🔒Lewiston’s remade Maine MILL offers history and ‘wow’ moments

Items found in the deserted mills of Lewiston and Auburn, salvaged on their way to the dump or donated by former textile workers and their families. These are among a unique collection of over 10,000 artifacts, hundreds of recorded oral histories and exhibits at the Maine Museum of Innovation, Learning and Labor — or Maine MILL — soon to open the doors to its new home in a redeveloped yarn mill at 1 Beech St. on the Lewiston riverfront. This is no run-of-the-mill home. “This new building represents a major step forward not just for Maine MILL, but for the community we serve,” says Rachel Ferrante, the museum’s executive director. “It allows us to deepen our work, broaden access and create a space where people can engage meaningfully with the stories and ideas that continue to shape this place.”

Long time coming

The museum’s new home was a long time coming. Formerly called Museum L-A, it was founded in 1996 and opened its doors in 2004, at 35 Canal St., at Bates Mill. The massive 12-acre manufacturing complex dates to Bates Manufacturing Co.’s textile roots in the 1850s. It was once Maine’s largest employer. After the city sold the Bates Mill building several years later to a local developer, the museum’s first executive director, Rachel Desgrosseilliers, and its board identified the old Camden Yarns Mill at 1 Beech St. in Lewiston as a great downtown spot to relocate the museum and create a purpose-designed space. At the time, the Camden Yarns Mill was owned by Miller Industries, a fabric mill company that used it for storage and had previously declined offers to sell the property. A 2009 Mainebiz article tells the story of how Desgrosseilliers convinced the owner to let her take a look, and the museum’s mission persuaded the man, the son of a Russian immigrant, to consider her offer. Desgrosseilliers wrote up a purchase agreement right in front of him, told the man she had no money and handed him a $1 bill. “I said, ‘This is what I can offer right now,” Desgrosseilliers recalled at the time. The final purchase price was $200,000. The sale closed in 2009.

Dusty gems

Desgrosseilliers noted at the time that, after the mills were shuttered, people didn’t talk about the region’s blue-collar history. By contrast, she was an enthusiast, calling relics such as a dusty old textile machine a “gem.” Guiding the nonprofit toward preserving and honoring the area’s working-class history, she organized reunions of Lewiston-Auburn’s aging millworkers and saved innumerable artifacts from the trash heap. “One former loom fixer, his old tools in hand, told her at the first millworkers’ reunion that he could die in peace knowing that someone cared about what he’d done during his life,” the 2009 Mainebiz story said. A long-time manufacturer that’s going strong is Rancourt & Co. “My family has been manufacturing in Lewiston for 58 years. It started with my father’s first factory in 1967,” says Michael Rancourt, owner of the Lewiston footwear manufacturer and the museum’s board chair. The museum has deep significance for families like his and for the community, he says. “We have a deep heritage with regard to making shoes here, employing local people, our factories and the things we’ve worked on for those 58 years,” Rancourt continues. “We live in this community, we care about Lewiston and we care about the things that the Maine MILL can exemplify for all the workers who have been part of this community for the last 150 or so years.”

Yarn mill

The former Camden Yarns mill, next to the Androscoggin River, dates to 1864 — a year when Maine textile mills were called on to produce fabric for Civil War uniforms and cotton duck canvas for Union tents. Textile manufacturing there ceased operation in 1992. Much of the building fell into disrepair. The museum worked toward moving there ever since, although slowed by a fire and the pandemic. The 2.5-acre site underwent environmental remediation. The museum razed a portion of the two-story brick building and stabilized and cleaned other parts. The project included construction of an 8,000-square-foot addition, bringing the total space to 22,000 square feet. The project team included Auburn architectural firm Platz Associates and Portland construction company Langford & Low, with Darren Crawford as site superintendent. “They’ve been absolutely fantastic,” Ferrante says. “We were starting with a building where portions of the structure, and neighboring mill buildings, had been demolished, and were given the program of a museum celebrating the past, present and future,” says Tom Platz. The renovated museum houses the permanent collection on the ground floor and rotating exhibits on the second floor. The design team carefully balanced preservation with contemporary intervention, creating a museum that honors the site’s industrial heritage while providing a welcoming and modern visitor experience. “We married a new building to the existing structure and created a glass entryway that ties everything together and brings in ample natural light,” Platz says.

