WILLOW CREEK — The last log came through the saw carriage at 3:14 in the afternoon on November 17, 1972. It was a northern red maple, 22 inches at the butt, cut from a woodlot on Farr Road that had been supplying the mill since 1928. The sawyer that afternoon was Leo Cormier, who had been running that carriage since 1948 and would tell the story of that last cut for the rest of his life.

“It was a good log,” Cormier told the Gazette in 1995, during an oral history project that the Historical Society conducted in anticipation of the mill’s 75th anniversary. “Straight grain, nice colour. The kind of log you want to finish on. I took my time with it. The foreman didn’t say anything, and I didn’t ask.”

The mill had been running continuously since 1903, when Ezra Thorne’s grandson, Benjamin Thorne, converted the family’s shipbuilding operation into a steam-powered flooring mill. The Thorne family had seen the river shipping business dying and recognised that the same timber that had built sloops could be planed into flooring for a rapidly industrialising nation. The mill produced pine and maple flooring for schools, churches, and office buildings from Bangor to Boston. At its peak in the 1920s, it employed 240 men and ran two shifts.

By 1972, it employed 180.

“We knew it was coming,” said Harold Peller, 84, the only living former foreman of the mill’s planing mill department, in a 2010 interview with the Gazette. “The Thorntons weren’t running it anymore. The corporation that bought it in 1965 — they’d been bleeding it for years. No maintenance. No new equipment. They were cutting the timber and selling it, and the mill was just a way to add a few cents per board foot before it went out the door.”

Harold Peller is the father of Stu Peller, who would become general manager when the mill reopened in 1990. He died in 2018 at the age of 92.

The final week was an orderly wind-down. The dry kilns were emptied of their last charge on Monday. The planer ran its final batch of finished flooring on Tuesday — 1,400 board feet of select-grade maple, loaded onto a flatbed for a school gymnasium in Presque Isle. The molder was shut down and greased on Wednesday. By Thursday, only the saw carriage was still running, cutting the last of the logs that had been pulled from the pond.

“The pond was almost empty,” Cormier recalled. “You could see the bottom in places. I’d never seen the bottom of that pond in my life. There were logs down there that must have sunk fifty years ago. We left them.”

The mill had its own log pond, fed by a millrace from the Willow River, just upstream from Thorne’s Bend. Logs were floated in, sorted, and pulled up a jack ladder into the mill. The pond was drained in 1975, when the property was briefly owned by a salvage company. It was filled in and graded in 1980.

The final whistle blew at 4:00 PM.

“It wasn’t like the movies,” said Doris Beaumont, who had worked in the mill’s front office since 1951. “There was no speech. No ceremony. The whistle blew and people walked out to their cars. Some of them were crying. Most of them were quiet. Leo stayed in the sawyer’s seat for a long time after the whistle. I saw him through the window. He was just sitting there, looking at the carriage.”

Beaumont, who was 42 at the time of the closure, went to work at the Aroostook County clerk’s office in Houlton. She retired in 1995 and still lives on School Street, two blocks from the silent mill.

The aftermath rearranged the town. One hundred and eighty workers — a number that represented roughly one in every four employed residents of Willow Creek — were suddenly without wages. Some found work at the paper mill in Millinocket. Others relocated to southern Maine or out of state entirely. The town’s population, which had held steady at approximately 1,200 since the 1940s, dropped to 950 by the 1980 census.

“It was like someone pulled the plug on a bathtub,” said Arthur Pendelton, chairman of the Board of Selectmen, whose father ran Pendelton’s Hardware through the closure years. “Not all at once. But over the next few years, you could see the water level going down. Empty houses. Fewer kids in the school. The diner changed hands three times.”

Pendelton’s father, Everett Pendelton, carried the mill workers on credit for six months after the closure. The hardware store survived, but only barely. “Dad used to say he never lost a night’s sleep over it,” Pendelton said. “He also never made money on those ledgers. But nobody starved, and that was good enough for him.”

For seventeen years, the mill sat empty and deteriorating. The roof leaked. The planer rusted. The saw carriage — the same one Cormier had run — remained in place, untouched, as if waiting for the next shift that never came. Vandals broke windows. Squatters camped in the dry kilns. The town considered condemning the building.

Then, in 1989, a group of local investors — led by Stu Peller, Harold’s son, who had been 12 years old when the mill closed — formed Willow Creek Custom Flooring, LLC and bought the property for $42,000. They spent $180,000 on equipment and another $60,000 on building repairs. The mill reopened in April of 1990 with a crew of 18.

It now employs 40.

Today, the mill is a different operation — smaller, more specialised, focused on historic restorations and custom work rather than the high-volume commodity flooring that defined its first seven decades. But the building is the same. The planer is new, but the carriage Cormier ran on November 17, 1972, still sits in the same spot, not operational but not removed either. Stu Peller keeps a framed photograph of his father standing beside that carriage in 1955.

“People ask me why I started this place,” Peller said. “They think it’s about business. And it is, partly. But the real reason is that I grew up in a town that had given up. And I wanted to see what happened if we didn’t.”

He paused.

“I also knew that if I didn’t reopen that mill, there would come a day when nobody alive remembered the sound it made. And that seemed like a loss I could do something about.”

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