East Millinocket Paper Mill, Maine

Great Northern Paper, which built the bigger mill in Millinocket, built this nearby mill in East Millinocket in 1907, along with another in Madison. The company grew to become the largest supplier of newsprint in the country, with more than 2 million acres of timberland in Maine (including a few thousand acres around Mount Katahdin, which it sold to the state in 1930 to form Baxter State Park). In the 1960s, the company built a plant in Georgia, and in the 1970s acquired or built plants in Wisconsin, Arkansas, and Mississippi. Changes to the industry came in the 1990s, and the company was sold and resold, until declaring bankruptcy in 2003, and closed its Millinocket Mill in 2008. The East Millinocket mill hung on a bit longer (it is said that the plant was saved by Fifty Shades of Grey, the popular 2011 trilogy, which used 3,000 tons of the mill’s paper to print its initial run). Even so, the mill was shuttered in 2014.