Reggie Gagne

I was in front of the entry way in to the broken down building.  I was not in a hurry to rush inside. I stood there thinking of what it would be like once I entered.  A million possibilities ran through my mind, but I was hoping just hoping that it would be different.  I stepped through the doorway.  It seemed that the darkness was sucking me in like a pitch black hole that could go on forever.  I turned on my flashlight and looked around; there was nothing but filthy garbage and clothing in a heap I wondered if that was a lost and found pile.    

My group started the 2 hour tour.  The darkness also had on effect in showing how old this building really was.  I could here the dripping of rain drops off in to the distant shadows.  As we went through the building I decided that I needed proof.  Proof of what this mill had made, proof that this beast of a building was once full of life, but most of all what this company meant to the community and former workers.    

We went up a creaky flight of stairs and down a medal ramp as I turned around a corner I saw boxes full of paper considering that this company had been shut down 2 years ago in was still white with little dust.  It was like it was a memory of what had meant so much to the local economy.  I made my way to what seemed the basement.  On a red elevator door were hundreds of names welded by the former employees.  That is how I think that the workers had left part of themselves behind in a place that they had considered their second home.    

Finally I was outside and I could breathe the fresh October air.  I decided that what ever they would do to renovate this building they would be preserving a large piece of brewer's history. 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.

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