DAVE ATKINSON remained at the mill throughout 2008, overseeing the process of shutting down. Tom Howatt urged him to continue working for Wausau as a vice president. “We’d love to have you stay with us,” he told Atkinson late in 2008. Atkinson declined: “I got called three times. I’m glad I didn’t go.” The decision to terminate his career at Wausau and to remain in the Groveton area has endeared Atkinson to the community. Roger Caron spoke for most former mill workers: “No one on the floor blamed Dave Atkinson or the managers for what came down. A good share of us felt this was a Wall Street decision and not a Main Street decision that shut this place down. It wasn’t the work ethic by any means that caused this place to go down.”
Reflecting on his career at the mill, Atkinson said it was “very satisfying. Too short, for sure. I learned more there about managing people, managing a fairly complex operation that I couldn’t have gotten anywhere else. I think because of the remoteness of Groveton, I was probably given opportunities, at a younger age than I might of in a larger corporation somewhere else. I was able to raise my family, make a very good living, stay in the area where my roots were. There’s something very satisfying about that; that’s why I chose to stay. I was paid well, but it was a fair wage for what I was doing. A great career; twenty years too short. Now that I’m doing something very different, I sleep better at night. I’m sure that not being responsible for the mill has probably added years to my life. Would I like the mill still to be operating? Would I love to be driving there every morning at six a.m.? I would absolutely love to still be doing that, but that’s not reality.
“I think one of the things I miss are those friendships that because you don’t work together anymore, you don’t see them as much. A lot of good friends over the years. There were three hundred people that worked there, and really, I knew all three hundred of them. That was one of the nice things about Groveton is all three hundred certainly knew me, but I knew them, and really tried to know them.”
Roger Caron was born into a family of mill workers: “The mill was always a part of my life.” At age fourteen or fifteen, Caron got a job servicing the mill’s vending machines. He graduated from high school in 1972. “I had full intentions of taking the summer off, but Dean Sanborn stopped my father and said, ‘Tell your boy to come down. I want to talk to him.’ I got a job immediately after graduation. There were a lot of times I was getting ready to quit and leave. Of course, one thing leads to another, and lo and behold, I’ve been here forty years.” He worked in a variety of maintenance jobs over the years, serving as foreman in the final years of the mill.
After the mill closed, he collected unemployment and made home improvements on his property. In the spring of 2008, he worked for a month on the construction crew of the federal prison in Berlin. “I wasn’t real happy with that particular job [as an equipment operator]. It wasn’t as structured as mechanical maintenance was in the mill. In the mill we had more planning and more knowing exactly what moves you were going to make and when you were going to make it. I didn’t see that there. I said, ‘I’m going to try something else.’”
In the fall, Caron was called to help with the auction of machines and equipment because of his knowledge of the mill. He worked there sporadically until March 2009, when he was hired full time—the last employee at the mill: “When I first took over here, I figured it was just for a few months. All in all, it was a real busy job. There’s a lot of different hats you have to wear.”
He performed basic maintenance on the massive facility—repairing leaks in the roof, pumping out water from the three springs in the mill’s basement, and maintaining the mill’s water treatment system. He also was in charge of public safety: “The potential for danger is incredible. Out behind the mill, there’s still 34,500 volts that comes into the facility at ten feet off the ground. If someone ever touched that in the right way, it would be history. It’s extremely powerful.” He helped catch thieves who stole thousands of dollars of copper and ruined tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment in the process.
“I worked for two different companies. One is an auction company, and one’s a used-equipment company. The used-equipment company, Perry Videx, would call and ask about equipment, and you’d go out and find the equipment, take pictures of the equipment, dig out any books or files that you could find on that equipment so they could put this stuff in their database and try to sell it to someone. At other times, there would be clients coming in from all over the world, whether it’s India or Brazil or what have you to look at this equipment. And you’d give the people tours through this facility.”
Sometimes he helped dismantle and remove equipment; other times, he supervised the contractor: “These people would come in here and they’d work for a week or two—long, long hours. Not knowing this facility, a person would have a hard time wrapping their arms around how much equipment is in a place like this. The number of electric motors, the number of pumps, what have you. Quite a place.”
What was it like working in an empty mill? “It’s been very strange in a lot of ways. The building creeks and groans. There’s always noises when you’re walking through here. If you had a person that’s a little skittish, he wouldn’t last very long here. It’s extremely dark. I carry a good flashlight with me, and hopefully it doesn’t go out. I’ve had to come back to the front office with a Bic lighter before. That’s a hard trip.”
