WILTON – Local business owners and developers met Wednesday night to discuss the town’s economic past, present and future for a television program.
The discussion was organized by the Maine Public Broadcasting Network and held at the Boiler Room Restaurant. MPBN recorded the event, segments of which will be used in its new series, “Hometown Economies,” which will focus on the economic revivals in several Maine towns and cities.
Wilton will be represented in the first part of the six-part series, which will air this fall. Highlights of the discussion will be used to document Wilton’s economic history, as well as a closer look at the Hersey Custom Shoes Co.
MPBN Manager of Marketing and Communications Lou Morin said MPBN received a grant of $396,000 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Rural Development to produce the series. Each of the six towns within the series has an economy that used to revolve around a different sort of industry, in Wilton’s case, the shoe and textile industries. Each town was selected due to its “unique response” to economic changes within their communities.
“We wanted to pick towns that have had once-dominant industries, which have faced serious economic decline,” Morin said.
The panel consisted of six members, all associated with businesses in Wilton. Three of the panelists, Mark Berry, Gil Reed and Sarah Doscinski, represented Nichols Development, a development company that is attempting to bring more business into town. Also present was Alison Hagerstrom, executive director of the Greater Franklin Development Corp., and Gil Riley of the Wilton Development Corp. Local businesswoman Sarah Tanguay, who owns the local Waterfront Bakery, also sat on the panel.
MPBN host Ann Murray led the panel through the rise of the G.H. Bass & Co., to the factory closing its doors in 1998. Reed noted that the factory had made Wilton into “a kind of Mecca for manufacturing jobs.” Berry agreed, saying that after the factory closed, “everything went downhill from there.”
“The attitude of many people,” Reed said, “was I’m in a mud hole and I can’t get out.'”
Hagerstrom noted that many nonprofit organizations stepped in to help Wilton residents, including the United Way and other national organizations.
The panel then discussed the efforts of local and state organizations to rebuild Wilton economically. This recovery was represented by several examples of business returning to Wilton, from the Nichols Development LLC to Tanguay’s Waterfront Bakery. All members of the discussion attributed much of the town’s recovery to the spirit of its citizens. Berry noted that Wilton residents showed up of the Nichols-Bass Business & Technology Center even before it had opened.
“We had people coming through the doors before we even had anything lined up. People were ready and willing to go back to work.”
The hour-long Wilton segment of Hometown Economies is scheduled to air at 8 p.m. Sept. 7 on MPBN.
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