At the Maine Museum of Innovation, Learning, and Labor — or MILL — last week, Betsy Scheintaub and Elana Adler, both with the Maine College of Art and Design, were threading a Jacquard textile loom the size of a pickup truck.
"It took two people, one person in the back and one person in the front, to get each thread through," Scheintaub said. "And there should be around 2,000 threads on this loom."
Those threads cascade down from a loom head suspended 13 feet in the air, passing through the hulking mass of gears, wooden beams and metal rolling bars.
Museum Executive Director Rachel Ferrante said the new space, the result of a $15 million renovation of a former textile factory downtown, allows this workhorse of Maine's textile industry to be on full display.
"This is likely the star piece in our collection that really never could be a star in the old location," she said.
This machine has long since gone silent, but Ferrante said the museum will pipe in sounds of operational looms to convey an impression of what a functioning mill would've sounded like.
The museum's new home is in the Camden Yarns mill building across from Simard-Payne Memorial Park, on the banks of the Androscoggin. Ferrante said it's the culmination of a years-long effort to relocate the museum from its previous home at another former mill nearby.
This space, she says, offers a more streamlined, and public-facing, experience.
"Visitors are able to walk around unassisted, unguided, though we also offer tours," Ferrante said. "We also have hands-on learning opportunities, a design lab, a children's center, and a proper classroom."
Ferrante said in its former location, the museum had been welcoming several school or summer camp groups during peak seasons, and will now be able to greatly increase that number.
At the same time, the new space also includes a permanent exhibition telling the story of one of the darkest chapters in the city's history: A small room on the second floor is dedicated to the October 2023 Lewiston mass shooting.
"And the light fixture in the middle of the room is one of the lights that was over a pool table at Schemengees that has some bullet holes in it on the side," she said, referring to the bar that was one of two locations targeted in the shooting.
On a table under the light sits an array of 3-D printed pumpkins, replicas of the ones left outside the bar and the bowling alley as impromptu memorials to the victims.
Ferrante said she hopes the room will invite visitors to pause and reflect on the tragedy and the broader impact of violence.
"That reflecting back to the community of our history feels like what we are meant to do," she said.
And the museum draws on its extensive oral history archives to weave that element of reflection through many of the exhibits. For example, Ferrante said, while learning how the mills produced common textiles, visitors will see the machines, but also read quotes from the people who once operated them.
"So really hearing the steps and the process and the work from the workers themselves," she said.
From shoe molds to bedspreads, Ferrante says the museum owes much of its collection to community members who salvaged artifacts from the region's industrial past. She hopes the new, expanded space will inspire residents to continue preserving, and celebrating, local history.
"This provides the permanent ability to keep doing that into the future, and so our hope is that people are proud of this place, and therefore proud of this city," Ferrante said.
The museum ribbon cutting ceremony kicks off at 10:30 a.m. Saturday, with free admission all weekend.
