Although they’re often called mobile homes or trailers, that’s really a misnomer because their owners can’t easily relocate them. Typically, the people who own them rent the land underneath the houses from the owners of manufactured home parks. Sometimes, an owner will rent their home to someone else while paying to rent the land as well.
Manufactured homes tend to be far more affordable than other single-family homes because they have lower upfront and monthly expenses. A typical one costs around US$120,000; smaller ones, known as single-wides, cost around $87,000.
I’m studying poverty, inequality, collective action and rural housing as a sociology Ph.D. candidate. In 2025, I began to conduct in-depth, on-the-ground research documenting the experiences of residents in manufactured home parks in rural Wisconsin whose park was either for sale or had been sold to a private equity firm. So far, I’ve interviewed 15 people as part of an ongoing study that is forthcoming and not yet published.
I’ve found that in this region, as is occurring in the rest of the country, rents tended to spike soon after those firms bought the parks. Those rent hikes are, in turn, creating a crisis for many low-income residents who may suddenly need to move, but have limited options.
Getting priced out
Nationally, rents in these parks have increased by 45% over the past decade. This increase, which is not adjusted for inflation, mirrors overall rent growth. But it shows how manufactured housing is becoming less affordable at the same rapid pace as the broader rental market.
In 2025, I interviewed a man I’m calling Anthony Perez. (I’m using pseudonyms to protect the privacy of everyone who spoke with me, which is a standard social science research method.) He had worked as a logger in northern Wisconsin until a debilitating back injury ended his ability to continue in the profession past his early 50s.
In anticipation of having a low income for the long term, Perez chose to invest his life savings in a manufactured home.
“There was a trailer for sale, and it was decent,” he said. “I had a little savings and workers comp, so I bought it for $9,000, thinking I could afford to live there on my disability income.”
That plan broke down when a private equity firm bought his park and instantly raised his monthly rent from $350 to $500, now costing him more than half of the $800 a month in Social Security Disability Insurance benefits he received.
With no other housing options, Perez decided to stay and fight alongside his neighbors, all of whom were facing the same rising rents and uncertainty about their ability to remain in their homes. Together, the residents have started organizing meetings to conjure up strategies to resist the changes imposed by the new ownership.
“They’re bullies,” Perez said. “So we here residents have to make some noise and get some power in a group to push back.”
Many mobile home communities are located in rural areas with scant affordable housing stock. AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel
Rising anxiety
Perez was among the many residents I met who lived in fear of losing their home and with limited options of where to go.
Johanna Hansen, a retired high school teacher who also invested her life savings in her manufactured home, lived about 40 miles (64 kilometers) west in another manufactured home park that a private equity firm had recently put in an offer for.
“I own my home, but I don’t own the land that it’s on,” Hansen said. “I always feel that insecurity of not knowing what will happen a year from now – or with the current sale, maybe even sooner than that.”
If the monthly cost of renting her lot rises by more than $100, Hansen says she will have to sell her home and move.
“Had I known the park was going to be sold to an investment group, I wouldn’t have bought in the first place,” she said. “But now I’m stuck.”
Repeating a similar mistake
In my view, today’s threat to mobile home parks echoes the loss of another affordable housing option: single-room occupancy units.
And like the single-room units that have largely disappeared, that housing is at risk of being lost, too.
The author would like to thank University of Wisconsin-Madison Sociology professor Jessica Calarco for her supervisory role and support on this project.
Erin Gaede does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
“Dark money” group takes aim at Longmeadow municipal fiber vote
When Vineeth Hemavathi ran for a vacated seat on Longmeadow’s Select Board in 2023, he spent months on the campaign trail knocking on doors. Though it hadn’t been an issue he had considered previously, the topic he said his neighbors mentioned most during those conversations was the poor quality of internet service.
“In Longmeadow, there are a lot of remote workers, and I just kept hearing over and over again how disruptive it was to their workdays,” he told The Shoestring.
After he was elected to the Select Board, Hemavathi volunteered to represent the body on the town’s Municipal Fiber Task Force, which began meeting that year to explore creating a public utility to bring much faster fiber internet to town. It wasn’t long before he heard from other towns that Longmeadow would likely face some well-funded opposition to the creation of a new public utility.
Longmeadow is only the latest among dozens of municipalities in western Massachusetts building out publicly owned fiber networks, most of which have partnered either with Whip City Fiber, Westfield’s public utility, or Fiberspring, part of the South Hadley Electric Light Department. But while building a municipal fiber network in the region’s more rural towns has faced little opposition, as private internet service providers have little intention of building infrastructure for small customer bases, a shadowy, difficult-to-trace group calling itself Mass Priorities has run apparently well-funded campaigns against municipal broadband in communities like West Springfield and Southwick.
Sure enough, Mass Priorities made its presence known in Longmeadow in the weeks before the town’s second vote to create a municipal light plant, the public utility that owns a public fiber network, in November 2024. The group spent over $10,000 on Facebook ads, according to listings on that site’s ad library, and, Hemavathi said, started phone-banking residents from out-of-town phone numbers.
“People were skeptical,” Hemavathi said.
Ultimately, the town voted by a 10-1 margin both to create the municipal light plant and to fund an initial design phase at that special Town Meeting.
According to Sean Fitzgerald, the general manager of the South Hadley Electric Light District and developer of Fiberspring, this kind of enthusiasm is not uncommon, especially in communities with lots of professionals who work from home or families with school-aged children. With more and more “cord-cutters” swapping out home appliances like TVs with modern, internet-connected replacements, Fitzgerald said Fiberspring doesn’t even do town-by-town market research anymore to confirm demand for more reliable fiber internet.
“You just need to ask your neighbor, ‘Is your internet failing while you were watching the Celtics last night?’” he joked.
The problem, Fitzgerald says, is that conglomerates like Comcast — the dominant internet service provider in Longmeadow through its division Xfinity — are not investing in “last mile” fiber, connecting homes to broader fiber networks, which use light signals to transfer information more quickly and reliably. And without fiber, lags and buffering are more common.
“The customer at home is still getting their bandwidth over an antiquated copper system,” he said. “Eventually, that capability is gonna hit its cap.”
