September 1993
Jan Ross heard the whir of the fax machine and grabbed the message while it was still warm to the touch. “Hiring Freeze: Immediate,” it read. She sucked in a breath. She had joined the staff of Strathmore Paper Company less than 24 hours ago.
“And I thought, ‘Phew!’” she remembered. “Oh my goodness.”
She delivered it to her manager. “Just don’t say anything,” he told her, closing his door to call Memphis. Strathmore was owned by International Paper (IP), and their global headquarters was in Tennessee. A call to Memphis was serious.
Even though it was her second day as a permanent hire in the human resources department in Westfield, Massachusetts, she had worked as a temp there for six months. Through the company picnics, held on the lush grass at nearby Stanley Park, she had met people who worked in the company’s mills in Russell, Millers Falls, and Turners Falls, where 123 employees’ lives would be upended within a year.
At these beloved events, employees and their families basked in the sun. They were far from the production plants, where staff worked around the clock in three shifts, the paper shot out of machines at high speeds – chu-chu-chu-chu-chu – and the guillotine chopped ream after ream with deafening precision – thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk. Sometimes it was so loud the mill workers had to communicate with hand signals.
It was a dangerous job, making paper, and even Ross had to suit up in safety gear if she was entering the manufacturing side of her own building, a calendaring facility where paper was finished. On those occasions Ross laced up steel-toed boots, donned safety glasses, and slipped on earmuffs. She followed the line of yellow tape on the floor; everyone was advised to stay inside of it. The team in Westfield did regular safety drills after someone at a nearby mill fell into the pulper and drowned.
So it was jarring now, this portentous message that threatened the employees’ security. She stayed quiet while her boss emerged from his meeting and made an official announcement.
“It was a definite damper in the office, because we knew if that’s for regular staff, what does it mean for the rank and file?” said Ross.
“It was the beginning of the end, I guess.”
February 2026
Can the end of the end be foreseen? Does identifying the years when Strathmore’s parent company, International Paper, might have made different decisions – 1993 to 2001 – assuage a town’s grief, or only complicate it? Today the sprawling, 224,000-square-foot complex is rusted and rotting on the banks of the Connecticut River, but it was once a beacon of prosperity. And as long as the ruins remain, they are a visible reminder of the mill’s history.
On a snowy Monday morning in February, the Montague historical commission was stuck at home, Zooming into its monthly meeting. The topic at hand was whether the group should invoke the town’s demolition delay bylaw for the Strathmore complex. (Turners Falls is one of five villages in the town of Montague.) The town had seized the decaying property under tax title in 2010.
What has halted the paper mill’s destruction, time and again, is exactly what got it off the ground: hope.
Janel Nockleby, the commission’s chair, called the vote. Chris Clawson, Ed Gregory, and Jen Viencek prepared to cast their decision on whether they should interrupt the demolition, scheduled to start in November 2027 thanks to $10 million in state and federal grants.
In 1871, the revered John Keith was running a mill in Adams when asked if he would like to build one from scratch. Soon, the Keith Paper Company was erected in Turners Falls, and the mill opened in 1873.
“It was unhesitatingly pronounced by experienced papermakers the best mill in the world,” the Springfield Republican bragged in 1877.
That same year a fire burned down the mill, and Keith took a second opportunity to define an institution in the up-and-coming manufacturing town. Upon hearing the steam whistle from his Greenfield home, according to Wren Wood, the park interpreter at the Great Falls Discovery Center in Turners Falls, Keith snapped into action, arriving on horseback and directing the firemen to save the financial records.
The mill was rebuilt within four months. In 1953, Keith Paper Company would be bought by Strathmore Paper Company and the structure became known largely as “the Strathmore,” even after Strathmore was bought by Hammermill in 1962, and after Hammermill was bought by International Paper in 1986.
“I don’t call it ‘the Strathmore’ or ‘International Paper,’” said Clawson at the meeting of the historical commission. “There is a history surrounding the creation of the Keith Paper Mill. It is part of the story about the re-tasking of the canal system, and [its] industrial use following the Civil War.”
Clawson and Gregory, who also administer the Montague Historical Society archives, are invested in continuing the story. It is “extremely important to the country,” said Clawson.
