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.

Dylan Davis
I think that the Eastern Fine Paper Mill was neat to look at. It has been all destroyed and disastered, but it had only been dead for 4 years. If they clean up the old mill good enough to be a dance floor of a restaurant it will take a lot of work. I don't no why they would even think about cleaning it up to do that. There are holes in the walls old scraps of wood and metal along the floors. The floors have holes in them that are covered up by various things in the building. Like one of the holes is covered up by a piece of a machine and some are covered up by long sheets of metal. That would definitely have to be fixed.

There are big brick pipes for the steam and gases to flow through going up to the sky, they will have to destroy them in order for it to look neater and more like a restaurant or apartment building. They would have to clean the building up if anyone would want to eat there, or live there. The outside is dirty too there is old garbage and chemicals out there draining into the river. There are some dead birds around, and there is graffiti all over the walls, it seems people have broken in and vandalized the old mill. That might be the explanation for some of the mess. It is well secured by locks and gates, but I'm sure there are ways in.

A lot of the stuff in there is about 100 years old and probably should be kept there, it would be better to make the old mill into a museum. Just clean it up a little bit and it would be fine. They might make a museum who knows but all that stuff should not be moved or thrown out. It is too old and valuable to the people that used to work there, I'm sure. There's an old metal wall or door that was hundreds of names on it from a long time ago, people have carved there names in the red paint on the door for a while, that should be kept. There was all so a sheet of metal with someone's name welded into it.

The mill would be a neat place to see all cleaned up and different, but it will take a long time to do that with all that mess. Hopefully they follow through with their ideas with the old mill.

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