A small town in Franklin County, Massachusetts is getting significant government support to take down a vacant mill complex that poses a threat.
Some $10 million is going toward an effort to demolish the old Strathmore Mill Complex in Turners Falls – a massive series of buildings with structures already “in the preliminary stages of collapse,” according to the town.
Dating to 1874, the mill grew to encompass at least 10 buildings on its sliver of land on the Connecticut River – making up part of the canal district and the area’s economic engine.
In the village within Montague, home to over half of the town’s 8,500 residents, the less-than-two-acre site remains vacant.
Ownership changed multiple times after the Strathmore Paper Company ceased operating there in 1994, and the town took possession of the site in 2010. A study later commissioned by Montague found rehabbing the complex was “economically infeasible.”
The more “suitable” option, according to the town: tear it down and restore the site for the public.
“The planned work consists of [demolishing] this large mill that's behind me - about 200,000 square feet of it - to stabilize the hydroelectric plant that is within the mill and to transform this area into a four-acre, municipal Riverfront Park that connects the bike path that's right below us here, in the Great Falls Discovery, the grounds that we’re on right now,” said Montague Town Administrator Walter Ramsey.
Ramsey described the plan Thursday at an event detailing how the project is being funded.
Gathered at the Great Falls Discovery Center overlooking the mill complex were representatives from the EPA, the state Department of Environmental Protection, and elected leaders like Democratic U.S. Senator Ed Markey, who helped secure the federal dollars.
“Today marks the beginning of a new chapter for Montague, so it's only fitting to rework the prologue of Shakespeare's ‘Romeo and Juliet’ to fit the occasion,” the senator said. “In fair Montague, where we lay our scene, from ancient mill buildings where PCBs make the land unclean, we are now going to change that story.”
Making up the nearly $10 million is $5 million from the state via an earmark from the Department of Conservation and Recreation. The work is also getting $4.9 million in EPA Brownfields Cleanup Grant funds.
Markey recounted his involvement in the 1994 creation of the initial Brownfields program for the EPA while serving on the House Environment Committee. He says the work has continued into his Senate tenure.
"I had come here to Montague in 2020 - walked through this beautiful community, saw this river, but also saw the Strathmore and what had happened,” he said. “And so, in my mind, on the committee, as I was working to build in the funding for a vastly expanded Brownfields program, it was Montague that I was thinking about. It was communities like Montague that really stood out.”
The federal funding can be traced back to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which the senator’s office says included $3.5 billion for Superfund sites.
The EPA announced last month that $35 million in Brownfield grants will be heading to Massachusetts, including $5 million for Springfield to clean up the ES Pinevale Street Property – a 16-acre cleanup site left vacant for 30 years and contaminated with compounds and heavy metals.
In the Berkshires, North Adams is receiving- $1.9 million for the Former Tannery Dump located on Ashton Avenue.
The agency says in the case of Montague, the buildings that were once home to paper production that involved bleaching and forging work are contaminated with PCBs, petroleum, heavy metals and more.
“This program, the Brownfield programs - at the federal level, and the state level – [the] job is to turn blight into might, exemplifying that environmental protection and economic development are not mutually-exclusive, they go hand-in-hand,” said David Cash, administrator of the EPA’s “New England Region” also known as “Region 1.” “And so, the potential for Brownfield sites like this one is huge. It makes one of my favorite events to host all around the region, because we are in New England - we see sites like this all over New England - and since the beginning of the Brownfields program, Massachusetts has been awarded about $200 million to address these kinds of things.”
Officials did not give an exact timeline for the demolition work.
In a June post on the town website, then-Town Administrator Steve Ellis suggested next steps include final design and bidding for the mill’s demolition, with quote “construction anticipated to begin in summer 2025.”
The work comes amid plans to replace multiple bridges along the canal district – a plan totaling over $54 million and likely to start in the spring of 2027, according to MassDOT.