Longmeadow faces one more hurdle to setting its fiber buildout in motion: a debt exclusion of $8.5 million that will require a two-thirds majority vote from the upcoming annual Town Meeting on May 12. That borrowing will fund the first phase of the buildout, after which time additional phases will be funded by revenue from customers.
“Getting two-thirds for anything is always difficult,” Hemavathi said. Though he’s hopeful that the momentum that municipal fiber has had among voters in Longmeadow will continue, he added that he’s “very well aware that Mass Priorities is not just throwing away their money. They’re doing it in a very strategic way that has worked before.”
According to Meta’s ad library, Mass Priorities has spent an estimated $319,000 on political ads since 2019, including over $3,000 just in the last week. While some of these ad buys come cheap — under $100 spent for fewer than 100 impressions — others were seen hundreds of thousands of times. One ad from May 2024 targeting Southwick voters was viewed over half a million times, Facebook estimates, and cost between $4,500 and $5,000. Mass Priorities spent as much as $20,000 the following year targeting ads to Southwick voters in the month leading up to a Town Meeting vote on borrowing money for their own municipal fiber buildout.
Voters in Southwick, a town of fewer than 10,000 residents, defeated a spending proposal to build out municipal broadband at the ballot box by a margin of 15 votes at that meeting, but the town is now moving forward with a scaled-back effort.
Mass Priorities bills itself on its website as a “nonprofit, nonpartisan coalition of concerned Massachusetts residents advocating for smart, responsible use of taxpayer dollars,” with a focus on “supporting responsible local spending that protects schools, infrastructure, public safety, and essential community services.” But of the six “problem” towns listed at the bottom of the site’s homepage, five are explicitly called out for their municipal fiber projects. The website’s “About Us” section names no leadership and provides no contact information, but bills Mass Priorities as a project of the Domestic Policy Caucus.
Domestic Policy Caucus is a registered 501(c)(4) nonprofit, which means it is not obligated to disclose its funding sources, can raise unlimited money, and can engage in political activity as long as it’s not the group’s primary purpose. Based in Minnesota, the group’s “initiatives” include Mass Priorities as well as others focused on supporting universal income, removing interest rate caps on consumer loans, and “Conservatives for National Popular Vote,” which does not, in fact, argue for a national popular vote. According to the group’s most recent tax filing, its primary expense was over $1 million spent “to educate the public on economic freedom.”
On that same document, among the group’s highest paid independent contractors are Ainsley Shea, a PR firm that appears to be owned and managed by Domestic Policy Caucus board members and boasts of its work on Mass Priorities web, mail, and door-knocking materials on its website, and Ballot Access Marketing, a consulting firm based in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, owned by Christopher Thrasher.
In 2023, the Cape Cod-based publication The Enterprise conducted their own investigation of Mass Priorities. At the time, they reported that Thrasher himself was on Domestic Policy Caucus’ board, and Thrasher spoke to them on behalf of Mass Priorities. Since then, he spent almost $25,000 of his own money in a campaign for a seat in the state Legislature, winning a write-in campaign for the Republican nomination but losing the general election to a Democrat, and explored a campaign to unseat Democratic U.S. Senator Ed Markey, which he apparently decided against. He has held a number of local volunteer and elected positions in Westport.
Calls to Domestic Policy Caucus, Ainsley Shea, and Christopher Thrasher all went unanswered this week.
Hemavathi noted that all six campaigns listed on the Mass Priorities site are in municipalities where Comcast provides internet service. In nearby Hampden, which considered and narrowly defeated its own municipal broadband proposal, Mass Priorities has been silent.
Comcast releases a list each year of 501(c)(4) contributions, and Mass Priorities does not appear on those lists, but the company’s policy does not require it to list contributions of under $50,000. Comcast has given significant sums to other groups, like over $1 million to the New England Connectivity and Telecommunications Association between 2023 and 2024, which does lobby on behalf of the industry but does not appear to have ties to Mass Priorities, though a dubiously-worded survey question echoes the group’s talking points.
Hemavathi and reporting by the Springfield Republican contend a lobbying group tied to Charter Communications called Alliance for Broadband was behind the Hampden defeat, but The Shoestring could not confirm this. Alliance for Quality Broadband is a group that lists Charter as one of its “partners,” and like Mass Priorities, argues for “protecting taxpayers from risky investments made at the expense of more pressing local needs.” The Shoestring was not able to link this group directly to the lobbying efforts in Hampden.
Electioneering, meanwhile, is not something that a public utility can do.
“Because we’re a municipal light plant, we have limitations,” Fitzgerald said of SHELD. “We don’t get involved in elections. We can’t be like them and go out there and spread information to voters.”
For Hemavathi, the deep-pocketed opposition shows the power of creating a public utility.
“While they’re casting doubt on it, it also shows that they believe in it more than anyone else,” he said. “They know that if this project gets off the ground, there’s no way they could compete with it.”
With no funding, Hemavathi said he and others in Longmeadow are trying to get accurate information out to voters as best as they can, via social media and at in-person gatherings. At an information session about the entire Town Meeting warrant on Monday, Hemavathi said, attendance exceeded expectations, and people of all ages came in to learn about municipal fiber.
“Some people walked in holding the Mass Priorities mailer, talking about how disgusted they were that this outside group was trying to sway this vote,” he said.
“Peecycling” program plans Franklin County launch
When it comes to solving the dominant issues of our time, from food production to climate change and the housing crisis, policy experts have proposed a wide range of solutions.
It’s not often, however, that the word “urine” enters those discussions.
Human urine is a potent source of nitrogen and phosphorus, which are the essential components in most agricultural fertilizers. However, these nutrients can become harmful pollutants when they accumulate in waterways, causing algal blooms, killing fish, and throwing ecosystems out of balance. Up and down the Connecticut River Valley, agricultural runoff, wastewater treatment plants, and septic systems all contribute to an overabundance of nitrogen and phosphorus in the watershed.
One organization is now trying to solve those problems, and more, by recycling urine in Franklin County. And they’ve just won funding to do so.
The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation developed the Long Island Sound Futures Fund in 2005, and recently awarded the grant to the Rich Earth Institute to help develop a urine recycling program in Franklin County. The nonprofit has been researching and developing ways to advance the use of human waste as a resource since 2012, and along the way founded a popular urine-based fertilizer business in Brattleboro.
