Going, Going, Gone ... Brown St. Mill Bites the Dust
 |
| The old Sprague Electric mill on Brown Street is being demolished. |
•Watch the video here
The brick mill buildings are being demolished by owner Great American Financial Resources, which has no immediate plans for the property other than leaving it a vacant lot. The buildings have been empty since 2001, when Commonwealth Sprague - one of the last vestige's of the city's manufacturing titan - departed for Mexico.
The polluted three-acre site has had environmental remediation done in the mid-1980s and over the last decade or so under the state Department of Environmental Protection. Most of that work has been completed.
The structures were built in the 1870s as a textile mill; Sprague Electric took the property over before World War II and produced gas masks there. Later, the company manufactured metalized film paper for capacitors.
Part of the property was used as an industrial landfill and, from the 1950s to the 1970s, drummed wastes containing trichloroethylene, or TCE, were dumped there. A 1983 preliminary assessment filed with the federal Environmental Protection Agency reported that 55,000 gallons of acids, solvents, TCE degreaser, ceramic sludge, aluminum oxide sludge, oily solid resins, paints, fly ash, and titanium and uranium oxides were dumped in the landfill on the property.
