Many feared that the closure of the Bucksport paper mill 10 years ago would devastate the Hancock County town.
Built during the Great Depression, the mill came to define the waterfront community over 80-plus years, employing thousands of people under its successive owners until Dec. 17, 2014, when nearly 600 workers walked off the job for the last time.
But in the decade since then, even as weeds have taken over much of the former mill site and Bucksport has faced other challenges including the pandemic, it has not withered like many other places that have lost their big industrial employers.
Since 2010, the population has slightly grown to just more than 5,000 residents, as enrollment has remained steady in its schools. Home values have risen instead of fallen, although that has created its own challenges for some residents. While the downtown has some empty storefronts, as is typical for most small-town Main Streets, it continues to boast a healthy mix of shops, restaurants and other businesses.
As the town marks the 10th anniversary of the mill closure, its resilience can be attributed to both the foresight of local officials and its advantageous geography. Bucksport is centrally located between various other service center communities and is one of the more affordable communities along Maine’s coast, where demand for all sorts of housing has soared in recent years.
How has your Maine town recovered after its mill closed?
“A lot of people came to rural communities again because of the pandemic,” said Kate Corwin, a Bucksport native who moved back from the Portland-area in 2016 because she was allowed to work remotely for athenahealth. “This is a good place to live and raise your kids. Everybody thought for sure Bucksport would roll up the sidewalks after the mill closed, and it so clearly hasn’t.”
It’s not just people originally from Bucksport who have discovered its small-town charms. Kate Harris and Eddie Hays, of northern Virginia, bought a home on Main Street in the fall of 2023, after getting a video tour from an agent who drove two hours to show it to them online.
Harris, a longtime seasonal visitor to Kennebunkport, said she and Hays previously knew nothing about Bucksport but love the house, which dates from 1890, and the downtown village.
While work and family considerations in Virginia have prevented them from moving to Bucksport full-time, they hope to someday.
Weathering the financial storm
To explain how Bucksport survived the closure of its paper mill, local officials credit their predecessors with stockpiling millions in tax revenue when it was still operating, which has lessened the blow from losing that income and prevented the town from falling into disrepair.
The plant had been the lifeblood of Bucksport, but in the late 20th century, as other Maine mills began facing financial troubles and layoffs, officials recognized the need to plan ahead and eventually saved up $8 million from the mill’s tax payments.
“We had a 900-pound gorilla at the end of Main Street that was both a blessing and a curse,” said Town Manager Susan Lessard, referring to the mill’s impact on the town.
That cushion has helped the town to weather the financial fallout from the closure without significantly raising taxes or cutting services, especially as optimism has dwindled that Whole Oceans, which bought a section of the mill property five years ago, will follow through on plans to replace it with a $250 million salmon farm.
The town’s tax base immediately shrank by 40 percent after the mill closed, with the total local property valuation falling from $712 million to $432 million, according to Lessard, who was hired in 2015.
But by spending $2 million of that $8 million “nest egg” in the year after the closure, officials limited the immediate hike in the tax rate to $3 for $1,000 of a home’s value, from $14 to $17, according to Lessard. That meant the owner of a Bucksport home with the median 2015 price of $119,500 saw their annual property taxes grow from $1,673 to $2,032.
The town has since spent another $4 million from the original $8 million fund, meaning it still has a couple million leftover. It has maintained funding for infrastructure and services, including a mile-long riverwalk, sidewalks, a seasonal outdoor swimming pool and local police, fire and ambulance departments, Lessard said.
“If we didn’t have that money, or blew through it all at once, we couldn’t have recovered. And we wouldn’t have recovered if we had waited for a new employer to come save us,” Lessard said.
After a town-wide revaluation in 2023, the town’s current tax rate is $13.25 per $1,000 of value and the total assessed value for all property has risen back to $636 million, more than $200 million higher than it was in 2015.