“What we’re doing at Rich Earth, and many other places around the world, is working to reconnect that linear nutrient flow back into the food nutrient cycle,” said Julia Cavicchi, the organization’s education director. “Where we can keep our waste out of our water so our water is cleaner and safer to use and live in, and our nutrients can be easier to reclaim and keep in our local food systems.”
The two-year $146,496 grant from the Futures Fund will cover the planning and implementation of new “peecycling” projects throughout the county. The Rich Earth Institute hosted a kick-off event at the Sunderland Public Library on April 8 to introduce the public to the concept and glean ideas from local farmers, waste management experts, and town officials about how urine recycling can fit into the region’s largely rural landscape.
Every year, Deb Habib, the co-founder of the Seeds of Solidarity Farm in Orange, invites the Rich Earth Institute to set up a urine collection booth at the North Quabbin Garlic & Arts Festival.
“Everything that we’re creating is going to end up somewhere. So why not connect ourselves with something positive rather than something polluting?” Habib said. “The fact that we’re connected by all these watersheds in this region really reminds people that there’s no such thing as ‘away.’”
Founded in 2012, the Rich Earth Institute claims to have established the first and largest community-scale urine recycling program in the country.
Demand for the Institute’s urine-based fertilizer, marketed to area farms as “U-Grow,” exceeds supply. Currently, nutrients are collected from 33 urine-diverting toilets in Vermont, and 260 individual “donors” who deliver their urine to collection stations located near the municipal transfer stations in Brattleboro and Bellows Falls.
Donors log their contributions, and the organization hosts an annual “Piss-Off Competition” to celebrate its “most prolific contributors,” Cavicchi said. The Rich Earth Institute currently provides U-Grow to nine farms, mostly to grow hay.
Chelsey Little — the superintendent of Montague’s wastewater treatment plant, the Clean Water Facility — attended the kickoff event at the Sunderland library after meeting with Rich Earth Institute staff last year.
“They did a little presentation for me during the meeting, and I just fell in love with the idea,” Little said. “It makes sense if we have people diverting the urine out of the waste stream, because that’s less of the nitrogen removal treatment that we have to do at the facility.”
Human urine makes up less than 1% of the waste sent to a typical wastewater treatment plant, but accounts for about 75% of the nitrogen and 60% of the phosphorus these facilities must process, according to a recent study from the University of Surrey in England published in the Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering.
As a condition of its current wastewater discharge permit, the Montague Clean Water Facility must reduce the amount of nitrogen it releases into the Connecticut River. Little wants to install urine collection and treatment infrastructure at the plant to achieve this.
“It’s a win-win,” Little said. “To scale it up is pretty cost effective as well… if we did all of Montague, and then the smaller surrounding towns.”
Installing the equipment at the Clean Water Facility would be “cheap, easy and effective,” costing only a couple thousand dollars, Little said. Pasteurizing urine for agricultural use requires heating it to 80 degrees Celsius (176 degrees Fahrenheit) for at least 90 seconds, then keeping it in a sealed container to prevent the ammonia from off-gassing. Brightwater Tools, a spin-off company that operates at the Rich Earth Institute’s Brattleboro headquarters, has developed technology to do this, and has also been experimenting with freeze concentration to make U-Grow easier to store, transport, and apply to farm fields.
“Farmers are becoming desperate for alternatives from an affordability standpoint, and also to have more nutrients available,” Cavicchi said.
About 70% of farmers in the U.S. claim they cannot afford all the fertilizer they need for the upcoming growing season, according to a survey conducted earlier this month by the American Farm Bureau Federation. Factored into those costs is the U.S. and Israeli war with Iran, which has led Iran to block ships carrying fuel and fertilizers from leaving the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz. Nearly half of the global supply of urea, a synthetically derived form of nitrogen, and about 30% of the world’s ammonia supply are exported through the Gulf, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation.
In addition to providing potent fertilizer to farmers, proponents of peecycling say it also saves water. Every five gallons of urine collected prevents 100 gallons of water from being flushed down the toilet, according to Rich Earth Institute data analysis, which equals about 4,000 gallons of water saved per person each year.
“We use large amounts of clean potable water to just move these nutrients from one place to another,” Cavicchi said. “By doing a relatively small act, in terms of volume, of diverting our urine at the source, we can have a relatively big impact on preventing downstream nutrient pollution and procuring those nutrients for use in local agriculture.”
Andrea Donlon, a senior land use and natural resources planner for the Franklin Regional Council of Governments, said that peecycling in Franklin County could help municipalities address the increasingly expensive disposal cost of “biosolids” — the thick residual waste from treatment plants.
“I’m interested in learning more about the logistics of collecting urine,” Donlon said. “I’m thinking of all the aging wastewater infrastructure we have, and the need to build more housing in places that don’t have any infrastructure.”
Mariah Kurtz, a senior livability planner at the Franklin Regional Council of Governments, said that sewer and septic capacity issues are a common bottleneck to the development of new housing. Building a new septic system, or expanding an existing septic system, can be a complicated and expensive undertaking.
“Thinking creatively about our waste solutions can unlock new types of housing in new locations that can allow for more housing, and could potentially allow for more affordable housing,” Kurtz said. “I think that this is at the beginning of a conversation that could have interesting results in our area.”
With the right regulatory reforms, peecycling and other forms of onsite waste diversion could reduce the volume of waste flushed into septic systems. With the extra capacity, homeowners could build additional bedrooms or accessory dwelling units without having to make costly upgrades to their existing septic systems
After years of successful advocacy to develop state-level policies that allow for various types of urine collection systems in Vermont, the Rich Earth Institute has turned its sights southward. U-Grow was approved for use and sale in Massachusetts in 2025, and the organization is looking into how municipal and state governments could go about permitting urine collection and treatment facilities in the state as well.
“There’s a lot to figure out in terms of collaborating with state regulatory officials, and legislators and town government officials about all those questions and the concerns they raise,” Cavicchi said.
