Paperboard dryer rotation gears.

WE WANTED IT TO LAST FOREVER

Closing the Minas Basin Paperboard Mill

The authors have taken the title of We Wanted It to Last Forever from mill employee Beth Caldwell. I grew up in a mill town and thought she might also have said; ‘We thought it would last forever.’ In my hometown its Irish owners closed Bathhurst Pulp and Paper overnight after 100 years of uninterrupted production. No one bore witness to the last days of this business, which sustained five generations in Northern New Brunswick. Today the mill site is a flat grey empty space. What a service this book is to Hantsport and the people who founded, built and worked at Minas Basin. In this book we find the history not only of a company but a community. George Bishop’s clear and appreciative history of the early years of this Jodrey enterprise explains the roots of the mill’s place in the town and in the province. Dick Groot’s choice to have so many employees share their experiences puts real blood in the veins of the story. Read their names and see their faces … they are Nova Scotians not bitter at their losses, but proud of their work at Minas. And the pictures of the plant, after its closure but still intact—such strange beauty in those stilled machines. Would that all of us had such a book about the mills that sustained our hometowns.

Don Connolly
Host of CBC Radio Halifax’s Information Morning