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.

Kassie King
The opened the door to reveal a dark dungeon like cave and ushered us in. Two years ago the mill was up and running as it had for the last one hundred years, but now the Eastern Fine paper Mill looked like a prison after a hurricane. There were clothes and shoes everywhere, and even a half filled can of coke. There were still workbenches with tools on them. It looked like the workers left abruptly. I wondered to myself "Why did the workers leave so quickly?" and "Wouldn't they give them time to collect their things?"

As I entered the mill I saw many things, but the very first thing I saw was color, even if most of them were blacks and grays. There were other colors too though, there were reds, and yellows, and blues, and whites. I also saw lots and lots of chipped paint.  I also saw holes everywhere, in the walls and on the floors, and I don't mean little gopher-hole sized things. Some of the holes were as big as three medium cars put together. My teacher saw a dead pigeon and some of my classmates said they saw a pile of human waste. I can tell you one thing the Eastern Fine Paper Mill is definitely not the most sanitary place in the world. I remember single file stairways and walking over creaking wooden bridges which I shined my flashlight down upon to reveal a big room with cement floors and big holes below. That if you stepped wrong......... could be lost forever.        

The things I heard. A very simple question, a very simple answer. I heard the sounds of my classmates screaming of fear and revealing their comments to their friends nearby. I heard the sound of metal against metal as many of us tripped over little pieces of it's past. The Eastern Fine Paper Mill sounded hollow.

It's a dark, dirty, scary place with water dripping down everywhere that I would never want to go inside again if it was in this condition. I may think it's dark, dirty, and scary, but I never said it wasn't memorable.

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