Partnering with academic institutions such as University of Michigan and Cornell University, the Rich Earth Institute has led studies on the soil health impacts of using urine as a fertilizer. They found that despite the presence of pollutants and pharmaceuticals in human urine, crops fertilized with it tend not to absorb the pollutants “at a significant human health exposure pathway level,” Cavicchi said. The nonprofit has been following other researchers investigating how various crops uptake and interact with potential pollutants found in urine.
At the Sunderland library kick-off event, some farmers expressed interest in using urine-based fertilizer on their fields, and perhaps even hosting collection and treatment facilities onsite. Others suggested partnering with local septic hauling companies to transport urine, or setting up portable toilets at public events to raise awareness about the benefits of peecycling. For the Rich Earth Institute, next steps include hosting on-farm fertilizer demonstrations, organizing toilet installation site visits, and partnering with schools and local groups for education events.
“We came away from the kick-off event feeling buoyed by the enthusiasm in the room, including from many who helped spark this effort and are now eager to collaborate on bringing the nutrient cycling vision into reality,” Cavicchi said.
The Rich Earth Institute will host an open house on Thursday, April 30 at its Brattleboro headquarters at 355 Old Ferry Road, located next to the Windham Solid Waste Management District. The event is open to anyone interested in its work in Brattleboro or the new project in Franklin County.
“There are many organizations all around the world, and also all across the country, working on compost toilet solutions, the use of urine in perennial agriculture, building-scale designs, and portable toilet businesses,” Cavicchi said. “We’re all kind of working together to figure out different ways that urine recycling can be practical, and fundable and enjoyable, in all sorts of different contexts.”
This article was copublished by The Shoestring and the Montague Reporter.
Could the Strathmore have been saved?
September 1993
Jan Ross heard the whir of the fax machine and grabbed the message while it was still warm to the touch. “Hiring Freeze: Immediate,” it read. She sucked in a breath. She had joined the staff of Strathmore Paper Company less than 24 hours ago.
“And I thought, ‘Phew!’” she remembered. “Oh my goodness.”
She delivered it to her manager. “Just don’t say anything,” he told her, closing his door to call Memphis. Strathmore was owned by International Paper (IP), and their global headquarters was in Tennessee. A call to Memphis was serious.
Even though it was her second day as a permanent hire in the human resources department in Westfield, Massachusetts, she had worked as a temp there for six months. Through the company picnics, held on the lush grass at nearby Stanley Park, she had met people who worked in the company’s mills in Russell, Millers Falls, and Turners Falls, where 123 employees’ lives would be upended within a year.
At these beloved events, employees and their families basked in the sun. They were far from the production plants, where staff worked around the clock in three shifts, the paper shot out of machines at high speeds – chu-chu-chu-chu-chu – and the guillotine chopped ream after ream with deafening precision – thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk. Sometimes it was so loud the mill workers had to communicate with hand signals.
It was a dangerous job, making paper, and even Ross had to suit up in safety gear if she was entering the manufacturing side of her own building, a calendaring facility where paper was finished. On those occasions Ross laced up steel-toed boots, donned safety glasses, and slipped on earmuffs. She followed the line of yellow tape on the floor; everyone was advised to stay inside of it. The team in Westfield did regular safety drills after someone at a nearby mill fell into the pulper and drowned.
So it was jarring now, this portentous message that threatened the employees’ security. She stayed quiet while her boss emerged from his meeting and made an official announcement.
“It was a definite damper in the office, because we knew if that’s for regular staff, what does it mean for the rank and file?” said Ross.
“It was the beginning of the end, I guess.”
February 2026
Can the end of the end be foreseen? Does identifying the years when Strathmore’s parent company, International Paper, might have made different decisions – 1993 to 2001 – assuage a town’s grief, or only complicate it? Today the sprawling, 224,000-square-foot complex is rusted and rotting on the banks of the Connecticut River, but it was once a beacon of prosperity. And as long as the ruins remain, they are a visible reminder of the mill’s history.
On a snowy Monday morning in February, the Montague historical commission was stuck at home, Zooming into its monthly meeting. The topic at hand was whether the group should invoke the town’s demolition delay bylaw for the Strathmore complex. (Turners Falls is one of five villages in the town of Montague.) The town had seized the decaying property under tax title in 2010.
What has halted the paper mill’s destruction, time and again, is exactly what got it off the ground: hope.
Janel Nockleby, the commission’s chair, called the vote. Chris Clawson, Ed Gregory, and Jen Viencek prepared to cast their decision on whether they should interrupt the demolition, scheduled to start in November 2027 thanks to $10 million in state and federal grants.
In 1871, the revered John Keith was running a mill in Adams when asked if he would like to build one from scratch. Soon, the Keith Paper Company was erected in Turners Falls, and the mill opened in 1873.
“It was unhesitatingly pronounced by experienced papermakers the best mill in the world,” the Springfield Republican bragged in 1877.
A footbridge once connected worker housing directly to the mill. It was finally removed last year. (Photo: Brian Zayatz).
That same year a fire burned down the mill, and Keith took a second opportunity to define an institution in the up-and-coming manufacturing town. Upon hearing the steam whistle from his Greenfield home, according to Wren Wood, the park interpreter at the Great Falls Discovery Center in Turners Falls, Keith snapped into action, arriving on horseback and directing the firemen to save the financial records.
The mill was rebuilt within four months. In 1953, Keith Paper Company would be bought by Strathmore Paper Company and the structure became known largely as “the Strathmore,” even after Strathmore was bought by Hammermill in 1962, and after Hammermill was bought by International Paper in 1986.
“I don’t call it ‘the Strathmore’ or ‘International Paper,’” said Clawson at the meeting of the historical commission. “There is a history surrounding the creation of the Keith Paper Mill. It is part of the story about the re-tasking of the canal system, and [its] industrial use following the Civil War.”
Clawson and Gregory, who also administer the Montague Historical Society archives, are invested in continuing the story. It is “extremely important to the country,” said Clawson.
September 1993
Brad Peters was sent to Strathmore to manage its demise. He was called a communications manager, but he had a reputation for silencing the conversation – he was given the unenviable task of making a living by stripping away people’s livelihoods.
“When he’d go to other mills and they saw him coming, they’d go, ‘Uh oh,’” said Ross, who now lives in Erving.