How did you feel about being the last employee of a mill that had employed thousands of people over the previous 116 years? “It’s not something that I’m extremely proud of. To me, I would like to see this place still hopping and making paper, or something else. What kept me going is that this facility could be repurposed. I jokingly said to CBS News, ‘Maybe it could be an electric car manufacturing facility.’ The point I was trying to make was that we have an abundance of talented people in this area with a good work ethic. Once the property is cleaned up, another company will come in and see this as a viable site to do something different. This place does hold a lot of memories for a lot of people, and it provided good employment for a lot of people in this area.”
The day I interviewed Roger, August 1, 2012, he was optimistic that a new owner would sign the purchase papers later that day. Instead, a few hours after we spoke, he sent an e-mail informing me that the would-be purchaser had failed to secure the funding and had withdrawn the offer. A salvage company purchased the mill a few months later, and that fall the long, depressing yearlong demolition process commenced.
ON THE BEAUTIFUL STRETCH of the Upper Ammonoosuc River that runs through town, there is a vast open space where the mill had been. For generations of Grovetonians, the mill had always been there. Always. And always would be there. . . .
The closing of the mill left the people of Groveton shocked, bewildered, devastated. Despite the mill’s struggles in the early 1990s, and despite the closing of the smaller Paper Board operation two years earlier, the Groveton community was utterly unprepared for the October 23, 2007, announcement. “The mill did good for this town, and it’s really hurting without it,” lamented Hadley Platt, who first worked at the mill in the late 1940s and retired in 1993. “I wouldn’t have this home if it hadn’t been for that mill. The mill was the life of this town.” “It was worth it,” said Belvah King. “I wouldn’t have what I’ve got today if I had just been a housewife and depended on Ted’s check.”
“Nowadays,” Shirley MacDow scornfully remarked, “you could walk up the street naked at night and nobody’d notice you. Sad, sad, sad to see what’s happened.”
“I tell you, they ruined this town,” Lawrence Benoit charged. “They bought up all the buildings and tore them down, and what do we got? A parking lot down here. I think they just hated this area or something and wanted to bankrupt this town. That’s my feelings anyway.” Benoit’s sarcasm is not far from the mark. In its heyday, there were more than thirty storefronts on Main Street and State Street. Each boasted a local business. In 2017, a quarter of the storefronts house active businesses; another quarter are gone, replaced by vacant lots; and the remainder are empty.
“I think where everybody missed the boat was how important that place was from not only the roof over your head and the food on your plate, but also it really was a part of you,” Louise Caouette observed. “Many of these folks were many generations. Nobody took the time to deal with the mourning of the loss that the people were going to feel. It was literally a mourning period that people went through, and it was sad.” Murray Rogers, the last president of Local 61, emphasized: “The big thing I want people to know is that the majority of people that worked there appreciated that they had that job.”
Pam Styles was fortunate to find work as the secretary of Groveton High School after thirty-seven years at the mill: “I think it’s taken a big effect on the town, especially that tax [not] coming from Wausau that the town was guaranteed every year. Now the slack has got to be picked up by the taxpayers in town. A lot of people not having jobs have moved away. They all have children in the school, so the count for Groveton High School is going down all the time, too.” Raymond Tetreault, who retired in 1987, concurred; his property taxes eat up his Social Security and his pension—“takes it all.”
Joe Berube was set to retire early in 2008. Although he had his pension, he worried about the community’s future: “There’s not a lot of opportunities today for any of the younger generation, that’s for sure. If they want a job once they graduate [from high school], they’re going to have to relocate somewhere.”
Something else was lost when the mill died. “[The mill] was like another family,” Pam Styles thought. When there was a death in the family, an illness, or a tragedy, the mill community came together. Dave Atkinson concurred: “There was always an envelope [in the lab]—a collection for someone who had a fire, or chemotherapy, or whatever. Significant collections. Each Christmas and/or Thanksgiving, [James River and Wausau] would buy a turkey or a ham for everyone and give it as a thank you. Many of the employees would say, ‘I’m here to get my turkey, but I want to give it to the Catholic church [or a local charity].’ Typically, we’d order thirty or forty more turkeys, and Wausau would make a donation to Meals on Wheels or whatever. There was a great philanthropic family atmosphere at the mill. It didn’t matter—union, salaried, there was an envelope there.”
