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.

Evan Dionne
As I walked into the factory I could hear water dripping from holes in the ceiling. We started the tour and started walking through the creepy rooms of Eastern Fine Paper Mill in the small city of Brewer, Maine. For a factory that had only been out of business for two years it seemed like it had been out of business for a hundred years.

With debris of old paper machines and trash all over the floor with the paint peeling off the walls of the old factory.  As we walked down the hall way farther and farther the mill got darker and darker and the debris got more and more it was quite a site to see. We made our way up some stairs into a room that was spooky and cold. When we were up stairs a man gave a speech about how the paper roller worked as he talked I could not help but look around at the frightening room.

After he made his speech we went back down stairs and in to a section were we could only see by the light of the flash light and the digital camera flashes as we made are way out of the gloomy area the group made it's way through a walkway which we could see were the old paper machines used to sit. It looks like a hand grenade had been thrown were the paper machines had sat in the factory for over one hundred years. In this little walk way there was so many holes in the ceiling that there was no way that you would not get a little wet.

I made my way off the wet walkway. The tour took us down a stairway down to an old fall out shelter were the air got colder and the room got darker. As we stared at an old red freight elevator door that had names of workers that had worked there  people and the years that the names had been engraved in to the old rust as I observed I saw names that were dated back as far as 1947 and ones that had been scratched on in 1997.

As we stumbled our way out of the fall out shelter and back into the day light of the rainy cold miserable day. I looked up at the building at the cracked windows and the old cracked brick of the one hundred year old build. I was rushed into an other building were the furnace was kept and a man gave a speech about  who knows what I looked around and in shock what a big room it just made me think how this factory looked like in the forties and fifties when it was in it's prime time. After the tour was over we made our way back on the buses back to Brewer Middle School. On the bus ride back I thought I was one lf the last people to enter that mill before construction work will be done and this place will be something completely different.   

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