International Paper had already used him in Jay, Maine, where a 16-month strike ending in 1988 led to the loss of hundreds of jobs after the company hired scabs to replace seasoned workers. Shortly after Peters came aboard in 1990, those replacement workers voted to decertify two unions, leaving negotiations with the conglomerate in individuals’ hands. True to its name, International Paper already had a worldwide presence then; today it operates at nearly 250 sites in 30 countries.
International Paper did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Peters was dispatched to Westfield in June 1993, where, he eventually admitted to Ross, “there was going to be some efficiency” at Strathmore’s Fine Papers division.
The two began dating the summer before the fateful fax came in, and continued a discreet office romance until 1995, when they married.
“Don’t take this wrong,” Ross told the Montague Reporter and The Shoestring during a visit to her home, where she and Peters lived until his passing in 2023. “He’d know how to manage this conversation with you. ‘Control the interview’ – that was the phrase. I hated him for that.”
She loved him for it, too. It was Peters’s precision, his insistence on reading her every memo before anyone else saw or heard it, that demonstrated two things: he prized her opinion, and he valued the employees’ welfare. Before IP announced it was downsizing, Ross said, Peters spent nearly a year advocating for the workers behind the scenes and writing helpful bulletins – to be included with their severance packages – on how to put together a resume and apply for unemployment.
“He understood he was dealing with human lives,” she said, “and he wanted it to be done right, and in the least hurtful way.”
While he managed the overarching downsizing, Ross assembled each severance package.
August 1994
“Strathmore Paper in Turners Closing,” the headline on Page 1 of the Greenfield Recorder read on August 4, 1994. Ninety-seven hourly and 26 salaried employees were told that they were being let go, “because the factory’s outmoded paper machines are the smallest and slowest of all the machines used in the Fine Paper Division of International Paper… according to Brad Peters, Strathmore’s communications manager.”
On the same day, the Springfield Republican reported, “Strathmore officials said yesterday that the mills in total are putting out more paper than needed, and the closing is meant to pull production back even with demand.”
It’s possible that the writing was on the wall as far back as 1986. Anton Zamachaj, a mechanical engineer at Strathmore in the 1980s, explained that after IP bought the company, it “lost [its] deal with the small-order purchasers” such as Hallmark Cards. To make complicated papers with “watermarks and feltmarks and specific colors,” he said, it could take half a day to set up the machinery correctly, which led to a lot of waste.
“They were doing runs that were probably spitting one or two bad rolls out to make one or two good rolls, then IP put a 10,000-pound minimum on orders,” said Zamachaj, who now lives in Chicopee. That was too much for Hallmark, a major buyer. “I’m assuming they just went, ‘We’re done.’”
However you look at it, the employees were devastated. “‘Dark’ isn’t the right word,” said Ross, remembering the ensuing heaviness at the office. “The sun could be shining and it wasn’t cheery.”
When it heard the plant would close, Local 1711 of the United Paperworkers’ International Union (UPIU) attempted an employee buyout, but International Paper said it couldn’t support the competition. According to the Recorder, on October 6 IP sent a letter to UPIU representative Ronald Pickering barring the manufacture of any paper product on the site. Because the company was not actively seeking a sale, the letter stated, “we are not prepared to make a sale offer.”
But Local 1711 president Bob Emond said that IP first dangled a carrot: there could be a sale – but the employees could only make paper for Bibles and cigarettes.
“The paper for Bibles was real thin,” said Emond, reached on vacation in Florida. Rolling papers are even thinner. “We made artist-grade materials. They weren’t going to let us make that.”
“And we didn’t know how to get into anything else,” said Greenfield resident Dennis Richotte, who was let go after working at Strathmore for 21 years.
Emond, who had started work at Strathmore out of high school in 1976, said the announcement the plant was closing wasn’t a surprise. “We were thinking it for a long time,” he said. “Once IP took over, they brought in all these different people to write down all the steps we took. They wanted to learn all our grades of paper, then they were thinking of how to close us down.”
After working his way up through the Local 1711, Emond was crushed when the union international told him that there wasn’t any money to help his workers. “That left a sore spot on my heart,” he said.
Despite its reluctance to kick in money, the international did help with negotiations around the employees’ severance packages. Originally, Emond said, IP wanted to spread out the severance payments, which would have delayed the workers collecting unemployment. The international union helped them win one lump sum.
With the remaining dues for his local chapter, he said, “We had a few parties, different drawings with gift cards, trying to help people get groceries. We did what we could to help the 100 people losing their jobs.”
Following the initial announcement in August, local churches quickly offered their support. “We really got concerned when they announced they were closing,” said Reverend Stanley Aksamit of Our Lady of Peace Church in Turners Falls. “We tried to gather people together to pray, we took up a collection [and divided] the money evenly among the employees who were about to lose their jobs. We couldn’t stop the process from evolving, but at least we tried to let the workers know we were with them.”
Aksamit, who grew up in Turners Falls, said the community’s manufacturing institutions – like those across the country – were no match for globalization. During his adolescence, he remembered, “We had a lot of stores in the downtown area, and between Turners Falls and Greenfield we could take care of all our needs.” Soon the Eastfield Mall arrived in Springfield, and the freshly constructed Interstate 91 allowed for easy travel out of town.
“When I was in high school, a friend of mine whose dad worked [at Strathmore] said the mill would never close, because there was a certain color of purple paper,” Aksamit explained, that no one else could replicate.
Truth or myth, everyone, everywhere was eager to make products that cost less to create. The mill closed on November 6.
January 2026
A month before the Montague historical commission gathered to vote on proceeding with leveling the Strathmore complex, Wood gave a talk at the Great Falls Discovery Center on the company’s legacy.
“We had six former employees who attended,” said Wood, though it wasn’t clear if they had worked for Strathmore in Russell, Millers Falls, or Turners Falls. “It brought a history alive.”
The park interpreter pointed out that the Keith Mill wasn’t just any institution – it was a catalyst for Turners Falls’s growth: “Without it, there wouldn’t have been the financial backing to build housing and create jobs. The village as we know it wouldn’t exist.” The paper mill paid well for people starting work out of high school, Wood said, noting that generations of workers have remained here.
