Vicksburg's rag-paper mill is getting a second life

This mill never ground up a single tree. While the rest of the Kalamazoo River valley was pulping wood, the Lee Paper Company in Vicksburg fed cotton rags into its vats and turned them into fine, durable writing paper — the heavy stuff letters and ledgers were once written on. Rag paper was the premium line, and Vicksburg got the plant because it had what that work needed: clean water, two railroads, and a central spot among Midwest paper buyers.

The Lee mill went up around 1904 and was making paper by 1905. It started with a couple hundred workers and just kept sprawling, building added onto building until the complex covered some thirty acres of connected halls beside its millpond just off the main road south of Kalamazoo. For nearly a century it was the thing that paid the town’s mortgages.

Then it did what a lot of old American mills did. It changed hands, lost its edge, and shut down for good in 2001. The halls sat empty and the windows went dark, and in most towns that is the end of the story — a few years of weeds and then a demolition crew. Vicksburg’s mill caught a different break. A long, patient restoration began, the complex earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places, and it is being rebuilt as The Mill at Vicksburg, the old buildings kept and reused rather than knocked down.

Drive into Vicksburg and you cannot miss it — that long brick wall along the water, far too big for a village this size, like a beached ocean liner. For once the explanation is hopeful: the place that built the town is being asked to do it again.