September 1993
Brad Peters was sent to Strathmore to manage its demise. He was called a communications manager, but he had a reputation for silencing the conversation – he was given the unenviable task of making a living by stripping away people’s livelihoods.
“When he’d go to other mills and they saw him coming, they’d go, ‘Uh oh,’” said Ross, who now lives in Erving.
International Paper had already used him in Jay, Maine, where a 16-month strike ending in 1988 led to the loss of hundreds of jobs after the company hired scabs to replace seasoned workers. Shortly after Peters came aboard in 1990, those replacement workers voted to decertify two unions, leaving negotiations with the conglomerate in individuals’ hands. True to its name, International Paper already had a worldwide presence then; today it operates at nearly 250 sites in 30 countries.
International Paper did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Peters was dispatched to Westfield in June 1993, where, he eventually admitted to Ross, “there was going to be some efficiency” at Strathmore’s Fine Papers division.
The two began dating the summer before the fateful fax came in, and continued a discreet office romance until 1995, when they married.
“Don’t take this wrong,” Ross told the Montague Reporter and The Shoestring during a visit to her home, where she and Peters lived until his passing in 2023. “He’d know how to manage this conversation with you. ‘Control the interview’ – that was the phrase. I hated him for that.”
She loved him for it, too. It was Peters’s precision, his insistence on reading her every memo before anyone else saw or heard it, that demonstrated two things: he prized her opinion, and he valued the employees’ welfare. Before IP announced it was downsizing, Ross said, Peters spent nearly a year advocating for the workers behind the scenes and writing helpful bulletins – to be included with their severance packages – on how to put together a resume and apply for unemployment.
“He understood he was dealing with human lives,” she said, “and he wanted it to be done right, and in the least hurtful way.”
While he managed the overarching downsizing, Ross assembled each severance package.
August 1994
“Strathmore Paper in Turners Closing,” the headline on Page 1 of the Greenfield Recorder read on August 4, 1994. Ninety-seven hourly and 26 salaried employees were told that they were being let go, “because the factory’s outmoded paper machines are the smallest and slowest of all the machines used in the Fine Paper Division of International Paper… according to Brad Peters, Strathmore’s communications manager.”
On the same day, the Springfield Republican reported, “Strathmore officials said yesterday that the mills in total are putting out more paper than needed, and the closing is meant to pull production back even with demand.”
It’s possible that the writing was on the wall as far back as 1986. Anton Zamachaj, a mechanical engineer at Strathmore in the 1980s, explained that after IP bought the company, it “lost [its] deal with the small-order purchasers” such as Hallmark Cards. To make complicated papers with “watermarks and feltmarks and specific colors,” he said, it could take half a day to set up the machinery correctly, which led to a lot of waste.
“They were doing runs that were probably spitting one or two bad rolls out to make one or two good rolls, then IP put a 10,000-pound minimum on orders,” said Zamachaj, who now lives in Chicopee. That was too much for Hallmark, a major buyer. “I’m assuming they just went, ‘We’re done.’”
However you look at it, the employees were devastated. “‘Dark’ isn’t the right word,” said Ross, remembering the ensuing heaviness at the office. “The sun could be shining and it wasn’t cheery.”
When it heard the plant would close, Local 1711 of the United Paperworkers’ International Union (UPIU) attempted an employee buyout, but International Paper said it couldn’t support the competition. According to the Recorder, on October 6 IP sent a letter to UPIU representative Ronald Pickering barring the manufacture of any paper product on the site. Because the company was not actively seeking a sale, the letter stated, “we are not prepared to make a sale offer.”
But Local 1711 president Bob Emond said that IP first dangled a carrot: there could be a sale – but the employees could only make paper for Bibles and cigarettes.
“The paper for Bibles was real thin,” said Emond, reached on vacation in Florida. Rolling papers are even thinner. “We made artist-grade materials. They weren’t going to let us make that.”
“And we didn’t know how to get into anything else,” said Greenfield resident Dennis Richotte, who was let go after working at Strathmore for 21 years.
