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.

Jacob Joy
As I stepped into the dark depths of the ghostly mill questions filled my head. I had a strange feeling sticking to my stomach I wondered did people actually lurk these halls just two years ago. The old misty mill had memories most of the memories were held in the hands of people I did not even know. As I walked up the ramp to the main entrance of the mill and turned the corner a moldy old misty smell filled the air and I thought I was going to be sick.     

When we started touring the mill it looked like it had been a home away from home for the 240 workers laid off in 2004. They were told to get out. One days notice to give up there job and leave a good part of there disappearing lives behind.  My visit to the eastern fine paper was interesting and exciting.  What I saw was a lot more then I though it was going to be.   Hears what I thought about the 100 year old 336,000 square foot building.     

I walked in with amazement in my eyes it was old and rusty and its huge interior where many people worked hard to put food on the table almost scared me.  As the lady up front started the tour I could not pay attention to her for two reasons I could not hear her and most importantly it was am amazingly hard to pay attention because of how much I was interested in the peace of history sitting in front of me.  All of it amazed me the dirt on the floor the graffiti on the wall the rotting wood that we were standing on.  I was most amazed that people were working in this filthy giant just two years ago.   

We started to walk into the darkness of the mill and I took my flashlight out of my pocket and turned it on I hesitated to flash it up to the ceiling.  Suddenly I saw some sort of bird flying over my head as every girl in the seventh grade screamed as if they were being killed.   As I looked to my right I saw an office filled with books, computers, and sticky notes that sick feeling came into my stomach again.  I kept thinking if that office is full he probably was not there the day it closed and never had a chance to clean out the office that he had worked in for 5 plus years.  What scared me the most is that he or she never got a chance to say good bye.

Every were I looked I saw puddles on the cement floor and the floors were covered with dirt so the puddles were actually mud puddles. As we passed more holes in the floor and more puddles from the old leaky ceiling we saw an old room full of cardboard boxes and they all looked like they were in great shape ready to go to the next person who called and asked for them to be delivered.  I remember not thinking the floors were safe to walk on and the ceiling was not safe to walk under and that scared me.     

As we kept going I saw holes in the floor that they had warned us about we turned the corner and I saw huge holes were the paper machines used to be.  It astonished me that the newest paper machine they had been using was from 1904! the holes looked like they were filling up with water from the leeks of the huge falling roof and "there are probably plenty of rats" said my friend Reggie as we started to leave the room where the paper machines were and headed to a place that smelled even worse and then stopped so the same lady who had talked before and she said" we are heading into a room were there are paper making machines on your left and on your right so stay in the middle and do not lean over the railings".  We then started to go up to the next floor where the developer of the mill [the guy who wants to turn the old defunct mill into a mall where locals can shop] he asked us what do you want for me to do to make this fun for you?  I thought there was a millionaire asking me what I want to happen hear so I raised my hand and I said a movie theater and a couple more questions were asked and then we went on.     

We then went to what we though was the last stop of this very fun trip the freight elevator door where people from years ago had printed the names on the door. My reading teacher saw her old neighbor.  We had not spent much time at the elevator door when  someone said turn around we have one last thing to see before we go back to the school so we started to go back to the entrance we came in we stopped right before the exit and went in to the power plant that kept the mill functioning and again the developer asked what would you want to see happen in this part of the mill on e kid said why don't we just keep it as a power plant for maybe a movie theater and all the shops apartments and anything else this mill would become.     

So as you can see it was quite an adventure and I only told you half of what I saw that day.  I think this was a chance of a lifetime and I am glad they picked the brewer middle school seventh grade students to experience this.  So as we headed out to the bus and drove out of the parking lot the hole bus was buzzing with exciting stories of what they saw and I just sat there quietly thinking about every thing that I saw that day and how I will never forget my seventh grade trip to the eastern fine paper mill in south Brewer.

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