UMaine “Save Our History Project” to Include Brewer Students
Contact: Pauleena MacDougall, 581-1848; George Manlove, 581-3756
ORONO — Staff members from the Maine Folklife Center at the University of Maine are taking their “Save Our History” paper mills research project into the schools on Tuesday, Sept. 26, as they introduce Brewer Middle School students to the historic preservation of a defunct Brewer paper mill.
Students in Brewer Middle School teacher Richard Kimball’s seventh-grade class will soon begin their own research, touring the recently closed Eastern Fine paper mill, making video recordings and photographing the inside and outside of the mill, drawing floor plans and drafting news releases to recruit former mill workers willing to share their stories about life in the mill for the project.
“It’s basically a seventh-grade version of what we do here at the Folklife Center,” says Amy Stevens, a UMaine graduate student in history and Brewer native who works with the Folklife Center.
Stevens and Folklife Center associate director Pauleena MacDougall, along with some of the former workers from the Eastern Fine paper mill, will meet with students at the school on Somerset Street at 8 a.m.
In January, MacDougall and Stevens began collecting paper mill workers’ memories about life in the mills, some of which have closed in the last decade. They have documented the stories from mill workers, and articles from mill publications dating back as far as 1880, on DVD and on the Folklife Center website (http://www.umaine.edu/folklife/). The Center has recorded stories from both men and women from Eastern Fine in Brewer and Georgia Pacific in Old Town, and is looking to find more current or former paper mill workers from the Lincoln, Millinocket and Bucksport areas.
Since its inception, the project has received grants from the Maine Humanities Council, the UMaine Women in the Curriculum program, and more recently – for the state of Maine, according to MacDougall – an unprecedented $10,000 grant from the History Channel’s Save Our History grant initiative.
“Papermaking was maybe the main industry besides fishing in Maine throughout the 20th century,” MacDougall says. “It’s important for us to do this work now, while the workers are still around and before they go into other industries or pass on.”
MacDougall says the purpose of taking the paper mill research into the schools is to help students understand the importance and methods of historic preservation. “That’s why it is called ‘Save Our History,'” she adds.
MacDougall and Stevens recently met with a dozen or more Brewer-area women who worked at the Eastern Fine mill and participated in the oral history collection. The women had a chance to see the website presentation, which remains under development as more information is collected.
MacDougall says she hopes to learn the names of other men and women who would be willing to be interviewed about their mill experiences.
“This is part of a larger project studying the history of papermaking in Maine,” she says. “We’ve interviewed 39 people so far.”
The Brewer school students will contribute their research to a website of their own — a project that can be continued as the students move into the eighth grade, Stevens says.
The experiential nature of the research will make the project more memorable for the students, and also will introduce them to the important work being done at the Folklife Center.
UMaine history Graduate student Tonalea Chapman also is assisting with the project. More information about the oral history and research into former paper mill employees’ experiences can be obtained by visiting the website or call the center at (207) 581-1891.