When Bucksport’s paper mill shut down almost 11 years ago, it didn’t just take hundreds of jobs and more than 40 percent of the tax base with it; the closure also left a void in the life of the town and the workers that spent decades making paper.
Now, a new museum has opened in its former gatehouse to honor those workers and suppliers. The yearslong process bringing it to life has reunited some of them for a new purpose with a sense of community they missed.
“It brought us back together,” said Wesley “Chip” Stubbs, who worked in the mill for decades and was foreman of the restoration process.
Bucksport appears to be the only former paper mill town in Maine to create such a memorial to its former major employer, and the process has shown how much deeply the mill shaped the area and the hundreds of people whose lives it touched. Once one of Maine’s dominant industries, papermaking has shrunk considerably in recent decades with other mills closing in Jay, East Millinocket, Millinocket, Old Town, Lincoln and elsewhere.
What was first known as the Maine Seaboard Paper Company produced its first piece of paper in Bucksport in 1930 and changed hands over the years to the St. Regis Paper Company, Champion International Corp., International Paper and finally Verso Paper Corp.
In late 2014, Verso closed the mill, citing increased costs and diminishing demand for paper.
Many people still feel its absence, Stubbs said. One recent visitor thanked him for his work on the museum but declined to come inside, wanting to remember it how it used to be.
The mill was heavily involved in Bucksport’s development and community life for decades; there’s a visible hole in the skyline where its buildings once stood, and the town is quieter without the sounds of papermaking.
Plans to convert a large part of the site to a salmon farm have so far failed to materialize. A Maine Maritime Academy training facility overlooks the gatehouse, but the surrounding mill property otherwise remains empty where former mill buildings have been knocked down.
Through decades inside the mill, machines began to feel like an extension of the worker, Stubbs said. He tended Paper Machine #5 and shut it down on the last day of Verso Paper’s operation here.
But when former workers get together or stop by, they often talk most about the people they worked with, according to Stubbs.
“It was a family that took care of each other,” he said. “…That was the camaraderie, was the people you worked with. That’s what they missed, more than the mill.”
The process of creating a museum in its memory began almost right away as employees started saving artifacts. In 2017, “Still Mill: Stories and Songs of Making Paper in Bucksport, Maine,” an anthology of mill stories, poems and memories, was published as a fundraiser for the museum.
Two years later, momentum gathered within the town’s historical society around renovating the former gatehouse to house it. The latest owner of the Bucksport Generation power plant, JERA Americas, eventually sold it to the society for a dollar in 2023.
A soft opening last year welcomed the public into the first room, which workers once passed every morning; after years of cleaning and ongoing utility work, the whole building is now filled with exhibits collected from neighbors, yard sales, former coworkers and a storage unit of material stashed by Ray Seamans, a mill electrician who was able to take home memorabilia as it shut down.
Among the artifacts are the first and last pieces of paper printed there, a tool cart used by pipe maintenance workers, lunch pails and backpacks, a desk complete with an original time clock, branded items and a diorama of the mill site.
Donations grew by word of mouth and are still coming in. When a reporter visited on Tuesday, Stubbs paused to unbox a grateful letter and package of St. Regis-branded merchandise including golf balls and a Zippo lighter sent in by a visitor who had worked for the company in Minnesota. Locally, others have willed more artifacts to the museum.
The team also hopes next summer to add hands-on demonstrations of how to make pulp, screen it, press it into paper and set it to dry so that younger generations can understand the process.
Making the museum a reality hasn’t been easy, Stubbs said, nor was it simple to turn a team of papermakers into carpenters. But he called it a “joyful task,” best explained by the story of a former mill worker whose daughter was invited to bring him in to visit the museum during restorations.
“The crew stopped work, and we sat down and talked with him, and visited with him,” Stubbs said. “If you could’ve heard the twinkle in his voice, seen the twinkle in his eye, and I know there was a twinkle in his heart…it made all the work that I have done here, or we have done here, worthwhile.”
The Bucksport Paper Mill Museum at 4 Mariner Way is open from 8 a.m. to noon on Tuesdays through Nov. 25.