Five years after the mill closed, Tom Bushey worried about the future of the community: “I don’t know what it’s gonna take to reinvent this area. I’m a Christian guy, and every day since the mill closed, I’ve prayed to be a part of the redevelopment of this area. I’m forty-four years old, still young. Definitely could move out of this area. I’d like to see my hometown come back to life, to have some semblance of a community. Because that’s what it always was. Growing up, you pretty much knew the inside of every home in the town because it was like one great big family. Now, with the closing of the mill, people aren’t coming together as much as they used to. I feel like the fabric of the town is unraveling a little bit each day. It’s just hard to see it. Three hundred and fifty people coming together every day, and now, boom—everybody’s scattered to the four corners of the state and beyond, trying to find employment.”
In nearly every interview, former mill workers expressed bitterness toward the last mill owner. Most of them cited the covenant as the cruelest blow. “I feel that Wausau did a gross injustice to this community [saying] that the paper machines couldn’t make paper on this facility,” Roger Caron said. “I think they were afraid of the competition because of the nature of the people that work here. We had an excellent workforce and a can-do attitude. They probably saw us as a threat, but that should have been illegal. We live in a forest-based part of the country, and it would almost be like ‘you can’t make flour in Kansas’ or something. To me it was wrong.”
Pam Styles recalled the grief in the final weeks: “I’m surprised that a lot of people didn’t do any damage to the mill because of them closing it that way. I believe there was some stealing of stuff that was supposed to have been left there. I think everyone has a lot of hard feelings about it, the way they did it. What bothered most everyone is the way they did it so that we couldn’t survive with another mill there. I think if they had left it so it could be sold to another papermaking company, people wouldn’t have felt as bad, at least that they have a chance to survive. I thought it was a raw deal.”
“I think that Wausau should have a lot of guilty consciences for what they have done, especially that thing about never making paper in that mill again,” Joan Breault said in 2010. “That has to be plain vindictiveness. Just meanness to do that. They had to know what impact that would have on this area. I don’t blame all their bosses. I think David Atkinson is one of the top guys I’ve ever known. He tried his darnedest to help the people of Groveton. He fought to keep that mill open. Nobody could ever blame him for anything wrong like that. He’s a good guy. It was the higher-ups in Wisconsin—Tom Howatt and some of them. It certainly has had an impact on this area. Not a good one. I’m glad I was retired. Right now, I’ve got a son and a grandson out of work. When my son got done as a paper machine tender [after thirty years], he took a college course on welding. He can’t get a job around here. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Bruce Blodgett grudgingly defended Wausau’s right to impose the covenant: “It’s a dirty deal, but they owned the mill. What do you want to do? Hey, they own it; so, kind of a lousy hand to get dealt to you, but how are you going to beat it? I think there’s crooked deals in it, sure. But when it comes down to it, if you decide you want to sell your house, I can’t tell you not to sell it or who to sell to.”
“I can’t even imagine such a thing [as the covenant]. Can’t imagine it,” a livid Jim Wemyss said. “I can’t even imagine how they thought it up. Somebody must have hated Groveton. I don’t know what their thinking behind it was.”
A great many people contrasted Jim Wemyss with Wausau. Louise Caouette suggested: “It’s real easy to say ‘Wausau,’ because that’s a group; it’s a board of directors. I think the difference was, when it was Wemyss, the buck stopped with him. Why preserve the Wisconsin mill and let Groveton go? There is a sense of community in Brokaw with the management because that’s where they live, that’s where the shots were being called. They could distance themselves from Groveton. They didn’t have to face somebody on the street with a decision that was made in Wisconsin. Where if it was locally owned . . .”
Sylvia Stone worked in the accounting department at the mill from 1952 to 1978. “They ruined our town,” she said. “I don’t understand why they ever did such a thing. Many corporations don’t think of the people; you’re a number. I feel that I was more than a number working for Groveton Papers.”
Wemyss wouldn’t have done this, Thurman Blodgett asserted: “I’ve seen the time when salesmen couldn’t even sell paper. It wasn’t very long before his plane would take off, and he’d be gone for a little while, and pretty soon he’d come back. The paper machines would start running again, and they was shipping her out as fast as they could. He’d undersell ’em to keep people working.”
Several former workers remained convinced that, as Zo Cloutier phrased it, “If [Jimmy Wemyss] was running that place today, it probably would still be running.” Joan Breault suggested that Wausau’s treatment of the town might cause some people to reevaluate their opinions of Wemyss: “I bet there are people who used to condemn the Wemysses for stuff, but I bet they wish they had the Wemysses here instead of Wausau. The Wemysses never left the people high and dry like Wausau did.”
