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.

Kristen Daigle
The mill in South Brewer, Maine opened its doors of hope to hundreds of people in 1889.  After over one-hundred years of paper making, it shut down in January of 2004.  Now it's being redeveloped and will be turned into another source of jobs and hope for the unemployed citizens of Maine.

Recently our class went to the mill here in Brewer.  Inside the mill it was dark and spooky. At one time I thought I saw a person in the shadows, but in reality it was only a light blended in with the rusty pipes.  As the tour went on I heard more and more sounds and saw more and more things. I saw water pouring in from the cold rain from the cloudy Maine sky.  There was a red door that had names carved in among the chipping and peeling paint.  The echoing of the pitter-patter of water hitting the floor made the place more and more mysterious.      

The giant rooms made me ask myself questions.  When the mill was still running what purpose did each room have?  Where did they eat lunch?  Was there a special room for them to eat in?  These questions invited more and more questions into my head until it was full.  Then we stepped into a room with windows to let in some light in.  Rooms like those made the place kind of gloomy to see all that was left over from when people used to work here.  It reminded me of seeing the homes of hurricane victims on the television.  The scattered wood and metal scraps were everywhere among the dirt.  The metal being kicked around the floor sounded hollow in that huge, empty mill.  

I then saw torn wires from the wall and the floor.  Without tripping over the wires I wondered "What did the wires go to?  Did they used to connect to more than just the cold, rusted remains of the machines?"  I thought I would have tripped until finally I made it out of the jungle of torn wires.  

After exploring more of the mill we stepped under an archway of fallen bricks.   The bricks looked as if they were thrown among the debris and were broken and covered in dust.  The doorway appeared to have been made from a bomb going off in the center of the room.  There were so many memories in this building.   Some of which were cheerful, sad, some brought love and hope, but some brought despair.  The memories made the rooms more dark or full of light without any light sources at all.  I think that it was those memories still keeping this place alive, it was those memories that kept this lonely mill from dying off completely.  The memories in those walls were like the blood of the building.  Without blood we would die.

When choosing what will happen to the abandoned mill I hope that they will choose something to remember who was there and what happened there, I hope that they choose something that will give hundreds of people jobs like the mill did because many people had a hard time finding jobs in the state of Maine after the closing of the giant Brewer mill.

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