David goes walking whenever he can on our vacations. On October 1, 2026, he walked for 4 1/2 miles in Kennebunk, the town in which we were staying, and surrounding areas. We then drove upstate to Lewiston, Maine, where Dave had been an LDS missionary in the 1960s.
Kennebunk was decorated for the harvest and upcoming Halloween, as David walked.
"The Maine coast gets most of the money and attention," a docent told us at the new Maine MILL Museum in Lewiston. Lewiston is inland, and is trying to forge a new identity, after the textile mills and brick factories that defined it for so many years closed.
As we crossed the bridge over the Androscoggin River between the twin cities of Auburn and Lewiston, Maine, we looked for the apartment where Dave lived as a missionary. He knew it was next to the bridge and thought it was in a building like the one in the background of this photo.
The years of Dave's mission were formative and important for him. After spending two years in New England as a missionary, Dave loves the region and returns again and again, including to such areas as Worcestershire and Weston (Massachusetts), Lewiston (Maine), Laconia (New Hampshire), and Prince Edward Island (Canada), where he served.
We thoroughly enjoyed the Maine MILL Museum, with its displays about the history of Lewiston, and its hopes and plans for the future. It is located in an old textile mill building.
The museum displayed the equipment that, between the 1850s and 2000, turned out much of the fabric for the United States. A Maine merchant anticipated the Civil War and stockpiled cotton from the South, which allowed him to stay in business while many other textile mills in New England closed. Bedspreads became a principal product of the Lewiston mills during the 1900s.
Brick was another profitable product for Lewiston. Portland, Maine, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, have red brick historical areas, with the brick fabricated up north in Lewiston.
The museum showed the process by which raw cotton from the South was turned into textiles.
Innovative machinery was created to run the mills.
The equipment included machines that could weave intricate jacquard patterns.
The top two sites our guidebook recommended in Lewiston were the Maine MILL Museum and the Catholic church. The church reflected the prosperity of a bygone age, when many Catholic workers from nearby Quebec came to Lewiston to work in the mills, and there were rich donors to fund the church.
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