Illuminated panels

Throughout the project, architectural features reference the region’s textile manufacturing history. The addition is clad in weathering steel panels, called Corten, perforated with thousands of openings patterned after historic weaving punch cards. The pattern depicts a “Martha Washington” bedspread, one of the most iconic products manufactured at Bates Mill, featuring garlands and floral motifs. At night, concealed lighting behind the panels transforms the façade into a glowing landmark. Custom acoustic ceiling panels and wall coverings were also developed using patterns inspired by artifacts in the museum’s collection. “The interiors acknowledge and celebrate the industrial character of the mill buildings while creating spaces that feel contemporary and accessible,” says Platz’s colleague, Gabrielle Russell.

‘Wow’ moments

“It is not a big museum,” notes Platz. “We had to face the fact that this community did not have the budget of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so we had to carefully choose our ‘wow’ moments.” Among those moments are the dramatic glass entry hall with its 38-foot ceiling and the museum’s centerpiece: a one-and-a-half-story Jacquard loom. Invented in the early 19th century, the loom revolutionized textile manufacturing. Displaying the loom required cutting an opening through the gallery floor and surrounding it with frameless glass, allowing visitors to experience it from both levels. The installation accommodates the loom at its full height and demonstrates how it would have been threaded and operated. Says Ferrante, “Having the architectural vision to find a way to display one of our key pieces, and let it shine the way it would have originally, was a design challenge that was accomplished beautifully.”

Larger galleries

The new spot features larger galleries, classrooms, a design lab, a children’s area and an event space. Displays include historical items not previously on view and expand the museum’s capacity to present both its permanent collection and temporary exhibitions. There are year-round exhibitions and educational programming, as well as partnerships with artists, schools and community organizations. Presented thematically, the permanent collection focuses on community, labor, innovation and Maine today. Rather than a linear chronology, the approach is to bring objects, stories and voices into conversation across time, highlighting changing people, industries and ideas and create an evolving portrait of the state, connecting historical experience to community life today. The museum partners in several major community development programs, including Franco Trail L-A, which promotes historic sites, and also ties in with a New England tour that stretches to Rhode Island.

$15M capital campaign

The project is the culmination of a $15 million capital campaign that drew contributions from individual donors, foundations and local, state, federal and institutional partners. The money includes operating reserves for the first two years. Ferrante came to Maine MILL in 2021 after 11 years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she rose to exhibition project manager. Ferrante led the institution’s rebranding from Museum L-A to Maine MILL, expanded its digital presence and directed the capital campaign to build the museum’s new permanent home.

A father’s toolbox

The collection began with salvaged machinery and artifacts saved by community members when the last textile mill closed in 2001. As word spread, more objects came in, expanding to include other industries and stories. Highlights include locally produced textiles, machinery involved in local production, personal items and tools owned by the mill workers and photographs of mill work and social life. Most artifacts were found in Lewiston and Auburn’s deserted mills, salvaged on their way to the dump or donated by former textile workers and their families. “Recently, somebody donated their father’s toolbox that was used while they worked in the Bates Mill complex for 30 years,” says Ferrante. “The toolbox was fully intact. We didn’t have that in our collection.”

For the shoe industry, corporate and individual donors contributed shoe shop machinery, tools, shoe lasts, products and promotional materials, most representing the last 50 years of the industry. Brickmaking artifacts represent another long history — the nature of the work, using few tools, changing little over hundreds of years; ironically, the industry producing the longest-lasting monuments left the least evidence of its existence. There are hundreds of recorded interviews and oral histories told by people who lived and labored in the region. At Rancourt & Co., father and son both contributed oral histories to the museum, which also has some of the company’s shoemaking tools. “I’m happy to tell that story,” Michael Rancourt says. “There are a lot of young people who try to understand how they can get into being makers and manufacturers and entrepreneurs.”