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.

John Herlihy
As I entered the old shut down building of Eastern Fine Paper Mill I wondered what lay inside that I would see and forever remember.  The three paper making machines that produced twenty-two tons of paper every day were removed from the old dank building which left large holes in the floor filled with debris.  There was stuff left in the building that ranged from an enormous wood pulp blender, from piles of old boots left behind by the previous mill workers.      

The old rickety stairs were narrow and barely safe.  There were chills that went down the spines of some students and mysterious shadows and faces appearing out of walls and disappearing in an instance.  Water was pouring from the ceilings because of holes in the roof.           

There was a coca-cola bottle sitting on a paper cutter and a big red door that had names from workers that worked in the mill scratched on it. There were TV camera men there filming the tour, and people were interviewed.  Most of the students there thought for sure that the place was haunted.  It was easy to tell because their eyes would be darting around in dark rooms.  There were windows that had been taken out and bricked up to fit a smaller sized window.  

A lot of the rooms smelled like old boots and others smelled like saw dust.  The upper levels had metal plates on the floors to make the floors stronger and to last longer.  A wall full of graffiti had a car door that was for a racer that worked there.  Two people died in that mill which is pretty good for it was open for over a century.  There was old wiring that came through a pipe in the floor.  The boiler that powered the mill was all rusty and looked liked it hadn't been use in twenty years.  Rats were running around all over the place and there was a dead pidgin on the floor.  In places there were holes in the floor that looked like they led to a basement of some sort.  A metal plate that was on the floor had rust on it that looked like blood.         

Some pidgins were flying around rooms that we never entered.  The giant pipe that ran by the door that we first entered had a couple of missing sections that looked like it was a heating pipe or a pipe that carried water from place to place.  I thought the place was cool while other people thought it was just plain creepy.  I like to go to historical places and learn about its history especially if it is in the same town that I live in.  It is pretty sad that the mill shut down and I like that they are trying to make it into a safe environment for civil use.  If they turn some of it into condos we would get a lot of people from out of state coming in to live.  If people came from outer state to live in Brewer the economy would increase.  On the upper level there was an empty fire hose reel that looks like it wouldn't move.  The lowest height looked to be about eight feet high.  In some spots it would smell like gas.  

The building is 336,000 square feet.  The mill was opened in 1896 which means it is 110 years old.  In one of the rooms there were two broken mirrors and at least five more unbroken mirrors, in the other end of that room there are pits that were filled with sand.  There was a safety award still behind glass Machine number 2 was sent of to Asia to be fixed and sold to a different company.

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