Community
Mill Town Profile: Mechanic Falls, Maine
By Ken Anderson
Jul 17, 2003 - 2:41:00 PM

Located approximately ten miles west of Lewiston, and about as far southeast of Oxford, Mechanic Falls is similar to Millinocket in many ways, although there are also striking differences.

Incorporated in 1893, just over 3,100 people now reside in Mechanic Falls, a small town lying along the banks of the Little Androscoggin River.

Not long ago, it was a thriving mill town, until its last mill closed in 1981. The town struggled with the loss of its tax base and its primary employer throughout the 1980s, but has experienced a dramatic renewal in the 1990s, continuing today.

It didn't come about by accident.

The Marcal Paper Mill, the last of Mechanic Falls' two paper mills, had employed about 250 people at the time that it closed its doors, not nearly as many as Great Northern, but still it was the only major employer in the smaller town of Mechanic Falls which, at that time, had only a restaurant, a couple of stores, and some smaller businesses which existed to support the mill, and the people who worked there.

When the mill closed, the town was devastated.

"It was the heart and soul of the community," said Dana Lee, Mechanic Falls' town manager. "Everybody worked there. You went to school knowing that when you got out of school, you had a job at the mill. Your dad did, your grandad did, your uncle and your brother did, and certainly you were going to work at the mill, with few exceptions."

However, as the paper market got more and more competitive, particularly against the overseas market, the United States market dried up, resulting in cutbacks and closures of mills throughout the state of Maine, including the ones in Mechanic Falls.

Not only did the town lose its primary tax base, but the townspeople lost their primary employer. For sale signs began appearing on the yards, and the town was faced with a dilemma.

The housing market suffered because, suddenly, Mechanic Falls was not a great place to buy a home. What was the point in going to Mechanic Falls if there was no mill?

"It's hard to imagine how dependent you become on the mill," said Lee. "Your whole economy, and all of the town's employees are based on the presence of the mill."

When Marcal left in 1981, the town had to cut back on teachers, on municipal employees, and on services. At that point, a town is placed an uncomfortable position. It has no money, yet the need for promotion is greater than ever. A town that has lost its primary employer needs to attract people and businesses, yet no one wants to move there if the streets are not being kept up or the sidewalks maintained. When the entire infrastructure is based on meeting the needs of a mill, in the absence of that mill there is little reason for anyone to remain, let alone move there.

Mechanic Falls had some forewarning. When the mill began to shut down one machine, then another, and started laying off people who were never called back; as 250 employees became 180, then 100, and 60, there were those who realized that it could no longer depend on the presence of an operating mill.

While the current town manager was not there at the time, Lee said this was when the town tried desperately to diversify its economy, although not in time to prevent a decade of hard times.

"It's critically important to try to diversify your economy," said Lee. The manager said that a town has to actively seek, encourage, and promote small and midsized businesses. "If you've got twenty of those when the mill loses value and your tax base drops, they can buoy your employment and the tax base," he added.

"It's easy to sit on your laurels," he said, "to think that because you're a milltown, you're all set."

Mechanic Falls did that. They had the mill, and they were all set. What could go wrong?

When a town is built around the presence of a mill, its infrastructure exists to support the mill. The better maintained roads lead to the mill, and even the street lights are set to accomodate the closing times of the mill.

"This makes sense," said Lee. "As long as they are your bread and butter, you've got to treat them well," he added; "but at the same time, you've got to begin to prepare your backside for when your bread and butter dries up."

Once the people of Mechanic Falls realized that their days of dependence upon the mill were coming to an end, they took steps aimed at speeding their recovery. They set up an organization called the Mechanic Falls Development Commission, as a separate arm from the town government, the council, or any of the other planning boards.

The development commission went to the state of Maine for money that could be used to encourage the development of small business in Mechanic Falls. With funding available, the commission went out and tried to find small businesses that might want to come to their town.

"If we help them get going, they grow here," said Lee. Still today, the town has from six to eight of these businesses, one of them being Auburn Manufacturing, a very successful company, according to the town manager.

Important to the development of small business in Mechanic Falls was the availability of no-interest or low-interest loans for businesses to grow or expand. This is something that can be brought about by a local chamber of commerce, council of governments, or development commission.

Realizing that they would no longer going to have a 250-employee business, the town aimed for something more attainable, such as fifty 5-employee businesses or five 50-person businesses.

"If we were going to get those jobs back," said Lee, "we were going to have to eat the elephant in bite-sized pieces."

Also important to the revival of Mechanic Falls was its infrastructure; things such as new water pipes, new sewer pipes, and new sidewalks.

Even when they have money, Lee explained, a lot of mill towns will develop a run-down appearance, particularly around the area of the mill.

"You need to get rid of the mill appearance," said Lee. "When you go from a mill economy to a non-mill economy," he said. "It's hard to change that without doing some landscaping."

Shortly after Lee came to Mechanic Falls, he recognized the need to do something about the Little Androscoggin River. The river had become a joke, a dumping ground, and since the mills were gone, the community opted to make a goal of cleaning it up, turning it into a place where people could swim or fish.

To clean up their river, the town's public works department served as a backbone for a largely volunteer effort by community groups such as the Boy Scouts, the Lions, the Masons, and others, assisted by local businesses and individual citizens. As a community, they met together on a Saturday morning and, before the day was out, they had retrieved tons of trash, 125 tires, a part of a car, a refrigerator, an old boat, two or three bicycles, and other assorted debris.

Appearances are not all that may need to be changed, however; as community attitudes, as well, will tend to be based around its identity as a mill town.

"Even when I came here in 1990, some nine years later," said Lee, "there was still a tremendous psychological or spiritual trauma that pervaded the town."

