Editorial Team and Acknowledgments

Aaron Cayer, Ph.D., is an architectural historian and assistant professor of architecture history at the University of New Mexico. He was raised and educated in the town of Rumford, Maine—the largest of those within the River Valley. He left Rumford for college after graduating from Mountain Valley High School in 2007. Cayer studied architecture at Norwich University in Vermont, where he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees, as well as at UCLA, where he received his Ph.D. in architecture.

Kerri Arsenault grew up in the River Valley, and she is a book critic, the book review editor for Orion Magazine, contributing editor at The Literary Hub, and author of Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains. She received her MFA from The New School and studied in the graduate program in Communication for Development at Sweden’s Malmö University. Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Air Mail, Freeman’s, the Paris Review Daily, and the New York Review of Books.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the community members, workers, archivists, and town officials who offered their stories upon which most of this report is based.