I’m not advocating entering abandoned houses. That would be breaking and entering. Or trespassing, at the very least. Either way, illegal. Maybe don’t do that.

But leaving aside abandoned houses, if you live anywhere around Biddeford, you’ve probably been to the old mills at least once. Whether it was for a school trip, or to shop, or work, or sight see, you’ve seen the old brickwork and the remnants of the dams. You may have even gone inside the ones that haven’t been cleaned up yet, with their huge echoing spaces and papered windows, or if you’re really lucky, down under to the small stone-walled cavern with old pipes like bones sticking up out of water that hasn’t seen sun in years.

The mills aren’t the only old place around New England. History has a tendency to echo here – people can trace their heritage back centuries, through gravestones and church records and farms where their greatgrandparents and their parents and their parents’ parents lived. Some of those places have functioned without pause, like Dyer Library; the original outer wall of the house makes up one side of the children’s room, which itself is built on the site of the kitchen garden. Or the Latin Building at Thornton, which started life as a library and would go on to be many things – including band room, which stemmed from the completely understandable desire to get the musicians as far away as possible – before being converted to classrooms.

But some places, like the old textile mills, were built for one purpose only – which in their case, was to capitalize on the booming Industrial Revolution and cloth industry. They had a pretty good run, and according to the site, were the “heart of York County,” but after the area suffered economic decline and it became cheaper to produce first in the South and then overseas, the mills became bereft of purpose and closed down. The Pepperell mills would languish in disuse for decades.

I can’t claim the length of life or residency that would have meant seeing the entire mill complex abandoned, and I certainly don’t claim to be anything near an expert on the subject. But I have seen parts of the mills today, echoing shells of scrapedout old production rooms with old dirt still ground into the floorboards. I saw the Pilgrim’s Progress two or three years ago, when it snaked around almost the entire ground floor of one of the buildings because it was the only place in either town with enough space to display it.

I went back and visited that same space about a year ago, and it took me a good half-hour to realize where I was. Partly because I came in a different way, partly because in the time since I had visited, the space had been closed off to build shops, a playground and a wool-dying business. In what couldn’t have been more than 36 months, the space had been completely transformed.

Repurposing architecture is a much older human tradition than the mills – in fact, much of medieval Cairo was built of limestone, ah, “borrowed” from the pyramids. But in the United States, in the past couple centuries or so, expansion has been the preferable option. It seemed like there would always be more land to build on, more resources to build with, more new things to create and house, so it seemed easier to start new than adapt to.

But the businesses housed in the mills that run the gamut from technological companies to pizza places to the aforementioned wool-dying business that continues the textile tradition – they’re not taking up untouched spaces. They’re reclaiming and repurposing ones that might otherwise have gone dormant for far longer.

As far as I can see, this trend can only be for the good. Expansion is as far as you can get from sustainable practices, and we as a people really need to focus a lot more on sustaining. Buildings seem like a pretty good space to start.

Just as an example – there are more abandoned houses in the U.S. than there are homeless people. The mills used to be empty, and now they’re coming back, full of people going about their business or just plain living.

Abandoned spaces are interesting to visit, and kind of cool to look at, but a lively, thriving community center is so much more.

— Nina Collay is a junior at Thornton Academy.