Emond, who had started work at Strathmore out of high school in 1976, said the announcement the plant was closing wasn’t a surprise. “We were thinking it for a long time,” he said. “Once IP took over, they brought in all these different people to write down all the steps we took. They wanted to learn all our grades of paper, then they were thinking of how to close us down.”
After working his way up through the Local 1711, Emond was crushed when the union international told him that there wasn’t any money to help his workers. “That left a sore spot on my heart,” he said.
Despite its reluctance to kick in money, the international did help with negotiations around the employees’ severance packages. Originally, Emond said, IP wanted to spread out the severance payments, which would have delayed the workers collecting unemployment. The international union helped them win one lump sum.
With the remaining dues for his local chapter, he said, “We had a few parties, different drawings with gift cards, trying to help people get groceries. We did what we could to help the 100 people losing their jobs.”
Following the initial announcement in August, local churches quickly offered their support. “We really got concerned when they announced they were closing,” said Reverend Stanley Aksamit of Our Lady of Peace Church in Turners Falls. “We tried to gather people together to pray, we took up a collection [and divided] the money evenly among the employees who were about to lose their jobs. We couldn’t stop the process from evolving, but at least we tried to let the workers know we were with them.”
Aksamit, who grew up in Turners Falls, said the community’s manufacturing institutions – like those across the country – were no match for globalization. During his adolescence, he remembered, “We had a lot of stores in the downtown area, and between Turners Falls and Greenfield we could take care of all our needs.” Soon the Eastfield Mall arrived in Springfield, and the freshly constructed Interstate 91 allowed for easy travel out of town.
“When I was in high school, a friend of mine whose dad worked [at Strathmore] said the mill would never close, because there was a certain color of purple paper,” Aksamit explained, that no one else could replicate.
Truth or myth, everyone, everywhere was eager to make products that cost less to create. The mill closed on November 6.
January 2026
A month before the Montague historical commission gathered to vote on proceeding with leveling the Strathmore complex, Wood gave a talk at the Great Falls Discovery Center on the company’s legacy.
“We had six former employees who attended,” said Wood, though it wasn’t clear if they had worked for Strathmore in Russell, Millers Falls, or Turners Falls. “It brought a history alive.”
The park interpreter pointed out that the Keith Mill wasn’t just any institution – it was a catalyst for Turners Falls’s growth: “Without it, there wouldn’t have been the financial backing to build housing and create jobs. The village as we know it wouldn’t exist.” The paper mill paid well for people starting work out of high school, Wood said, noting that generations of workers have remained here.
But when Wood invited the former employees to share their memories, they recalled the mill’s limitations, such as how dark it was, not having exposure to fresh air, and the ever-present possibility of getting hurt.
Strathmore was once one of the main employers in a town now deemed “one of the most economically distressed communities in the most rural counties in the Commonwealth,” in the words of the Montague Economic Development and Industrial Corporation (EDIC), which noted in a 2022 report that a “steady erosion of traditional manufacturing has left the town saddled with a backlog of aging infrastructure.”
That same year, the town’s master plan for the redevelopment of what officials now call the “Canal District” reported that most of the Strathmore complex is made up of “buildings in distress.” The document includes 13 photos showing rotting walls, caved-in ceilings, and window panes reduced to jagged glass. Its suggested solutions included performing “selective demolition” and creating space for “historic interpretation.”
This razor-thin line between reality and possibility, and the human desire to maintain it, is a recurring theme in discussions of the complex’s past, present, and future.
Wood said they hoped their presentation provided a useful reframing. “Many folks across the valley, at least by my perspective, are sort of feeling burned or burnt out on the industrial history of the area and how it dominates narratives,” they said. “I’d like to give folks the chance to cut through that disillusionment, and see the hope it once offered the community.”
January 1995 – December 1996
After the Turners Falls mill closed, International Paper sold the machinery to a Turkish company. “For several months, a group of workers carefully took apart the machines, catalogued the parts, and loaded them into shipping containers,” Peters would later write in the Montague Reporter. “The machines were reassembled and paper was again produced.”
This kind of outsourcing wasn’t uncommon, said Zamachaj, the mechanical engineer: “All I did for 15 years was tear machines down to be recycled, or boxed them up and sent them overseas.”