But when Wood invited the former employees to share their memories, they recalled the mill’s limitations, such as how dark it was, not having exposure to fresh air, and the ever-present possibility of getting hurt.
Strathmore was once one of the main employers in a town now deemed “one of the most economically distressed communities in the most rural counties in the Commonwealth,” in the words of the Montague Economic Development and Industrial Corporation (EDIC), which noted in a 2022 report that a “steady erosion of traditional manufacturing has left the town saddled with a backlog of aging infrastructure.”
That same year, the town’s master plan for the redevelopment of what officials now call the “Canal District” reported that most of the Strathmore complex is made up of “buildings in distress.” The document includes 13 photos showing rotting walls, caved-in ceilings, and window panes reduced to jagged glass. Its suggested solutions included performing “selective demolition” and creating space for “historic interpretation.”
This razor-thin line between reality and possibility, and the human desire to maintain it, is a recurring theme in discussions of the complex’s past, present, and future.
Wood said they hoped their presentation provided a useful reframing. “Many folks across the valley, at least by my perspective, are sort of feeling burned or burnt out on the industrial history of the area and how it dominates narratives,” they said. “I’d like to give folks the chance to cut through that disillusionment, and see the hope it once offered the community.”
January 1995 – December 1996
After the Turners Falls mill closed, International Paper sold the machinery to a Turkish company. “For several months, a group of workers carefully took apart the machines, catalogued the parts, and loaded them into shipping containers,” Peters would later write in the Montague Reporter. “The machines were reassembled and paper was again produced.”
This kind of outsourcing wasn’t uncommon, said Zamachaj, the mechanical engineer: “All I did for 15 years was tear machines down to be recycled, or boxed them up and sent them overseas.”
Meanwhile, IP assigned a 15-year lease to its neighbor, Indeck Industries. The co-generating power plant, which had operated next door since 1989 and provided the building with steam, now set out to find tenants for what it called the “Canal Road Arts & Industries Building.” It was another hopeful beginning, this time for an arts incubator that at its peak housed 35 individuals and businesses.
But there were cracks in the foundation – and they had been there for a while.
“When I would go up there to my temporary office off the courtyard, in the wing closest to Esleeck [Manufacturing Company],” said Zamachaj of the state of affairs in 1985, “every time the fork truck hit the wall we wondered if this was going to be the time we’d go down with it. The building was so cockeyed that when I put my back against it and looked up, I couldn’t see the sky.”
Ten years later Indeck plant manager Fran Zabek, tasked with finding lessees, was “watching out for bricks falling out of the wall.” The Art & Industries effort, he admitted, was “just a stopgap until the higher-ups made the final decision to shut the place down.”
But Zabek, who now resides in Florida, remembers fondly tenants like Jim Slavas, a senior scientist at Spray Research, Inc. who manufactured fog nozzles, and Paul Franz, who owned a photography studio and worked as the photo editor for the Greenfield Recorder.
“It was a big happy family – until it wasn’t,” said Zabek.
“It was a great thing, all these artists,” agreed Franz. “I was in Building 11. Jim [Slavas] was right below me. He was like a mad professor, testing nozzles and playing classical music on his cello. The building was full of characters.”
Franz noted that Indeck often steamed up the windows, but that was the least of the issues.
“We called the lower part of the building ‘the Dungeon,’” remembered Thor Holbek, who created museum displays and now lives in Maine. “It was dark down there, with big chambers, different stainless-steel vats, and acid to clean the paper and color it.”
Nina Rossi, who interned with Holbek and now handles distribution for the Montague Reporter, described a side room where water seepage from the canal created “this really dark waterfall.”
But everyone felt the mill still had potential.
January 1997 – January 2000
Indeck shut down its operations in October 1996, and Zabek told the tenants they would have to leave by 1998. This would ultimately be extended until 2000, but in the meantime, four more attempts to buy the mill buildings were quashed by International Paper.
In January 1997 David Manning, the president of Applied Dynamics Corporation, which leased space in one of the buildings, offered to buy the complex. Manning thought he had secured a verbal agreement, but IP shut it down that October.
“The offer was ridiculous,” an IP representative told the Recorder at the time. The Springfield Republican, meanwhile, reported that IP had put a $10 offer on the table, then rescinded it.
That December, Slavas and Holbek teamed up to buy 65,000 square feet of the space, but International Paper told them it preferred to sell the entire complex.
Slavas told the Recorder on December 2 that he had written a letter to Montague’s board of selectmen but had not received a response.
Reached by email this year, Slavas, who resides in Monroe Bridge, was critical of all parties involved in the rejection – especially the town.
“Although IP certainly shares responsibility for the outcome owing to their own fantasy of the complex’s value… the Town’s failure to grasp both the promise and vulnerability of the nascent ‘Arts and Industry’ community was the most damaging,” he wrote.
In September 1999, Holbek returned with an offer to buy the entire complex, but IP rejected a purchase-and-sale following a verbal agreement. “The deal is off,” IP’s spokesperson told the Recorder, adding cryptically that Holbek had requested “a lot of changes.”
Holbek would later recall that these were environmentally related, but couldn’t remember any specifics.
Finally, in January 2000, IP rejected a $1 bid from the Franklin County Community Development Corporation (FCCDC). The Republican reported that the paper company wanted to sell the property as-is, but the FCCDC had asked it to “replace fire doors, change the sprinkler system to accommodate multitenant use and repair the heating system.” The nonprofit, which supports the development of small businesses, could not afford these repairs.
“The whole idea was [to] carry the building through the winter so we would have time to pull money together… to make this a viable building,” FCCDC vice chair Molly Wood told the Recorder at the time.
John Waite, who was hired as the executive director of the FCCDC that spring, was not involved in any attempts to purchase the building, but, he told the Reporter, “I do know there were a lot of environmental cleanup issues. When I came on, people said, ‘Don’t get involved with Strathmore.’”
July 2000 – June 2001
The sixth time was apparently the charm – or, depending on who you ask, the curse.
In July 2000, International Paper received an offer from Swift River Hydro, LLC, which sought to buy only the mill’s hydroelectric turbine, which amounted to less than 4% of the complex. Because the power plant shared walls with other buildings in the complex, the town was asked to allow easements proposed by IP.
