GNP bankruptcy sows need for change in Katahdin area

Like many people in the Katahdin region, Mary Morris desperately wants to believe the idle paper mills will be up and running again one day.

The mills in East Millinocket and Millinocket have shut down for short periods before over the last 20 years, after all, and they’ve managed to come back in some form. Usually as scaled-down versions of themselves, sometimes with new owners, and always with fewer workers than before to keep them running.

Even now, with Great Northern Paper Inc. in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, Morris, the administrative assistant for East Millinocket, is confident the mills won’t disappear for good and take the vulnerable towns down with them.

“This area will go through an extremely difficult period in the next few years,” said Morris, a 37-year-old mother of two young children, whose family has worked in the paper mills for three generations.

“The towns will bounce back somehow. I don’t believe they’ll die, even as more people leave the area. But there will have to big changes, and the biggest is that we can’t look to the mill as our future anymore,” Morris said. “We have to start looking beyond it for other opportunities.”

Yet she also understands there will be some people who cling to the illusive hope that the mills that gave birth to these towns more than 100 years ago will continue to sustain them. The Great Northern tradition, so much a part of the identity of these rural communities, will be a tough habit to break.

“The mills have had a few different owners over the years,” Morris said, “but as long as they keep using the name Great Northern, there will be people who perceive it as the same old landmark they grew up with. They can’t imagine life without Great Northern.”

Morris knows that feeling intimately. She was born in East Millinocket and hopes to live there for the rest of her life. Her grandfather worked at Great Northern, and her father retired from the mill about three years ago. Her husband has worked at the mill for 22 years, and both of his parents worked there before him.

In the late 1970s, when Morris’ husband graduated from Schenck High School, just about everyone could find a job at Great Northern. That changed in the 1980s, when the operation began scaling back, and the work force has been shrinking ever since. The mill that once employed several thousand people now operates with a little more than 1,100.

“As people have lost jobs through the years and left the area,” Morris said, “we’ve had fewer and fewer people of childbearing age living here. We have a lot of retirees from the mill, and now we hear that their health insurance may be in jeopardy. That’s an extremely scary thing – one of many.”

With the possibility of more layoffs to come, and the frightening prospect that her town could lose more than 70 percent of its tax base should Great Northern fold, Morris said the region has no choice but to begin shaping a future that, for the first time in its history, is not based on a papermaking economy.

“We’ve lived with insecurity here for the last 20 years, but this is definitely the most fearful period we’ve ever known,” Morris said. “If the mill closed, and there were no other buyers, a lot of people would have to leave town. But there are also a lot of families that would hang on as long as they could. To survive, we have to stop thinking of ourselves as individual towns of East Millinocket, Medway and Millinocket, all living in our separate little bubbles. We have to come together.”

Making the separate mill towns think as one and diversifying the area’s regional economy will be the greatest challenges the area has ever faced, Morris said. The consolidation of schools in East Millinocket and Medway a few years ago was a promising first step. Having Millinocket join its smaller neighbors, she said, would be even more beneficial to the region.

“It’s a way of changing the mind-set of people in the area and making them work together for the same goals,” she said. “It means erasing the differences among the towns, and the traditional school rivalries that we’ve always known. But whatever happens at the mill, our communities can’t afford to go on as we have before. We have to change, and it’s going to be a long struggle.”