave it away for hundreds of dollars.

We entered into a doorway and up the stairs. I was scared that I might break through the wooden stairs because it was soggy and old, but luckily I didn't. As we continued I saw lots of water falling out of big holes on the ceiling and the broken pipes. It looked like a waterfall with a little lake or pond at the bottom. Where the water was falling, I looked down and saw a huge hole where the paper maker was. It was so big that I thought it must made lots of paper in just one day.

As we continued I saw some random things, like shoes, ripped clothing and a half bottle of cola. Some things were interesting like the type of supplies and tools they used. We went on and I saw that the tour guides were standing by the broken holes and broken pipes. There was barely any room to walk though without hitting the holes and broken pipes.

We went down a longer set of stairs and ended up going through a big black medal door that was so huge it could fit 4 or 5 people at the same time through it. We went down another set of stairs and saw where the old elevator used to be. It was a lot different than the ones I usually go on. It was bigger and had different types of doors. The doors didn't go up and down with it. The door that stayed was written on by hundreds of people. I thought it was interesting because if you want to know who was there to visit or even worked there then you can see how many people were there by looking at the door.

We only had a few more rooms left to see. When we went through a big hallway and the tour guides showed us a written safety certificate behind a glass and they told us about why they had to close it.    As we walked out of the old mill to go back onto the bus, we wanted to have some people talk on television to tell what the mill is like when people can't go to the mill anymore. It was very interesting to go to the mill.  It was upsetting to because they worked so hard on building it and don't want to take it down.

I think that if they can't reopen it then they should leave it and let it break down itself instead of taking it down themselves because we would like to go by it and still remember all about what they did inside the mill and remember how much hard work they did and what it looks like now. 

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