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.

Dustin Pelkey
I was just waiting to enter the old mill. I was dying to go inside the old building. At last! I am in the building and now I want to just go everywhere. We walked toward an empty room of darkness and everyone was looking everywhere with their flashlights, I begged Nathan for his flashlight so I could look around myself. Nathan finally gave his flashlight to me and now I looked into a different room and a giant piece of metal was sticking out of the floor, there was rusty water dripping on it from the ceiling and it looked creepy in a way but it looked cool also. I totally ignored the person giving us information about the room because I was looking everywhere. It was like I was learning for the first time! Now the whole group started moving in the direction we came from and we kept walking into the darkness. I just wanted to go everywhere but we stopped and I was just looking around again. When I was looking around I noticed lots of items: there was dust on the floor, old tools, clothing on the floor and more dark rooms. Then the group started moving again but into a light room because the ceiling was practically a white glass material. There were lots of pigeons at the ceiling and they were just hanging out on the pipes above. Sooner than later the room became dark again and we slowed down because we were going upstairs! That made me feel so happy. I felt like the floor was going to be looser and not that sturdy! I couldn't wait.

When we got upstairs I was looking everywhere, I was expecting lots dust and old broken things but I couldn't really tell because it was so dark up there. We kept moving and there were lots of broken pipes sticking out of the floor and people almost tripped on them and there was a wire hanging down and people almost ran into it a lot. Then we got to a corner and we all went to a big empty room and we went into another hallway (all the hallways were really big) and then we stopped...finally. I turned on Nathan's flashlight again and I started looking everywhere. After a while I started to listen to the instructor. Then we started moving in the direction we came from and we came to that big room again and I noticed that there were boxes full of paper. We came to the bigger room with all the pipes coming from the floor and we passed those and went down a different hall but before we did we stopped, the tour guides were telling us that there will be a big hole on the left that was deep as 10 feet. The 10 foot hole was where an old paper machine has been but then they took it out for some reason. Finally we went in the hall and it was like something hit the roof and fell through and made that hole! It was a cool sight, there was water pouring in from the roof because it was raining outside. The hole in the roof made me think that the paper machines were taken out by a crane. When we passed the hole we took a right and it was dark again and the tour guides were saying that there were going to be more holes on to out left and right. There were and there were no holes in the ceiling. As we were walking through the giant hall there was water dripping from the ceiling and I was just looking around and all of a sudden a water drop hit me in the eye, I was thinking of the dirt and oils in the water because it did sting a little.

When we got out of the hall with the two holes the tour guide started talking about the room and asked for any ideas for the room. A few of the kids raised there hands and they kept saying "a hockey rink!" but the tour guides were saying" we can't because of the support beams". In my head I was thinking of the room to be a paint-ball course and other people just started yelling ideas and I was just looking around and I noticed on the support beams there was a line and above it said "do not stack paper higher than this line!" So I thought the room was a paper stacking room. Then I started listening to the ideas people were saying when one of the people finally said "A paint-ball course!". After that people just started yelling "paint-ball course!" Then after that we all went to a small stair way and there was and empty elevator shaft so I looked down it and it didn't go down far, it only went down like 7 feet and there was a bunch of rubble. Then we all went down a stair case and then a cement ramp and it all lead to the basement of the mill. They took us down there because there was an old freight elevator door with names and dates scratched in it. Even though the mill has been there for 100 years there was a date on it that said "1804", you can tell the date was a joke or a lie but we all know the mill hasn't been open that long. My group didn't stay down there for long because we were like the last group down there. After that we went to the first floor and waited at the entrance of the mill for one of the tour guides to check if the other part of the mill was unlocked, we waited and she came back and told us to go so we entered the other part of the mill and it smelled BAD!

When we got inside we all walked down this big cement ramp and at the bottom there was a huge puddle of disgusting water and almost everyone walked in it and Nathan and I laughed at any person that walked in it. My group was the farthest in that small part of the room and I didn't even listen, I just stood there with my nose tucked inside my shirt and just looking around. About ten minutes later we all got out of there and got on the busses and just waited for some of the teachers and we also waited for some kids being interviewed. We waited for them and we left the big old mill and came back to school and had lunch. That was my day at the "Eastern Fine Paper Mill".

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