AUGUSTA – For more than 100 years, workers toiled inside the massive brick Edwards Mill complex before it was destroyed by a spectacular blaze in 1989.

Now, a small group made up primarily of descendants of those workers is working to make sure the memories and stories aren’t buried with the charred ashes of the former riverside mill.

“Manufacturing in Augusta — I don’t want it to be lost for our children” said Jan Michaud, president of Friends for a Heritage Center at Mill Park. “This is the work force that was the backbone of the city.”

At its peak, the Edwards Mill work force numbered 1,300 people — many of them Franco-Americans and other immigrants who came to Augusta to work. They made cotton cloth products for a thriving company — and lives for themselves and their families.

Today’s core group of 10 local residents is raising funds and spurring interest in turning the only still-standing Edwards Mill building into a museum.

The museum would seek to honor the city’s thousands of manufacturing workers, starting with the many who toiled at Edwards, but later expanding to include paper mill and other manufacturing workers from the city’s past, Michaud said.

Members of Friends for a Heritage Center at Mill Park have been laying the foundation for the museum for three years, interviewing, photographing and recording video and audio of 31 former mill workers, documenting their stories and memories.

“These folks were reluctant at first,” said Michaud, whose grandfather worked at the mill. “They’d say, ‘Oh, you don’t want to talk to me, I don’t have anything interesting to say.’ We said, ‘We just want your memories. What was it like? How did work affect your family?’ And, inevitably, they’d open up. Once they started to talk, they couldn’t stop.”

The former cotton mill at 1 Water St. frames one side of the city’s downtown area. The city owns the building, which is located in the Capital Riverfront Improvement District, an area created in 1999 as a joint venture between the city and the state to emphasize and protect the river.

Because of that, organizers, who are incorporated as a nonprofit group, will need both the city and Capital Riverfront Improvement District board to sign off on the project.

City Councilor Patrick Paradis, a member of the district’s board, said the City Council and district board have both spoken favorably about the proposal.

“We want to see that building go from being an unused building to a wonderful museum to all the people who worked there,” said Paradis, whose father worked at the mill for 35 years. “This history is going away; every week, someone who worked there is passing away. We want to capture their history.”

Jan Michaud’s husband, Victor Michaud, whose grandfather and great-grandfather worked at the mill, said the building they’re eyeing for a museum was deemed structurally sound in a 2002 assessment. But it was estimated that it would take $1.5 million to restore the building and convert it into a museum.

In addition to photos, the Friends for a Heritage Center at Mill Park has cloth products made at the mill, tools and a huge logbook from the 1930s listing each worker, their pay and how much they paid in rent to live in numerous company-owned homes surrounding the mill.

“I just found my grandfather’s (information); he was in the card room,” said Sandy Arbour as she looked through the logbook recently. “Look at all these French names … Amazing.”

University of Maine at Augusta architecture students have already come up with designs for turning the building, currently used by the city for storage, into a showplace.

A fundraiser for the project is planned for Friday at Le Club Calumet, featuring comedian Louis Philippe as “Father Frenchie,” and musician Tina Charest. The group has an online presence on Facebook as well. It’s http://heritagecenteratmillpark.blogspot.com.