When my father opened a restaurant on the corner of Main and Central streets in downtown Bucksport in 1980, the paper mill down the road was doing well — which meant he was, too.
For 20 years, St. Regis and Champion paper mills were his biggest customers. He catered events and delivered meals to workers nearly every day. They filled his dining rooms and drank at his bar. At lunch, a line of managers and their clients would snake out the front door, while the dishwasher loaded the truck out the back door with hundreds of mill-bound deliveries. He even set up a dedicated phone line for taking orders from Champion. MacLeod’s served 1,200 turkey dinners around the clock at the mill one Thanksgiving.
As a child growing up in the area, it felt like our mill had always been there. Its loss was always a possibility, but it was hard to imagine what it would look like. Then earlier this month, Verso Paper brass announced they were halting paper making on Dec. 1. The mill just wasn’t profitable, they said.
For as long as I could see over the dashboard of my family’s car, watching the mill rise from the trees on River Road meant we were home. The sawdust smell, billowing steam and workers crossing the road at shift changes were as much a part of Bucksport as the view of the dark fort across the river.
Generations of my schoolmates’ relatives worked at the mill. My best friend’s father was its manager for a time in the 1990s. The company sponsored local sports teams and hung Christmas lights along Main Street on the holidays. It once provided three-quarters of the tax revenue. The high school where my mother works is funded in part by those taxes, which now total a more modest 44 percent of Bucksport’s municipal budget.
From a very young age, it was clear to me that the town needed the mill. But it was never clear whether the mill needed the town.
The shuttering of the town’s largest employer means immediate pain and unspeakable heartbreak for dozens of Bucksport families, an economic impact that will likely take years to fully realize, and a harsh confrontation with the question of what happens to a mill town when the mill goes away.
From the outside, it would be easy to write off Bucksport as a failure, to say that it can’t recover from the loss of the mill.
But that’s just not true.
Bucksport is a beautiful — if underutilized — town that sits across the Penobscot River from two popular tourist attractions. It’s on the way to Acadia. It has the infrastructure of the mill as well as railroad tracks and a river. It has skilled workers. You can’t deny all that potential.
The mill closing hurts. But it also is an opportunity.
In the days after the news of the mill’s impending shutdown, gubernatorial candidates jumped on each other to assign blame. There have been calls to keep the mill open, to bring in new investors and keep making paper. It’s always easier in the short run to keep things as they are. But what’s the next step? Where will the paper industry be in 10 years? Where will be Bucksport be? What about Maine?
The town needs leaders to offer a new vision — one that keeps all those workers employed in a sustainable, growing industry. One that can truly help Bucksport thrive, not just survive a few more years by doing what it’s always done.
When International Paper bought out Champion in 2000, the new bosses starting cutting costs. That’s when the mill phone at MacLeod’s stopped ringing. There was less catering work. Management didn’t go out for lunch meetings. Business slowed.
Dad eventually had to stop serving lunch altogether to cut costs.
That was 14 years ago, and he’s still in business. Four years ago, he resumed serving lunch.
He found a way to keep going. So can Bucksport.
Dan MacLeod is a musician and writer living in Syracuse, New York. He is an Orland native, and he can be reached at dansmacleod@gmail.com.