Meanwhile, IP assigned a 15-year lease to its neighbor, Indeck Industries. The co-generating power plant, which had operated next door since 1989 and provided the building with steam, now set out to find tenants for what it called the “Canal Road Arts & Industries Building.” It was another hopeful beginning, this time for an arts incubator that at its peak housed 35 individuals and businesses.
But there were cracks in the foundation – and they had been there for a while.
“When I would go up there to my temporary office off the courtyard, in the wing closest to Esleeck [Manufacturing Company],” said Zamachaj of the state of affairs in 1985, “every time the fork truck hit the wall we wondered if this was going to be the time we’d go down with it. The building was so cockeyed that when I put my back against it and looked up, I couldn’t see the sky.”
Ten years later Indeck plant manager Fran Zabek, tasked with finding lessees, was “watching out for bricks falling out of the wall.” The Art & Industries effort, he admitted, was “just a stopgap until the higher-ups made the final decision to shut the place down.”
But Zabek, who now resides in Florida, remembers fondly tenants like Jim Slavas, a senior scientist at Spray Research, Inc. who manufactured fog nozzles, and Paul Franz, who owned a photography studio and worked as the photo editor for the Greenfield Recorder.
“It was a big happy family – until it wasn’t,” said Zabek.
“It was a great thing, all these artists,” agreed Franz. “I was in Building 11. Jim [Slavas] was right below me. He was like a mad professor, testing nozzles and playing classical music on his cello. The building was full of characters.”
Franz noted that Indeck often steamed up the windows, but that was the least of the issues.
“We called the lower part of the building ‘the Dungeon,’” remembered Thor Holbek, who created museum displays and now lives in Maine. “It was dark down there, with big chambers, different stainless-steel vats, and acid to clean the paper and color it.”
Nina Rossi, who interned with Holbek and now handles distribution for the Montague Reporter, described a side room where water seepage from the canal created “this really dark waterfall.”
But everyone felt the mill still had potential.
January 1997 – January 2000
Indeck shut down its operations in October 1996, and Zabek told the tenants they would have to leave by 1998. This would ultimately be extended until 2000, but in the meantime, four more attempts to buy the mill buildings were quashed by International Paper.
In January 1997 David Manning, the president of Applied Dynamics Corporation, which leased space in one of the buildings, offered to buy the complex. Manning thought he had secured a verbal agreement, but IP shut it down that October.
“The offer was ridiculous,” an IP representative told the Recorder at the time. The Springfield Republican, meanwhile, reported that IP had put a $10 offer on the table, then rescinded it.
That December, Slavas and Holbek teamed up to buy 65,000 square feet of the space, but International Paper told them it preferred to sell the entire complex.
Slavas told the Recorder on December 2 that he had written a letter to Montague’s board of selectmen but had not received a response.
Reached by email this year, Slavas, who resides in Monroe Bridge, was critical of all parties involved in the rejection – especially the town.
“Although IP certainly shares responsibility for the outcome owing to their own fantasy of the complex’s value… the Town’s failure to grasp both the promise and vulnerability of the nascent ‘Arts and Industry’ community was the most damaging,” he wrote.
In September 1999, Holbek returned with an offer to buy the entire complex, but IP rejected a purchase-and-sale following a verbal agreement. “The deal is off,” IP’s spokesperson told the Recorder, adding cryptically that Holbek had requested “a lot of changes.”
Holbek would later recall that these were environmentally related, but couldn’t remember any specifics.
Finally, in January 2000, IP rejected a $1 bid from the Franklin County Community Development Corporation (FCCDC). The Republican reported that the paper company wanted to sell the property as-is, but the FCCDC had asked it to “replace fire doors, change the sprinkler system to accommodate multitenant use and repair the heating system.” The nonprofit, which supports the development of small businesses, could not afford these repairs.
“The whole idea was [to] carry the building through the winter so we would have time to pull money together… to make this a viable building,” FCCDC vice chair Molly Wood told the Recorder at the time.
