JAY – Jean Richard was born in Riley in 1931 and remembers growing up in the village off Riley Road, near the Androscoggin paper mill.

Life in Riley was typical in most households at the time, said the 76-year-old, who retired from the paper industry as a machinist.

It was special enough that families who lived there were willing to write about their experiences and share their memories in book form, “Riley, Maine, A Vanishing Village.”

“As we were growing we were kept busy with chores around the house, gardening and tending to the lawn,” Richard said Wednesday. “In my own case, I came from a family of eight children, six of them boys.”

Boys had assignments in the home that included doing the dishes, tending the wood box and helping with canning.

Children who lived in Riley went to school in the village and attended church there as well, at Our Lady of the Assumption Church. There was also a post office and International Paper’s ground wood mill, where most of the village men worked.

But it wasn’t all work and no play, Richard said.

“Actually, our playground was all the land IP owned and what was known as Bennie’s pasture and basically to Alden Hill to halfway Jay,” he said.

Where Riley Village began is debatable, he said, but he believes it is at the end of the bridge on Riley Road.

“In the wintertime, the (Androscoggin) river was frozen over and we had an ice rink from Canton Point to Seven-Mile Brook to the bluff in North Jay,” Richard said.

He lived at home, except for his time in the military, until he was 26 and then married his wife, Lucille, 50 years ago.

There were 33 to 35 families living in the village. His parents rented their home from IP, as did many others.

“It was a close-knit community,” he said.

Since then the church, the school, a store, many houses and families, and part of the ground wood mill buildings and IP have gone, and the village is no longer a bustling burg as it was through much of the 1900s.

Riley grew ever more quiet as IP reclaimed many of the homes and bought others over the years. As more and more homes and buildings were bought, Riley became a shadow of itself. There are fewer than 10 families living there now.

Verso Paper now owns the Androscoggin Mill and the former IP property that went with the sale.

Several years ago another fellow Riley villager, Rosemary Morrison, contacted Richard’s brother, Lionel, who has since died, about information on the history and people of Riley.

Richard’s family and others who grew up there had plenty of information to share.

That’s when the notion was born to put together a book to preserve the memories of Riley.

“It took 14 years,” Richard said, but the book “Riley, Maine, A Vanishing Village” is out and on sale for $25. Only 400 of the 326-page books were printed and it is selling well, Richard said. After the cost of production is covered, any funds leftover will go to the Jay Historical Society, he said.

There is no author listed on the soft-covered book because its information and stories were compiled from people who lived in the village, he said.

Morrison, Richard, Maureen Jones and James Richard formed the Riley Book Committee to oversee the gathering of information and producing it in book form.

The book gives the history of Riley and its families, from its inception in 1897 when the name of the area was changed from Petersons Rips, and is also steeped in history of the papermaking industry and leaders who made it happen.

“I feel that we did a good job, not I alone, we,” Richard stressed.