Lewiston-Auburn is a massive and fascinating museum. It radiates in all directions from one critical point: the Great Falls.

We can see old mills, canals and churches, but it takes the effort and dedication of special people to bring the historical significance of our communities into focus.

Elliott Epstein , a local lawyer and founder of Museum L-A, knows the need for saving important pieces of L-A’s industrial past. A few years ago, he laid the foundation for rescuing textile mill records, machinery and nearly forgotten stories of the workers.

Museum L-A’s exhibit space in the historic Bates Mill is growing in both scope and importance as it documents Lewiston’s great textile industry, Auburn’s shoemaking and, soon, a little-known and under-appreciated chronicle of brickmaking in this area.

Fortunately, both Epstein and Rachel Desgrosseilliers, executive director of Museum L-A, understand that Museum L-A’s reach must extend beyond its physical walls. They made that happen last week at the Lewiston Public Library’s Marsden Hartley Cultural Center when Epstein gave a talk in the “Voices” lecture series about how the industrial revolution affected Lewiston.

He talked about farmers many years ago who needed extra work through the long winters, so they worked in mills and factories. He talked about the Irish potato famine that brought desperate families to our shores, and many Irishmen came here to dig the canals. He explained ingenious mechanisms that took the power of water flowing through those canals and – by cogged wheel, shafts, pulleys and belts – brought it throughout the sprawling mills. And he talked about the vital role of Franco-American millworkers.

Epstein gave perspective to Lewiston’s textile history as he explained how the vision of Boston financier Benjamin Bates led to the canal and mill construction here just before the Civil War. With access to cotton in the south disrupted, the price went from 12 cents to $1 a pound. It was boom time in L-A as military orders came in for tent cloth, uniforms and boots.

In 1857, Bates Manufacturing Co. was turning out 5.7 million yards of cloth a year. During the Civil War and up to 1867, the seven mills of Lewiston produced $34 million worth of cotton and woolen goods, Epstein said.

Statistics, yes, but presented with Epstein’s enthusiasm, we can grasp the excitement that must have prevailed here at that time.

“We’re different from other mill towns,” Epstein said. “We held on longer.”

By repositioning and making “high-fashion textiles” like the famed Martha Washington bedspread, Lewiston’s textile industry survived into the 1960s.

Could that boom time be repeated here? Epstein believes it’s possible.

He said it would take the kind of “entrepreneurial spirit” of the pre-Civil War years and the “technological innovation” that drove industry then.

“If we can bring those elements together, we can re-create the miracle of Lewiston and Auburn in the mid-1800s,” Epstein said.

Dave Sargent is a freelance writer and an Auburn native. You can e-mail him at [email protected].