The question at hand, reported the Recorder, was whether Montague planning board members had the “authority to give approval for the subdivision of a building in the same manner as for land subdivision.”
It was baffling.“It’s like looking at an ANR (Approval Not Required) to separate the bathroom from two other rooms in my house,” member Steve Ellis told the newspaper.
Looking back, David Jensen, who served as the town’s building inspector from 1988 to 2018 and is now the alternate building inspector, said that IP ultimately “wanted to dump the problem” – on Montague, and on him.
“Shit runs downhill,” he said. “Since I was probably an advocate of saving the building, it was like, ‘Okay, now it’s your problem’ was how the bureaucracy worked.”
Jensen, with his dry sense of humor and gravelly voice, might sound like he is over the endless will-they-or-won’t-they around the Strathmore. But when he gave the Reportera tour outside the old buildings – buildings he may know better than anyone – in early 2026, he demonstrated otherwise.
When we came to the former courtyard, Jensen stopped and looked out at the overgrown space. “A guy used to play his cello here,” he said wistfully.
Asked if it had seemed as though the Strathmore was already doomed when the town was deciding whether to section it off, Jensen replied, “‘Doomed’ – that’s retrospect. I don’t think anybody was under the illusion that this was somehow going to be easy. It was an uphill slug no matter how you looked at it.”
In April 2001 the zoning board of appeals (ZBA) decided that the sale of the power plant, though not ideal, could mean another start. In June Swift River’s subsidiary, Turners Falls Hydro, moved in.
“With an occupant in the complex, it might have grown,” said Jensen, who had approved the easements.
The only member of the ZBA to dissent was Dennis Booska, whose prescient opinion echoes like a warning: “Leaving the remainder with no reuse plan except for ‘it’s for sale’ raises the specter of a purposeful abandonment of responsibilities [by IP],” he wrote. “To allow this condition to be aggravated by separation of the building as it is into ‘lots’ cannot be reconciled with the intent of the zoning bylaws nor deemed to be in the public good.”
Reached through his son at Booska’s Flooring in Turners Falls, Booska declined an interview.
IP would go on to sell the remainder of the complex in 2002, and after a series of additional tragedies including an arson fire in 2007 that burned down Building 10, the town seized the property in 2010. As of December 2025 officials have been in talks with Eagle Creek Renewable Energy, which now owns Turners Falls Hydro, to discuss “site access, project sequencing, and interface with adjacent hydroelectric infrastructure,” according to the town’s webpage for the Strathmore Mill Site Cleanup Project.
The physical connection between the power plant, still operating today, and the empty complex has made rehabilitation or demolition extremely complicated.
“I don’t think all the possibilities have been exhausted,” said Jensen. “I think the motivation to pursue them is basically zero, and the path is looking inevitable. The potential was pretty good, the finances are horrible, but the dream goes on.”
February 2026
As the Zoom meeting of the historical commission continued on that snowy morning, Nockleby agreed with Clawson that despite its condition, the Strathmore “invokes a sense of place.”
“It’s very much a big presence,” Nockleby said. “It’s a touchpoint for the memories of everything from the workers, their injuries, the person who after a fire rose from the ashes and rebuilt it in the 1870s… All those stories matter.”
But.
“But where we’re at, the building inspector, the police department, the fire department, the town administrative staff, nobody wants these buildings. They’re condemned, basically. And we’re in rural Franklin County; there is no white knight coming to save us, there’s nobody with deep pockets to help.”
The commission voted unanimously not to delay the demolition.
This article was written in collaboration between The Shoestring (www.theshoestring.org) and the Montague Reporter.
Ready for New Boating Regulations?
Rural schools speak up about funding challenges
Last week, 36 school districts across the state sounded the alarm about their funding woes in what they called the Rural and Declining Enrollment Schools Week of Action.
“It’s a death spiral,” Martha Thurber, the chair of the Mohawk Trail Regional School Committee, said of the fiscal crisis that schools face when their enrollment declines. “What you end up ultimately with is a shell of a school that’s providing only the very, very basics.”
That’s because enrollment factors significantly into the state’s funding formula, known as Chapter 70. For schools where enrollment is steadily declining, state contributions to annual school budgets can plateau, which spells trouble as schools face increased fixed costs, like building maintenance and energy expenses, the end of pandemic-era federal aid, and extra pressure from exploding insurance costs.
Mohawk Trail Regional School District is one of dozens of districts, largely concentrated in western Massachusetts, that are struggling to provide adequate educationdue to declining enrollment. It’s not just rural schools that are struggling with declining enrollment, either — districts like Amherst and Northampton have also seen enrollment decrease.
“Rural schools have had declining enrollment for a number of years because of aging demographics,” Thurber said. “There’s not a lot of economic opportunity here for people to find jobs. There’s not a lot of affordable housing for people who might want to be out here.”
According to U.S Census data, the population in Franklin County has been steadily decreasing for decades and over a quarter of the population are seniors. The percentage of employed residents in Franklin county is also trending downward and the median household income is lower than the state’s average by nearly $30,000.
Franklin County is also sparse, with 102 people per square mile compared to the state average of 900 people per square mile.
Thurber is also a co-chair of the Rural Schools Committee of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, along with Jessica Corwin, who serves on the Frontier Regional School Committee. The two of them, accompanied by several other members, have been working to raise awareness of the “dire straits” of rural schools and their different needs. But recently, Thurber felt that movement had stalled.
The funding formula is rarely updated. The last major modifications to the way that funding is allocated to schools were made in 1993 and 2019, the latter after the passage of the Student Opportunity Act, which established a special commission that would study the needs of rural schools.
In 2022, the Rural Schools Commission released a detailed report outlining startling findings. In a comparison of non-vocational districts, the commission found that per-pupil costs were 17% higher in districts with fewer than 1300 students than in their more populous counterparts, and across districts the report defined as sparse, total enrollment decline over the 2010s was only slightly less than the entire state’s figure — about 4,200 students. Mohawk Trail, for example, saw an enrollment decline of almost 20% over that period, a loss of about 200 students.
The report recommended that “at least $60 million should be appropriated annually in rural school aid” and that the standard funding formula for schools should be revised.
