A ghost town attached to a hydro site

I mentioned the other day that the Gilman site used to be a paper mill and that the majority of the mill was now unused. Actually, I think my words were that the rest of the mill was dead. There are different flavors of dead at the mill.

There's the upper middle section that housed the paper machines themselves. Those areas are industrial dead. There's minimal lighting and tons of junk lying around. We're trying to sell the machines so we're trying to "preserve" it a bit with as little effort as possible. The outside of that area of the building looks pretty awesome. The paper machines ran so hot that there's tons of HVAC mounted on the outside of the building.

I love it.

The next section of the mill is the nasty middle office area. While not nasty back in it's day, these lower level mill offices were used for managing the floor. Unfortunately, the roof failed...

Now it's all black mold and water damage. It's so bad I want to hold my breath while walking through it. I was exploring one day during the rain and it's just terrible. There's water coming in everywhere and a storm drain pipe split on the floor and just pours water in. It's just nasty.

Then we come to the "abandoned" type of dead of the main administrative offices. This area looks reasonably normal if a bit neglected. The really disconcerting part of it is that every calendar still shows 2007. There a few areas where unopened mail is still sitting there post-marked 2007. We found someone's lunch (yuck) and a few other signs of an unexpected closure. 

(Coffee?)

Then there's just all the weird stuff you find lying around. We were scavenging primarily for furniture but we were also just looking for anything that might be useful. The guy who ran the mill when it closed already grabbed a bunch of stuff and I heard that one of our (former) operators had been stealing stuff from the front office as well. So we weren't sure how much we'd find. 

One strange one was a fairly modern router wired into the office network, plugged into an old APC power supply and still-on. There was no internet connection hooked in but it was placed near one. It was hacked in so strangely that it had to be reasonably new. 

Turns out we had tried to access some information off the old mainframe (VAX) when we first purchased the plant and had hacked in this network. Apparently it didn't work but I'm not sure what the goal was. That router came with us for use elsewhere.

I found a nice new laptop, the only one left probably. I expect any others were stolen. It's about 2" thick  and not very sleek. Pretty classic though. That keyboard has some serious travel too...

Damn kids and your trackpads...

Since furniture for PHS's new office was our first priority I was scrutinizing all the nice wooden desks in the administrative offices. They're all basically the same as the one above and not particularly interesting. Back at home I have an old oak drafting table that came out of another paper mill and I was hoping to come across something similar. Turns out I was in luck.

It doesn't particularly look like much here but that drafting table is incredibly solid and in really good shape. I'm excited to get it out of here and into our offices.

Overall there were some interesting and strange things we found while digging through the old mill offices. Overall it was just kind-of sad. Whatever happened it was very sudden and nobody really gave a crap. There's no sign of a bank coming through to sell off stuff. We just got the whole mill, as-is, when we bought the hydro portion. 

Our problem now...