A Bucksport elder, I am a retired educator and homesteader. I grew up on Central St. and subsistence farms in outback Millvale and Bucksmills to which my father returned following WWII, moving our family downriver for work at the mill which he found, being a master rigger aboard a destroyer in the Pacific Theater of the U.S. Navy. My mother worked in the mill wrapping paper while he was serving until child-care became a problem. My uncles, nephew, sister, cousins, classmates and neighbors worked in the mill. My husband, sons and grandsons cut and hauled wood to sell there.

A member of the BHS class of 1958, I worked my way through UMaine where I met and married Ed Ranzoni of rural Chatham, NY, following his work out of state, and back, to keep the Smith farm in the family and raise our three children in Bucksport. We were the last on both sides of our families to keep a family cow. I taught in public schools in Orono and Bucksport, earning graduate degrees in educational leadership along the way. We created New Alderbrook School on the farm, the first state-approved private nursery-kindergarten in the area. 

When in midlife, a neuromuscular condition changed what I could do, I became educational consultant for the Maine Independent Living Center and began writing for publication, freelancing for various entities including, briefly, the mill retirement program. I had articles accepted by publications in the field of education, and poetry by journals across Maine and beyond, documenting the disappearing cultures of my people in coastal, upriver, and woodland Maine. 

In 2014 it was the honor of my life to be named Poet Laureate by the Bucksport Town Council. When the mill closed seven months later, I used that platform to establish the Still Mill anthology project, gathering hundreds of stories and poems for which I obtained a publication grant from the UMaine Foundation providing free copies for all contributors of material and donating royalties to the Historical Society for the location, protection and exhibition of mill artifacts. This Still Mill Fund initiated the financing of the Bucksport Paper Mill Museum.

Former mill electrician, Ray Seamans, arrived at the farm one day presenting the key to the first collection of artifacts rescued from the mill demolition to the Still Mill project, having obtained the donation of a WeStore unit from John Wardwell until a building could be located. In turn, I enlisted the commitment of the Historical Society to take the collection under their nonprofit umbrella and presented the collection's key through  their Vice President, Gary Bagley, who envisioned the mill gatehouse as a papermaking museum. Gary and I became co-chairs and commenced organizing the working group. In and out of the Covid pandemic, while he set about with a Deed Team to secure the property transfer from the numerous owners it was passing through; and Chip Stubbs, renovation foreman, with attorney Bill Tymoczko, guided us through the long, often discouraging process of obtaining an updated property survey and revised town codes, Larry Wahl and I established the Founders Fund for securing and insuring the facility, growing our Still Mill account in readiness.  With these and many other partners, the Bucksport Paper Mill Museum has been the main focus of my life for close to 10 years. It's been who we are.

—Pat Ranzoni