A shuttered paper mill that once defined the identity and finances of Erving, Mass. is formally back on the market. The small Franklin County town is seeking a private developer to purchase and redevelop the former International Paper site along the Millers River, more than a decade after the facility went dark.
For most of the 20th century, the mill was Erving's dominant employer and taxpayer. Its closure in the late 2000s left the town of roughly 1,600 residents with a gaping hole in its commercial tax base, pushing more of the burden onto homeowners and a single hydro facility on Northfield Mountain. The site has sat largely dormant since, a common story in western Massachusetts mill towns from Holyoke to North Adams.
The mill's roots go back to the 1870s, when Erving Paper Mills was founded along the Millers River as part of a regional paper-manufacturing corridor that made the Connecticut River Valley one of the world's most productive. That industry contracted sharply in the latter half of the 20th century as production moved south and overseas, and collapsed further in the 2000s as digital media gutted demand for printing and writing paper. International Paper, the world's largest paper company, shuttered its Erving facility as part of a broader wave of North American closures.
Source: NationGraph.
Three forces appear to have converged to make this moment possible. Massachusetts has expanded brownfield redevelopment funding through MassDevelopment and the state's Brownfields Redevelopment Fund, bolstered by new federal money from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Governor Maura Healey's administration has pushed hard on housing production and rural economic development, both of which favor putting large legacy sites back into use. And Erving's fiscal pressure has only grown.
The site's location on the Millers River, a state-designated cold-water fishery, will limit what a developer can build and will bring state environmental regulators into any approval process. Any contamination on the property, a near-certainty for a site with a century of industrial use, will need to be addressed as part of any redevelopment plan.
The town has posted the formal request for proposals on its bid portal. Because Erving operates under an open town meeting, a redevelopment deal of this scale will ultimately face unusually direct public scrutiny from residents.
Similar mill redevelopment efforts in Massachusetts, including the ongoing work at the Ludlow Mills site, have typically taken a decade or more to complete. Whether Erving can attract a serious buyer, and what that buyer proposes to build, will determine whether the community can convert a 19th-century industrial ruin into something that works for a 21st-century small town.
