BIDDEFORD — Lisa Flynn worked at WestPoint Home until the end.

“I never thought we’d shut down,” she said Saturday, seated around a table in the vast North Dam mill  with several former co-workers, reminiscing.

“We had a popular blanket and it was in demand,” said her husband Dan Flynn, who left the mill a few years before it closed to expand his electrical business.

During the good years in the 1990s, when the textile factory was churning out blankets at a breakneck pace, there was lots of work ”“ almost too much sometimes ”“ six days a week and one Sunday a month.

But Biddeford’s last operating textile mill did close, in 2009. The mills that had provided a hardworking, decent living for so many for so long, were shuttered.

The red brick walls hold a history that most agree should not be lost.

The Flynns were among many who returned to the mill Saturday night for a traditional Maine baked bean supper.

It was a low key way to bring former workers and others together and to subtly build support for the Biddeford Mills Museum, to be housed in Building 13 of the Pepperell Mill Campus. Mill owner Doug Sanford will donate space.

Scott Marcoux of the Steering Committee for the Biddeford Mills Museum said the idea of the bean supper, organized and prepared by the Arundel Historical Society and served by Biddeford High School students, was to spark discussion about workers’ experiences.

It worked. There was lots of talk.

Why Arundel Historical Society? Easy answer, said Steering Committee member. Dana Peck, who operates a business in the mill. Francis Spencer, who developed the Vellux blanket, was an Arundel boy, he said.

Seemed like at one time everyone you knew worked in one of the mills, workers said.

“It wasn’t, ”˜Where did you work,’” said former mill worker Larry Dumont. “It was, ”˜What shift are you on?’ The mills were intertwined with family histories. All of my uncles worked here and my brothers and sisters.”

The first textile mills on the banks of the Saco River were built in the mid-1800s. Production spanned 150 years and Biddeford woven goods and linens were shipped worldwide before the jobs were later lost ”“ first to the southern states and then to the far east. 

Among those who flocked to the area, eager for work, were families from Quebec who left “La Belle Province” beginning in the late 1800s. And while immigration from Canada eventually slowed, there was a resurgence in the 1960s, Dan Flynn recalled. During the Vietnam War, the company would bring in workers from Quebec.

Richard Couture, who worked in the wool carding room, in maintenance and later in the Vellux  department, remembers the camaraderie among the workers. And he remembers that against the supervisors’ wishes, sometimes the workers would put money in a bucket, and lower it out a mill window and down to Ralph’s Italian sandwich shop on Main Street. The folks at Ralph’s would fill the bucket with sandwiches and send it back up.

Norman and Dorothy Lamb met at the mill.

“We sat down and talked one day, and we’ve been married 35 years,” said Dorothy, as the couple filed in to see what was happening. Lamb said she had quit before the mill closed. “We worked hard for our money. We did well working in the mill, I really miss it.”

Pete Timmins, a night watchman for a dozen years, carried a clock and a flashlight when he made his solo rounds. The buildings creaked and groaned.

“Sometimes I swear there were people following me,” he said.

Bob Archambault walked into the mills at 18 years-old after high school and stayed 37 years until the end. He remembers signing a confidentiality clause about the manufacturing process of the Vellux blanket and how the windows were bricked up so no one could peer in.

He remembers the good fun with his co-workers.

“We always had a good time. We used to laugh all day every day,” Archambault said of his days there.

Ray Gaudette started at the mill back when they made sheets and pillowcases, retiring in 2000. A doffer in the spinning room, he’d take the full bobbins off the frames and put new ones on and restart. He watched when company officials ordered the frames to be removed from the Biddeford mill for their journey down south.

“I hope the museum works out,” he said.

“I love the idea of a museum,” said Bettyann Richard, who worked at the mill along with her brother Francis.

“That history has got to be preserved,” said Dan Flynn.

— Senior Staff Writer Tammy Wells can be contacted at 324-4444 or twells@journaltribune.com. Staff Writer Dina Mendros contributed to this report.