Anger. Sadness. Denial. Hopelessness. Residents of the Katahdin region are feeling and sharing a range of emotions as the paper industry that once fueled and ruled the area was dealt another blow this week with the bankruptcy of Great Northern Paper Co.
One word that shouldn’t be overlooked, however, is resiliency.
Millinocket, East Millinocket and neighboring communities like Medway, Mattawamkeag and Chester have gone through enormous changes in recent decades. Through it all, the resilience of residents and business owners has been tested, but it has not been broken.
That strength will get the region through the latest changes, whether it be a new owner for the East Millinocket mill or a new use of the area’s abundant wood fiber, increasing tourism or a combination of these things.
In 1900, when Great Northern Paper Co. began making newsprint at its new mill in Millinocket, it was the biggest paper mill in the world. A mill in East Millinocket was added to the company’s portfolio in 1907.
Rapid changes then ensued in the region. Millinocket became known as the “Magic City.” For decades, the mill and town grew together. When new paper machines were added, the company built new streets, sold lots and dug foundations for new homes for the new workers the mill needed.
When Millinocket’s high school burned in 1921, GNP gave $50,000 toward the construction of a new building. The company paid most of the towns’ taxes. High school graduates were nearly assured of a job at the GNP mills or ancillary operations when their education ended. The company paid high wages and leased lots to its workers, enabling many to have camps in the woods near town.
“Perhaps unique among American employers because it was so remote from notice and completely surrounded by the natural resources that provided both raw material and power, Great Northern Paper Company in 1977 was the product of a century of American industrial Zeitgeist,” David Woodbury, who joined the company in 1977, wrote in his mid-2000s memoir “The Fall of Great Northern Paper Company.” “Its 4,200 workers offered living proof that capitalism works and that both the employer and its people need merely to be left alone and they will indeed get it right.”
Shortly after Woodbury was hired, changes turned negative. He blames the demise of GNP on a mix of factors: tougher environmental laws, spruce budworm infestations, labor strife in the paper industry, among others.
Job cuts began in the late 1980s, and paper machines shut down. When Woodbury left GNP in 1999, fewer than 1,700 people still worked there.
Technology allowed more paper to be made with fewer workers and, more recently, growth of electronic communications has substantially decreased demand for paper. The mills changed ownership; GNP’s land and then its hydropower system were sold. The populations of Millinocket and East Millinocket have been in decline for decades.
The Millinocket mill closed in 2008 and the one in East Millinocket has been idle since 2011. Then, this week, GNP, which is now managed by Cate Street Capital, which revived the Great Northern name in 2011, filed for bankruptcy.
“Thirty years ago, folks in Millinocket and East Millinocket could boast that half of the people in America regularly held something in their hands printed on paper that had been produced in one of those two towns — a newspaper, a catalog, a school workbook, or a telephone book,” Woodbury reminisced.
What these towns will be known for in the future is unknown. Unlike the past when one company determined their destiny, local residents and businesses will have a larger hand in shaping what is to come. The tone they set is crucial. No ideas should be dismissed without careful consideration. And there should be no expectation that the towns’ economies will be dominated by a single enterprise.
The words of a speech President Franklin Roosevelt was set to give in April 1945 (he died the day before he was set to deliver it at the founding conference of the United Nations) offer a hopeful look forward.
“The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.”