John Waite, who was hired as the executive director of the FCCDC that spring, was not involved in any attempts to purchase the building, but, he told the Reporter, “I do know there were a lot of environmental cleanup issues. When I came on, people said, ‘Don’t get involved with Strathmore.’”
July 2000 – June 2001
The sixth time was apparently the charm – or, depending on who you ask, the curse.
In July 2000, International Paper received an offer from Swift River Hydro, LLC, which sought to buy only the mill’s hydroelectric turbine, which amounted to less than 4% of the complex. Because the power plant shared walls with other buildings in the complex, the town was asked to allow easements proposed by IP.
The question at hand, reported the Recorder, was whether Montague planning board members had the “authority to give approval for the subdivision of a building in the same manner as for land subdivision.”
It was baffling.“It’s like looking at an ANR (Approval Not Required) to separate the bathroom from two other rooms in my house,” member Steve Ellis told the newspaper.
Looking back, David Jensen, who served as the town’s building inspector from 1988 to 2018 and is now the alternate building inspector, said that IP ultimately “wanted to dump the problem” – on Montague, and on him.
“Shit runs downhill,” he said. “Since I was probably an advocate of saving the building, it was like, ‘Okay, now it’s your problem’ was how the bureaucracy worked.”
Jensen, with his dry sense of humor and gravelly voice, might sound like he is over the endless will-they-or-won’t-they around the Strathmore. But when he gave the Reporter a tour outside the old buildings – buildings he may know better than anyone – in early 2026, he demonstrated otherwise.
When we came to the former courtyard, Jensen stopped and looked out at the overgrown space. “A guy used to play his cello here,” he said wistfully.
Asked if it had seemed as though the Strathmore was already doomed when the town was deciding whether to section it off, Jensen replied, “‘Doomed’ – that’s retrospect. I don’t think anybody was under the illusion that this was somehow going to be easy. It was an uphill slug no matter how you looked at it.”
In April 2001 the zoning board of appeals (ZBA) decided that the sale of the power plant, though not ideal, could mean another start. In June Swift River’s subsidiary, Turners Falls Hydro, moved in.
“With an occupant in the complex, it might have grown,” said Jensen, who had approved the easements.
The only member of the ZBA to dissent was Dennis Booska, whose prescient opinion echoes like a warning: “Leaving the remainder with no reuse plan except for ‘it’s for sale’ raises the specter of a purposeful abandonment of responsibilities [by IP],” he wrote. “To allow this condition to be aggravated by separation of the building as it is into ‘lots’ cannot be reconciled with the intent of the zoning bylaws nor deemed to be in the public good.”
Reached through his son at Booska’s Flooring in Turners Falls, Booska declined an interview.
IP would go on to sell the remainder of the complex in 2002, and after a series of additional tragedies including an arson fire in 2007 that burned down Building 10, the town seized the property in 2010. As of December 2025 officials have been in talks with Eagle Creek Renewable Energy, which now owns Turners Falls Hydro, to discuss “site access, project sequencing, and interface with adjacent hydroelectric infrastructure,” according to the town’s webpage for the Strathmore Mill Site Cleanup Project.
The physical connection between the power plant, still operating today, and the empty complex has made rehabilitation or demolition extremely complicated.
“I don’t think all the possibilities have been exhausted,” said Jensen. “I think the motivation to pursue them is basically zero, and the path is looking inevitable. The potential was pretty good, the finances are horrible, but the dream goes on.”
February 2026
As the Zoom meeting of the historical commission continued on that snowy morning, Nockleby agreed with Clawson that despite its condition, the Strathmore “invokes a sense of place.”
“It’s very much a big presence,” Nockleby said. “It’s a touchpoint for the memories of everything from the workers, their injuries, the person who after a fire rose from the ashes and rebuilt it in the 1870s… All those stories matter.”
But.
“But where we’re at, the building inspector, the police department, the fire department, the town administrative staff, nobody wants these buildings. They’re condemned, basically. And we’re in rural Franklin County; there is no white knight coming to save us, there’s nobody with deep pockets to help.”
The commission voted unanimously not to delay the demolition.
This article was written in collaboration between The Shoestring (www.theshoestring.org) and the Montague Reporter.
Melissa Karen Sances
