LINCOLN, Maine ― Volunteers at the Lincoln Regional Food Cupboard ended the day before Thanksgiving with a fair amount of food still on the shelves.
Crates of bottled water, large packs of sugar, cans of vegetables, bottles of wheat germ and cooking oil, and stacks of pudding containers lined the blue shelves along the cupboard’s walls.
But that will not last long, said Lincoln Regional Food Cupboard Director Melvin Voisine.
The shutdown of Lincoln Paper and Tissue LLC, the town’s third-largest employer, is starting to tell on the shelter’s reserves, Voisine said, but that effect won’t become acute for several more weeks. By Christmas, the layoff at the mill, and the trickle-down effects upon the mill’s many regional suppliers, will hit the Lincoln food pantry hard.
“The numbers have increased a little bit right now. We expect them to increase a lot more, probably within the next month or two,” Voisine said Wednesday. “It’s the fact that they have a reserve of money or paychecks or stuff. Usually it is the third or fourth week after [millworkers] have not had a paycheck that they start coming here.
“Mill people are really proud people. They have been used to working and maintaining their own households and things,” he said. “For a lot of them, it is hard to put their pride aside and get assistance.”
The sale of the mill to a group of asset liquidators on Friday for $5.95 million ended a downward slide that began with the explosion of a chemical recovery boiler in November 2013. About 185 of the mill’s 400 workers were laid off in the aftermath of the disaster.
Lincoln Paper filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September. Union officials said about 70 people were still working at the mill at the time of the bankruptcy auction. That number will likely will drop to about 12 by Dec. 1, they said.
Efforts to contact the mill’s latest buyer, Boston-based Gordon Brothers Commercial & Industrial LLC, have so far been unsuccessful for town officials, Town Manager Ron Weatherbee said Wednesday. In the meantime, only rumors about Gordon Brothers’ intentions, and vague hopes that the mill will restart, are floating about, Weatherbee and Town Council Chairman Steve Clay said.
Lincoln Paper officials said after the auction that it was unlikely that the mill would restart.
It’s a sign of their pride and work ethic that laid-off workers have begun working at the pantry as volunteers, helping prepare and deliver food to the pantry’s clients, Voisine said.
“I have seen that the last 10 years. The mill has been up and down,” Voisine said, “and the millworkers are very good. Usually you call them and they come. They will do anything we want or need them to do, and it makes it really good to have that, because a lot of our volunteers are elderly people.”
About 1,200 families from Passadumkeag to Kingman and from the Katahdin region seek pantry aid annually, Voisine said. About 40 volunteers donate time or money to the pantry.
The number of client families will likely increase by 100 to 200 over the next few months, he said. He and Clay expressed confidence that pantry donations will keep pace with the increased need. Lincoln endured several mill closures before, most recently in 2004, so area residents are familiar with the process, Clay said.
“We help each other out when it’s needed,” Clay said. “That’s the way it’s always been.”
And donations, Voisine said, have been coming in from as far away as Texas, usually from former Lincoln residents who feel for their old hometown.
But the pantry can always use more, he said.
Anyone interested in making donations to the food pantry can mail them to the Lincoln Federal Credit Union at 171 West Broadway, Lincoln, 04457, Attention: Lincoln Regional Food Cupboard.