An evolving community
The fact that the town weathered the financial storm of the mill closure hasn’t stopped officials from continuing to try to bring new tenants there, although the initial optimism about Whole Oceans’ plans to build a salmon farm have faded as the site still remains untouched and the company’s development permits have expired.
Paul Bissonnette, who as mayor serves as the chair of the local town council, pointed to various possibilities for the mill property, including that Whole Oceans could get its project back on track, or two other operations already on the site — Maine Maritime Academy’s professional training facility and power company Bucksport Generation — could grow.
The riverfront site’s proximity to rail lines, natural gas, and the Sprague Energy marine terminal likely will attract renewed interest at some point, he said.
But at this point, many residents and officials do not feel that the site needs a large new tenant for the town to continue developing at a good pace. For Bissonnette, Bucksport’s appeal to both people who grew up there and to those from away who want small-town living — and don’t necessarily need a job in town — will ensure its survival.
“Bucksport has weathered the past 10 years better than many people expected,” Bissonnette said. “It was unabashedly a mill town, but it continues to evolve.”
In some ways, Bucksport already was transforming well before the mill closure, with more members of its shrinking workforce commuting long distances and fewer mill families raising kids in town, according to Bissonnette. That led to local high school enrollment dipping from more than 400 students in the 1990s and 2000s, to around 300 in 2014.
But there has not been a major contraction since the mill closure in 2014. Cumulative enrollment among the town’s four schools, from kindergarten through high school, has held steady at just shy of 1,100 students, according to state data. Bissonnette noted that the 2011 closure of the elementary school in neighboring Orland brought more students who may have offset some declines.
A more affordable coastal town
Mark Eastman, a Bucksport town councilor and local real estate agent said that, as painful as the mill’s closure was, it may have put Bucksport in a better position to attract new residents who are self-employed or have remote jobs.
Bucksport is a small, quiet town, within easy commuting distance of Bangor and other larger communities, and has both a downtown and services that are easy to access. Its proximity to the water and nearby cities made the town more desirable during the pandemic, when millions of office workers began working from home and urban residents moved to smaller towns to avoid crowds, he said.
Even as such factors have pushed up the prices for Maine homes, especially along the coast, people still have been buying them. Bucksport’s median home price of $272,000 is two and a half times as high as it was a decade ago, but still well below those in the nearby communities of Belfast, Blue Hill and Ellsworth, which range from $345,000 to $442,500, according to data compiled by the Maine State Housing Authority.
“To some degree, the mill closure opened the town up,” Eastman said, though he added that the increase in home values has not been easy for longtime residents with limited incomes to absorb. “Our tax rate is still lower than any full-service community around us.”
The town appears to be getting younger, said Eastman. When he was first elected to the council eight years ago, he was in his late 40s, compared with most other council members who were in their 60s or 70s. Now, he is one of the older people on the board.
Eastman also pointed to signs of new blood in downtown, although officials hope to fill some empty storefronts with help from a state development program.
Warren’s Waterfront Restaurant, which was founded in 2019 by a former mill employee, was bought this fall by a new owner who moved from Massachusetts because he wanted a quieter lifestyle. Chalee’s, a new Thai sushi restaurant, is preparing to open next to the town office. My Buddy’s Place opened this summer in the former Friar’s Brewhouse Tap Room.
Matthew Cunningham, a landscape architect who grew up in town, bought the Bucksport Branch bank building in June to preserve and find a new commercial use for it.
And BookStacks, a longtime book and wine shop, is changing hands, with owner Andy Lacher selling the business to Corwin — the Bucksport native who moved back to the town with her husband and is now raising young kids there.
The sidewalk outside BookStacks is where Harris and Hays, the Virginia residents, were walking their dogs the day before Thanksgiving.
When they do visit their new seasonal home, they enjoy exploring the area, checking out nearby communities and finding hiking trails and wild blueberries, Harris said.
“We were so glad we got here,” Harris said. “The people are amazing. You can just sort of slide in and join. They really did welcome us.”
