Looking for lunch pails
Larry Wahl's drawings of iconic lunch and dinner containers illustrating those carried throughout the history of the mill, as originally published in Still Mill: Poems, Stories & Songs of Making Paper in Bucksport, Maine 1930 - 2014 and later used on our Bucksport Paper Mill towels as shown here.
July 29, 2024
The Bucksport Paper Mill Museum is seeking donations of mill workers' lunch pails. These will be suspended from the ceiling of the museum with the name of the worker and the dates of his or her employment written on the pail.
Various styles of lunch and dinner containers were used by mill workers throughout the years. These lunch baskets, boxes and coolers became symbolic of the mill workers who carried them.
“My father, Frank Ames, worked in the wood yard running the crane when they first opened. ... He carried a basket lunch box with handles like a picnic basket and lugged it on his arm. Sandwiches, like hogs head cheese, and desserts like my mother’s pies. Apple, rhubarb, whatever she made. Thermos of coffee.”
The collection of lunch containers displayed at the mill museum will be one way that we pay tribute to the men and women who worked at the paper mill throughout its history.
If you have a lunch box to donate, please contact us at: bucksportmillmuseum@gmail.com. You can also drop them off at the mill gatehouse building any Tuesday between 8am and 12 noon. Please provide your proper name, nickname, hire and retirement dates, as well as your email address.
Open house event to be held September 2 and 3
Interested in getting an early look at the Bucksport Paper Mill Museum? The gatehouse building will be open to the public on Labor Day, Monday, September 2, 10am to 5pm, and the following day, Tuesday, September 3, from 10am to 2pm. The building is located at the former site of the Bucksport Paper Mill.
Join us to see the work that has been done so far and to learn more about plans for the Museum.