Biddeford, Maine

the riverbanks, including the Laconia Company in 1845, and the Pepperell Company in 1850. The mills attracted waves of immigrants, including the Irish, Albanians, and French-Canadians from the province of Quebec, and Biddeford was incorporated as a city in 1855. At one time, the textile mills in Biddeford employed as many as 12,000 people, but as happened elsewhere, the industry entered a long period of decline. As of 2009, the last remaining textile company in the city, WestPoint Home, closed. In that same year, the city administration in Biddeford created a task force to discuss the future of the Maine Energy Recovery Co. (MERC), a waste-to-energy plant that was built in the mid 1980s in order to deal with the growing landfills in Biddeford, Saco, and other surrounding towns. According to Mathew Eddy, Biddeford’s Planning & Development Director, the plant never operated the way in which it was intended and was repeatedly fined for ash and toxic emissions. “It ended up creating quite a bit of smell; it ended up burning a lot more than they had planned on; and it became a detractor to anybody looking at redeveloping the mills,” he reports. After years of contentious discussions between MERC’s owners and the city, Biddeford finally purchased the plant in 2012 for $6.65 million and tore it down. The removal of the MERC facility helped spur a wave of redevelopment of several of the defunct mills into the city’s new Mill District, bounded by AT A GLANCE BIDDEFORD, MAINE WHAT: A city of 22,000 WHERE: On the Saco River in York County WEBSITE: www.biddefordmaine.org