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.

Justin Grevencamp
As I entered this cold homeless dark mill I could already hear the fun laughs of the mill workers long ago. The creaks of door ways and shrieks of people made me wonder why they shut the wonders place of work down. In the cold gloomy hallways I saw a lonely door opened, a dead pigeon, dripping water that leaked through the ceilings smell that made me think I was going to die, bent pipes or brain cells, old paper making machines, piles of junk, broken stairways, and an elevator shaft are parts of what me and some people saw and smelt at the mill.  An old coke can with coke still in it caught my eye. The camera man was taping this dying building of an empire that was fit for a king. I saw bricks on the walls like the intestine of a monster. Wood, steel, and concrete beams covered the so called ceiling of the monster that was called the mill. Down in this heart or the basement, I reached a huge gaping red door and as I looked on this gargantuan red door, I saw the names of people who worked there, the names on the door written messy like graffiti on walls and trains. Then the two hours past, as we entered a power building or the brain as I would call it. A man was asking the seventh grade kids what we wanted; some said a restaurant, museum, and an ice rink. The hockey players supported the ice rink. I personally think there should be a mall or movie theater. Then it was over, the one-hundred year old, three-hundred thirty-six thousand square foot mill was seen by me and the other seventh graders on the two buses, but no one person in the whole mill saw it like me or was thinking like me.

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