I was born in Windham in 1937, and for as long as I can remember the monstrous “Keddy” mill has loomed from the river in South Windham. Before I was born, my father and many local men worked at the mill when it was a pulp mill. The old folks (really old timers like me) still call it the pulp mill.

Today’s crop of environmentalists and greenies would have had a field back then as raw material in the form of logs were floated down the Presumpscot River to the mill. The mill closed during the 1929 depression. Big multi-room houses, once boarding houses built for mill workers, were split up into apartments. Some had little stores on the first floor. Part of the old mill was used for another company, but many of the mill workers moved elsewhere.

In the late 1800s, businessmen and mill owners “imported” stonemasons from Italy to build the mill in South Windham. For many natives, it was their first exposure to people who spoke another language and actually had a different culture. It wasn’t until about 30 years after the mill was built that immigrants from many countries, including Italy, came to southern Maine, many of them to Windham.

This mill was one of several, along with dwellings and businesses, which used the river, some as a generator of power (from the Little Falls) and some as a convenient sewer. Along with dwellings and other establishments in the village of South Windham (sometimes melded into Little Falls), everything not used in manufacture was discharged into the river.

In 1970 I returned to my hometown and went to work at L. C. Andrew in South Windham. Trains were running. Long traffic waits ensued and the old mill was running again, too, although not as a pulp mill. Eventually, it was abandoned. It never was a pretty picture, as I recall, and sometime in the 1990s, the news that someone had an idea to revitalize the area was reason to hope that the village area would be cleaned up.

A dangerous place, the old mill caused much concern to local officials and parents, as it was a natural attraction for vandals, firebugs and mischief. Windows were broken, metal stolen and it became an eyesore for decades. Costs of rehab were prohibitive in this town filled with folks who protested if the tax rate went up.

South Windham village, once the center of all industry and manufacturing in Windham, where hundreds of people worked, took a back seat to the fields of North Windham when those fields were sold to developers by families who didn’t want to continue the agricultural pursuits of their ancestors.

As I listen to the depressing and ignorant (of the facts) discussions about “doing something about the eyesore”, I wonder if town officials have any idea of how long the mill has been part of the landscape – or how expensive and environmentally difficult it would be to take it down.

No matter how ugly this site is, I can’t imagine spending millions of property tax dollars to tear something down without a plan to build something in its place. The federal and state laws that are in place to protect the river, and the decades and work of volunteers it took to make that river habitable again, cannot be ignored simply to avoid looking at a falling down mill. Take another route. Drive by the Correctional Center instead.

Believe me, many of us would like to see a lovely park or bevy of shops in place of the mill. I personally would like to see the return of the daily bus service we once had, public transportation to Westbrook and Portland.

We’d like to see a roadway wide enough to accommodate the traffic of today also. But South Windham village was established as a place to work, and it was at its busiest and most productive before cars arrived. There’s an old saying about making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. It’s kind of like that.

See you in a couple of weeks.