But that hasn’t happened yet.
Thurber said that the issue has been largely ignored by legislators east of the Connecticut River Valley, in part because rural areas have less voting power due to smaller populations. Each of the eight towns that she represents have populations below 2,000, she said, and none of them have significant commercial districts — making school funding more dependent on residents’ property taxes.
“As school districts begin to need more and more of those resources, then the towns are having to either say: ‘No, we can’t afford to educate our kids the way we want to educate them, or we can’t afford to plow our roads, or to fix our bridges, or to pay our own employees a decent salary.’ So there’s a real nexus between the survivability of rural schools and the survivability of rural towns.” Thurber said.
Thurber said that one of the first steps that can be taken to remedy the underfunding is the immediate funding of $60 million to rural schools. This was the amount proposed in the original house version of the rural school funding bill by former state Rep. Natalie Blais. It’s still being sponsored by Sen. Joanne Comerford after Blais’ resignation to take another job, but the current bill text as amended by the Joint Committee on Education does not include that funding.
Comerford declined a request for comment for this story.
As of January, the committee also removed aid for districts considering regionalization — a merging of multiple school districts — as well as reimbursement for building projects, transportation costs, and aid for the salaries of teachers and staff in districts undergoing regionalization.
However, some aspects of the original bill remain intact: it defines “rural” districts as those with fewer than 35 students per square mile and a per capita income below the state average, and keeps certain assistance for districts that choose to regionalize, like debt relief and financial assistance with student costs for the first three years.
Regionalization isn’t appropriate for every city and town, Greg Snedaker, a veteran teacher and Gill Select Board member, told The Shoestring. But having spent the last decade exploring the option for six Franklin County towns as part of a regionalization board, he said it would improve the quality of education in the face of declining enrollment for students in Gill, Montague, Northfield, Warwick, Bernardston, and Leyden.
For Snedeker, smaller schools don’t always mean better education. He said regionalizing schools gives students more choices and opportunities for their education, and that it doesn’t have to result in teacher lay offs. Instead, he said that regionalization would give districts an opportunity to consolidate at the administrative level — like superintendents and business directors. He said that cost-saving measures in small districts like closing down schools and laying off teachers are avoidable.
“That’s what we’ve been doing for 30 years,” Snedeker said. “And by not regionalizing, you can expect more of [that] to come.”
According to Thurber, there’s been a push for rural schools to consolidate. But both Thurber and Corwin said that’s not realistic for many districts, especially without funding.
Corwin said that it’s an inequity issue — students at Frontier Regional School are losing a school adjustment counselor amidst a “mental health crisis” and every cut is impacting the education that students receive. According to her, rural schools can’t make any more cuts to their expenses. DESE’s latest report on teachers’ salaries found that rural schools already make up some of the lowest paying districts in the state.
Thurber said that further cuts would also lead to more “choicing out” — that is, parents with means will take their children out of the district in pursuit of a better education — leading to a “death spiral” of more declining enrollment, less funding, and more cuts. Thurber called that scenario “totally inequitable” for the students who don’t have the ability to go to school elsewhere.
Just a few weeks prior, Corwin said she had to vote in favor of a school budget that would result in laying off teachers. She said that as a former teacher, it was heartbreaking to her that teachers are being laid off because of the state’s inaction.
Students and parents have also been mobilizing in response to rural schools’ funding crises.
Eliza Strickland moved to Leverett in 2021, partly because of the good reviews she had heard about the school district. Last week, she and other families got together in the cold rain to hold signs, raise awareness, and show support for rural schools. She’s a big believer in public schools, she said, and wanted to make sure that her children received public education.
“You shouldn’t have to go to a pricey private school to get the best opportunities,” Strickland said.
She’s also the mother of a second-grader, who Strickland said loves school. For both of them, schools make up an integral part of their everyday lives.
“It’s the heart of the community in my mind,” Strickland said. “Our social world kind of revolves around the people we know through school. It’s more than just an education for the kids, it’s a way to bring the community together.”
According to Strickland, schools in Leverett get a lot of community support. From non-profit organizations like the Leverett Education Foundation to PTO fundraisers that help students experience field trips and extracurriculars. But without dedicated community members Strickland said that Leverett schools would be bare bones. And every year, she said it feels like there’s a crisis when budget negotiations for the town occur — with concerns over raising property taxes and school budgets.
“We really want to keep our kids in there,” she said. “And keep supporting the school.”
Jimin Anh is a freshman at Frontier Regional School. She’s been attending school committee meetings whenever she can, and when she can’t, she watches them in her free time. She also makes it a point to attend Deerfield’s annual town meeting, where issues like school funding are discussed.
“When you’re in such a small school, you’re able to be very close to most of the people in the school,” Anh said. “I know most of the people at our school. I think it’s really fun because it’s almost like we’re a huge, big family.”
Despite the love she has for her school and community, Anh said that she has seen the way that underfunding has been impacting her school — she said that the textbooks are older and there are fewer classes offered than nearby schools in Springfield.
“I really think that it’s unfair to the students at Frontier that we as a community need to work harder just to get the same basic education and experiences that other towns, regions, and schools can get for a lot less work and a lot less money,” Anh said.
She said that the teachers at Frontier put in extra time and effort in order for students to have the ability to experience extracurriculars.
Frontier Regional School was one of dozens of schools across rural Massachusetts that took action. At the end of their school day last Thursday, students from the 7th to 12th grade gathered to spell “SOS” in their gym. She said that although she appreciates the hard work of her senators and representatives, she doesn’t feel like they pay attention to smaller rural schools.
“Just because we’re small doesn’t mean that we don’t matter. It doesn’t mean that we don’t need funding. We do,” Anh said. “The only reason we’ve been able to stay afloat as a school is because of so much of the extra work and money that the students, teachers, and the community puts into our school.”
The budget that Frontier Regional School Committee passed will cut “the librarian, a special education teacher, a part-time adjustment counselor, a hall monitor, and three instructional assistants,” according to Corwin. Anh said that she’s worried how it’ll affect the education of her peers.
“We’re such a small school, when one thing gets cut, it’s like a ripple effect,” she said. “It truly affects every single student.”