Jim Wemyss agreed: “You think I’d have allowed this company to be shut down if I’d been working? Are you crazy? It never would have happened.” He noted that tissue is too expensive to ship more than five hundred miles: “If I’d kept it as a family business, I’d have two big high-speed tissue machines running there right now, on secondary fiber making Vanity Fair products and dominating the goddamn whole East Coast like I did before. No problem in my mind. But you can’t do this till you’re a hundred years old. You have to turn it over to somebody someday. And I felt at seventy-five it was time for me to get the hell out.”
There’s the rub: If I’d kept it as a family business. The Groveton Papers Company ceased to exist as an independent, family-owned business in June 1968 when Jim Jr. and his father merged with Diamond International. Even though Jim Wemyss ran the mill for Diamond for another fifteen years, Sir James Goldsmith’s hostile takeover of Diamond exposed the illusion that the mill remained under local control after 1968.
Mill demolition and Cape Horn. (Courtesy Doug White)
Jim Wemyss blamed Goldsmith and Wall Street for the death of the Groveton mill. Certainly Goldsmith’s rapacious capitalism accelerated the demise of the region’s paper industry, but by the 1980s the future of northern New England’s paper industry was already bleak. Signs of trouble had become manifest during the 1970s. The shocks of that decade’s two oil crises, the costs of cleaning up past pollution and reducing future emissions, combined with growing competition from bigger, faster, newer mills, placed the old paper mills of New England at a competitive disadvantage. As Fortune 500 corporations swallowed up New England mills that formerly had been owned by people with some connection to the region, decisions over the fates of mill-dependent communities were increasingly made from afar.
Between 1988, when Goldsmith sold off Diamond’s former timberlands, and 2005, most of the eight million acres formerly owned by paper companies in northern New England had been sold off to hedge funds, real estate investment trusts, and other speculators who typically log intensively before selling off within five to ten years. A small percentage of these lands was acquired by the public or by private, nonprofit conservation groups.
In the past two decades, at least ten paper mills have closed or ceased making paper in northern New England and New York. In Maine alone, there has been a 62 percent decline in paper mill jobs since 1990. Logging jobs declined 24 percent in the same period, and sawmill jobs diminished by 39 percent. Real wages for those lucky to have a job in the depressed region have declined. Many rural townships are barely surviving.1 These desperate communities are forced to close schools and cut services. They are faced with choices such as accept a prison, a casino, a toxic dump, or go bankrupt.
Late in 2005, Lloyd Irland, a leading forest economist in Maine, wrote: “My own conclusions from scanning the economic landscape is that the U.S. and Canadian wood sectors are in for a prolonged ‘Dark Time,’ likely to last decades.”2 The spate of paper mill closures in northern New England since then bears out his observation.
Wausau shut down its Brokaw mill in 2012 and Brainerd a year later. It sold its Rhinelander and Mosinee mills in 2013 under pressure from a hedge fund that bought a huge chunk of Wausau stock in 2011. If, in 2007, Wausau had spared Groveton and shuttered Brainerd or one of its Wisconsin mills instead, it is unlikely that Groveton would have escaped its unhappy fate for long. Almost certainly, Groveton would have been shut down by 2013 because of uncontrollable global economic forces. The covenant Wausau placed on the Groveton mill was an ugly reminder of the power of Wall Street–financed corporations’ power to destroy rural resource communities. Nevertheless, the covenant probably didn’t much matter because, as Louise Caouette observed: “It’s inevitable that the [New England] paper industry is going to die anyway. I think that long-term the whole community—Coos County—has got to find a way to diversify itself. At some point, the community was going to have to deal with the death of the industry.”
“It’s a dying industry,” Dave Atkinson said with resignation in 2012. “Even in China, the printing paper market annual tons per year sold is shrinking. The world market is shrinking. It’s going to continue because of the e-media.”
“It’s time for Groveton to move on,” Bill Astle asserted two years before the mill was demolished. “Just as there wasn’t always a paper mill in Groveton, and there was life in Groveton before the paper mill, there will be life again.”
“I feel I was fortunate to have a job,” the ever-feisty Pauline Labrecque summed up forty years at the mill. “I wasn’t one that because I wanted the night off I would call in sick. I was there. They could depend on me. That makes me feel good. And if they called me today and said, ‘Paulie, we’re going to bring back some of them napkin machines on Number 4 here; are you willing to come back to work?’ In a heartbeat. . . . . . . . . . . . Yup. . . . . . . . . . . . In a heartbeat.”