Bucksport: The Paper Town with a Cursed Exoskeleton

When Bucksport lost its massive paper mill, the town did what communities do when the giant in the room dies: it started telling better stories. For more than 80 years, the Verso mill was the entire point of Bucksport—it was the boilers, the skyline, and the steady union payroll that anchored generations of families on the Penobscot River. Then, in 2014, the mill shut down, taking 500 jobs with it and leaving a hole in the civic ledger big enough to change the town’s structural gravity.

In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns, host Andrew Wilcox takes us to a Maine river town that refuses to become a museum of itself. We look past the windshield view of this industrial landscape to explore Bucksport's complicated transition from pulp to aquaculture—rebuilding its waterfront on the promise of massive, land-based salmon tanks.

But hanging over this modern economic hustle, like a local joke that refuses to stay dead, is the town's original brand identity: The Curse of Colonel Buck. We visit the grave of the town's 1760s founder, Jonathan Buck, to see the infamous, inexplicable leg-shaped stain on his monument that folklore attributes to a condemned witch—a haunting reminder that this town has always understood the value of an unsettling story.

• The Founder’s Shadow: The legend vs. the ledger of Colonel Jonathan Buck, and why his "cursed" monument remains Maine's most enduring roadside oddity.

• Reprogramming the Penobscot: A look at the layered industrial history of a waterfront that successfully pivoted from a steel mill to a tanning company, to Maine Seaboard Paper, and finally to Verso.

• The Death of the Fortress: How the 2014 mill closure hit Bucksport like a structural failure disguised as a corporate business decision, silencing the grammar of labor.

• Salmon on the Bones: Inside the audacious, land-based aquaculture pivot by Whole Oceans to hatch the town's future in high-tech fish tanks.

• The Scale of Anxiety: How Bucksport utilizes both hard-nosed economic diversification and its rich folklore to navigate the modern coastal squeeze.

If you want to hear more stories about the gritty American towns rewriting their futures after the factory whistles go silent, follow the show on Spotify.

• Instagram: @50statefamily

• LinkedIn: Andrew Wilcox

• Email: wilcoxlegal@gmail.com

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