The Bucksport Mill is Closed | Post 6 | Maine

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4 min readMar 12, 2015

En route to check out Bucksport — site of a triple homicide in 1876, an unsolved murder in 1898, and a circus elephant escape in 1892 — we pass through the small towns of Ellsworth and Orland. Proprietors have ensured we will see some color on this cloudy day on Route 1:

A quick detour off of Route 1 takes us into tiny Orland proper, and on our way out of town towards neighboring Bucksport (population: 5000) we cross this ho-hum state bridge dressed up with flower boxes…

… and our eye catches a tiny plaque at the very end. The plaque will foretell the Bucksport story. It’s not one of 19th-century murder and elephants.

In 2009, the 124th Maine State Legislature resolved to name “the State Route 175 bridge crossing the Narramissic River in Orland, which is being rebuilt and is due to be completed next year, after the late lifelong Orland resident Ralston C. Gray”. The small plaque at the end of the bridge says:

In Memory Of

Ralston C. Gray

Aug. 23, 1923 — Mar. 4, 2009

Not much info, but below the inscription is an engraving of what appears to be a hat. Ralston Gray, it turns out, was known in Orland as “the man with the derby hat”. A graduate of Bucksport High School, Gray worked at Portland Shipyard, fought in World War II (earning a Purple Heart), and returned home to eventually work for the St. Regis Paper Company — a.k.a. the Bucksport paper mill. At the mill, Gray served as president of Local No. 88 Pulpsulphite and the Paper Mill Workers Union. Over his years, the Bucksport mill typically employed nearly 1000 area residents while supplying lightweight coated magazine paper to Time (a former owner of the mill), Good Housekeeping, Victoria’a Secret, and Maine’s own L.L. Bean for its famous catalog.

But it would be interesting to know what Gray — who requested no funeral or visitation — would think of the Bucksport mill today. It doesn’t employ anybody. It closed three months ago.

When the Verso Paper Company announced the 85-year-old mill’s closure last fall, the Bangor Daily News reported that the move “caught many people off guard”, including Bucksport’s government officials. Some 570 people lost jobs, and Bucksport counts on property tax from the mill for nearly half of its annual town budget. Verso, for its part, explained that the mill had not been profitable for years, thanks to declining demand for its coated paper and rising natural gas costs.

Verso’s other mill in Maine, larger and to the west in Jay, remains open, but two other closures in the state brought 2014 paper mill job losses to 1000. News of Bucksport’s demise prompted U.S. Rep. Mike Michaud to say, “The closing of mills is becoming an all-too-common occurrence in our communities. But these are more than just headlines — these closings are traumatic events that impact Maine families all across our state.”

It’s a two-bridge hop when leaving Bucksport south on U.S. Route 1. From the first we can see the mill at the edge of town in the distance:

The bridge lands us on Verona Island, where someone has opened a rock shop:

And then we continue south over the sleek new Penobscot Narrows Bridge. Completed in 2006, it was a replacement for the old Waldo-Hancock Bridge, which we can see here to the right in this Street View image dated 2011 but was in fact demolished in 2013 and is no more. The Waldo-Hancock Bridge opened in 1931, which, if fate must be told, was Bucksport’s first full year of paper production.