LEWISTON – The Twin Cities’ industrial history was showcased this week to about 100 leaders from some of New England’s largest and oldest museums.

They came to Museum L-A at the Bates Mill from a New England Museum Association conference in Portland on Thursday night.

And they liked what they saw.

“This is a very exciting endeavor,” said Kate Viens, executive director of the New England Museum Association. “It’s very important for our colleagues to get out and see the museums in the region.”

Elliott Epstein, Museum L-A’s founder and president, welcomed the museum executives and told them about setting up the museum with old equipment and artifacts left in the Bates Mill, where textiles were manufactured for more than 100 years.

The museum houses a collection of textile and industrial equipment, old photographs and an oral history gallery.

“It wasn’t much of a decision (to start a museum); it was a natural,” he said.

The NEMA members came from institutions such as the American Textile History Museum in Lowell, Mass.; the American Precision Museum in Windsor, Vt.; and the American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar in Richmond, Va.

Jonathon Shay of the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Conn., said, “It’s so important to preserve this, and it seems it’s on the edge of extinction.”

Marc A. Brouillette, who is associated with the Winchendon (Mass.) Historical Society, was sympathetic to the costs of running a museum with limited resources.

He said their 22-room mansion tells of the town’s fame as the world’s largest wooden toy manufacturer before the Great Depression. The small museum has a $7,000-a-year oil bill and only a few dozen active members.

Brouillette said he found many similarities between Winchendon and Lewiston. His town once had a denim mill and there was a large Franco-American population in the area, he said.

Marylou Ashooh Lazos, curator of collections at the Manchester Historic Association, is another visitor who saw historic parallels. Her museum tells the story of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, which became the largest textile producing company in the world with 17,000 employees.

She also noted the importance of the stories that individuals can tell.

She told of a recent family trip to the Maine coast where her mother noted a Lewiston sign.

“Oh, I worked there during the war,” her mother said. It triggered memories for the woman who now suffers from Alzheimer’s Disease. Lazos said she talked about making parachutes here. She recalled that the chutes were used on bombs and were made out of a newly developed material called nylon.

Lazos said some of the stories were new to her and it emphasized the importance of getting oral histories from people who lived through one-of-a-kind experiences.

The visit was a thrill for Rachel Desgrosseilliers, executive director of Museum L-A.

“To have your peers actually be the ones to say things like that is like, ‘Wow, I guess we’re going in the right direction,'” she said.