"They still identified with being a mill town, even though the mill had been gone for almost a decade," he said. "It's not there," he said of the mill. "It's not coming back, and people needed to accept that."

"People were still in denial," he explained, comparing the loss of a town's primary employer with the stages of grief that a person must go through after losing a loved one. Before a community can move on to acceptance and recovery, it must first go through the other stages of grief, which include denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance. As in the loss of a loved one, those who remain stuck in an earlier stage are unable to move on to the acceptance that leads to recovery.

"It's like that," said Lee. "It's like mourning. Whether a community does well or doesn't do well has much to do with its ability to address and accept this, quickly going through the phases that lead to acceptance, so that they can move on and get back to living again. If you continue to wait, and postpone, and deny the truth, hoping that one day some miracle will happen and everything will be right again," he added, "you are allowing your community to die along with its mill."

Mechanic Falls had to change its thinking, and get through its identity crisis. Was it still a mill town? Once it was able to accept that the answer to that question was no, not anymore, it could move on to develop a new identity.

The journey was still rough. One mistake that Mechanic Falls made early on was to think that it had a valuable asset in its closed mill. Surely, they thought, someone would want the mill for its buildings.

That wasn't the case. The brick-and-mortar mill itself, designed for paper machines, tends to be of not much use for anything else.

"If people believe they have a tremendous asset that can be marketed; well, if there's somebody out there looking for an old mill," said Lee, "I've got one, Biddeford has one, Saco has one, Millinocket's got one. The market is flush with old mills that, largely, the town would be willing to buy, give you money, set up a TIF, and do anything to put this old mill back on the market."

That's what Mechanic Falls did with its mill. It became the home to Great Northern Recycling, which used a couple of the office buildings and set up a substantial recycling plant at the back of the mill, using some of the mill space for warehousing. While they employed at most about 40 people in $7, $8, and $9 an hour jobs, according to Lee, the town was happy to have somebody in there.

Great Northern Recycling was recently bought up by another company, which moved them to Scarborough, so the old mill is now back on the market, used only by an arm of Pine Tree Waste, which employs only a few people at that location.

When the mill closed in Mechanic Falls, they had not yet set up a fully diversified economy. The town's next largest employer had only about a dozen employees. Now, Lee says, they have a 60-person employer, as well as others employing 35 people, 32 people, 27 people, and so forth.

As a gateway to Western Maine, one might think that Mechanic Falls was in place to develop a tourist trade, but that was not their focus.

Tourism tends to be seasonal, and not very high paying. Employment tends to be part-time rather than full-time, and not benefited.

"It's a poor replacement for a manufacturing base," said Lee, who added that it may still be an asset worth looking into. "If you can get ten poor replacements in place, you might have a valid replacement for part of what is gone," he added, suggesting that a tourist market might save the housing market, if nothing else; but long-term financial health is probably going to be built around industry rather than tourism.

An asset that Mechanic Falls had was that they had a lot of people who had learned machining, tooling, metalworking, and other production skills, as well as chemistry and management skills.

"When I list what our town has now," said Lee, "we have have two or three metal fabrication shops, a couple of engineering places, a wood-treating company, a machining shop, and some of the other businesses we have, I realize that most of these are businesses that utilize skills that were transferable from those learned in the mill."

Another important factor in Mechanic Falls' recovery was related to sharing of services. While the town maintains many of its own services, such as a police department, a fire department, and public works, some other services, such as its school department, are shared with neighboring communities. Still, Lee points out, the school takes nearly 70% of the town's entire budget.

"There's a lot of money in schools," he concedes, "particularly in school administration."

A community that combines with a neighboring community risks the loss of its own identity, but sharing services tends to work for the benefit of both communities. Administration of social services, recreation, fringe services, these are the kinds of things that can easily be shared.

Other services can be privatized. "If you have a recreation center or a building that is used for that purpose, you might want to give it to the YMCA, the Boys and Girls Club, or another organization," Lee suggests, "and let them run it in your stead."

Mechanic Falls budgets only $6,000 on recreation, with the bulk of its programs managed by volunteers.

Still it may be necessary for a community to tighten its belt. Mechanic Falls had to determine where they had gotten flabby, making cuts where it would hurt the least. Do you have an extra man in public works, or maybe an extra firefighter or two? Maybe that old fire truck needs to go, since we don't use it and can't afford to repair it anymore. These are things that need to be looked at, according to Lee.

"It's little bite-sized pieces," he said. "I think you need to take little chunks around the edges, ones that won't be felt very much," he added. "Get your plate down a little bit because, realistically, when your tax base dries up, a crisis is upon you."

When reducing the budget, however, a community needs to be careful to protect its infrastructure.

Considering the need for a community that has lost its tax base to develop a new economy, Lee suggests shifting some resources from maintenance to development.

The St. Lawrence and Atlantic railroad runs through Mechanic Falls. Having identified properties along the rail line, the town's development commission is preparing itself for development in that area, as railway commerce in the Lewiston/Auburn area is moving in that direction.

These are some of the things that have worked for Mechanic Falls. While it still has a ways to go, it is on road to recovery.

Mechanic Falls is not a booming metropolis, and never was. Mechanic Falls is, as it has always been, a small town, about eleven square miles in size. A place to call home and to raise your family, it is no longer a mill town, but neither is it suffering as it was immediately following the closure of its last mill.

The price of an average single-family home is about $70,000, yet I saw only two for sale signs during the four hours that I was in Mechanic Falls. The streets were clean and well-maintained, its several small shops appeared to be doing a good business, the food was good at Kathy's Diner, and Mechanic Falls had the look of a healthy, happy town.

While the paper mill remains an important part of the history of Mechanic Falls, the town has developed a new, more diversified economy, allowing it to be no longer held back by the demise of the paper industry.

-- Part one in a series of mill town profiles.