Kerri Arsenault’s hometown of Mexico, Maine, is small, remote, and working-class. It sits along the Androscoggin River; on the opposite side is a paper mill, the region’s primary source of economic stability and pollution. The value of the former and the harm of the latter create the disparity at the center of “Mill Town,” a multigenerational portrait of life and death in rural America.
Charting the rise of industry and the decline of a town, Arsenault’s debut book traces a winding line between human dispossession and environmental degradation. Pensive and heartfelt, the author’s nuanced regional history is enriched by family background. Arsenault’s great-grandfathers worked in the mill, as did her grandfathers, grandmothers, and parents. Hired as a pipefitter in 1952, her father gave 43 years of his life to the mill. He retired with asbestosis of the lungs, an ailment that forced him to spend his last days dependent upon an oxygen tank to breathe. As Arsenault discovers, illness was especially common among those who worked in the mill or lived nearby.
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What began as an endeavor to piece together her family tree grew into a decade-long examination of pollution, poverty, and disease. “What we find is not always what we seek,” she writes of genealogy, “and what we seek we don’t always find.” While her research was underway before her father’s death, his passing propelled her to ask questions about his life, her town, and herself that she hadn’t thought to ask.
Arsenault is of Acadian descent, a designation generally interpreted to mean that one has familial roots in the original French Colony of Acadia dating back to around 1604. In unraveling the complexities of her heritage, she details the forced removal of the Acadians and the Mi’kmaq from northeastern North America by the British during the French and Indian War in 1755. Le Grand Dérangement — referred to as both “a genocide” and “the predecessor to American Manifest Destiny” — saw the Acadians stripped of their land, imprisoned, and deported, “fractured into small groups and dispensed across the globe.”
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“Maps are so fixed in our consciousness,” writes Arsenault about this diaspora, “it’s hard to dismantle the concept of belonging and identity behind its arbitrary lines.”
Maine was established as a state in 1820, seen as New England’s last frontier and a summertime paradise. But it was also an industrial powerhouse. In 1890, Hugh J. Chisholm purchased 1,400 acres in the Rumford and Mexico region, “penetrat[ing] a wilderness and arrest[ing] a mighty river … to render service and create wealth for man,” in the words of one biographer. The Rumford paper mill he financed was functioning by 1902. Along with quickly growing into “the largest book-paper maker in the world under one roof,” the mill attracted some 4,000 workers to the area, including Arsenault’s great-grandfathers.
By 1941, the town’s population “hovered around ten thousand” while “the industrial discharge equaled what more than two million people would expect to produce.” Arsenault tells of residents vomiting, the coins in their pockets tarnishing, and the paint on their houses and cars peeling “like burnt skin.” Her mother was born the following year. By the time of the author’s birth in 1967, manufacturing jobs throughout the US were declining and “working class towns isolated from urban centers … started emptying out.”
Arsenault reports that Maine’s papermaking industry—which provided the region with a sense of “pride and connectedness” — employed 17,700 in 1990. The same industry today employs 4,700. The profits of America’s 20th-century industrial empire were largely dependent upon exploited, unprotected labor and a lack of environmental regulations. “Industry in the US operated like a colonial enterprise,” a paper mill consultant tells Arsenault. “We were able to have an extraordinary amount of economic success that way. That’s no longer possible.”
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The arc of “Mill Town” contains many shifts, one of the most significant being the author’s discovery that Nestlé, the world’s largest food and beverage conglomerate, sought to bottle Rumford’s water. Arsenault reflects on the commoditization of Maine’s natural environment and the dangers of “putting life-or-death resources in private hands.” In analyzing a power structure that binds the region’s economic fate to avaricious outside forces, her thinking expands and her relationship with the area gains new dimensions.
“What gave our town life could also be what’s killing it,” Arsenault contends. She implores readers to consider the pages in our books, the toxins in our food, and the mercury-tainted waste buried in the riverbank. While she’s too involved in the unfolding narrative to provide a detached perspective, objectivity seems beside the point. Arsenault intentionally places herself within her town’s story line, trading impartiality for a more impassioned approach. Although the author has moved away from Mexico, she is always returning, confronting “a referendum on the success or failure of a different definition of home.”
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With affection and concern, “Mill Town” recounts “Maine’s constant conundrum, an American story, a human predicament.” In rural, working-class towns, the presence of industry amounts to pollution, but its absence gives way to poverty. Within fence-line communities like Arsenault’s Mexico, prosperity and affliction are wholly intertwined.
MILL TOWN: Reckoning With What Remains
By Kerri Arsenault
St. Martin’s Press, 368 pp., $27.99
Andru Okun is a freelance writer living in New Orleans.
"industry" - Google News
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Tracing what the textile industry did to an area of Maine in 'Mill Town' - The Boston Globe
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