LEWISTON – Descending an unlit staircase amid the stale air, cobwebs and peeling paint of the former Camden Yarn Mill, Rachel Desgrosseilliers chirped about her grand plans.

She saw galleries and theaters and children learning about the sacrifices of their ancestors.

“I’m looking at the dream at the end of the journey,” said Desgrosseilliers, the executive director of Museum L-A. “I know it’s going to be a tough journey.”

The museum’s board of directors has signed a purchase agreement to buy the forlorn-looking brick building.

Their intention: create a showpiece.

The agreement gives the board 18 months to buy the building and land at a cost of $300,000. If the money is raised, then plans call for spending $4 million more to transform the mill into a state-of-the-art museum. Phase one would allow 20,000 square feet to open. Another phase costing even more money would use all 50,000 square feet in the building, once Lewiston’s first cotton mill.

“It’s got a whole history of its own,” Desgrosseilliers said. “And it’s the perfect spot for what we’re planning.”

The 16-member board and Degrosseilliers have spent the past year mapping out the future of Museum L-A. They have been writing reports including a strategic plan, a program plan and operating budget projections.

“It’s been a long year of planning and lots of agonizing decisions,” she said.

Among them was a decision to eventually move the museum out of its space in the Bates Mill complex and into its own space, one that could be permanent and owned by the museum.

They looked at several possible places, including the Hill and Continental mills. They seemed too big.

“What do you do with a million square feet?” Desgrosseilliers asked.

The Camden Yarn Mill was smaller, with about one-twentieth of the floor space. And its location – beside the river, adjacent to Simard/Payne Memorial Park, within walking distance of several mills and the Franco American Heritage Center – made it ideal.

It wasn’t even for sale when Desgrosseilliers began asking about the building. Then she started poking around. She convinced the Miller family, who own the mill, to let her inside.

“It was love at first sight,” she said.

Parts of the mill are still in used for storage. Other parts have been dormant for decades. At the top of one stairwell, the ceiling still carries the scars of a catastrophic 1940s-era fire. A bulletin board just inside lists the minimum wage as $3.80 an hour, the going rate in 1990.

In a sense, the relocation would be the museum’s biggest rescue, yet.

It was founded 12 years ago by lawyer Elliot Epstein as a way of preserving some of the tangible artifacts from Lewiston’s textile history.

“If there were no museum to preserve the artifacts of these mills, they would have simply disappeared,” Epstein told the Sun Journal in 2003.

Since then, the museum has grown. It’s expanded to examine the industrial working history of the cities as a manufacturer of textiles, shoes and bricks, which Desgrosseilliers describes as Lewiston-Auburn’s cotton, leather and clay.

Much of the recent work has been focused on gathering nearly 200 oral histories of the people who worked in the industries. There are many more to record.

In them, Desgrosseilliers finds the heart of the museum, she said.

One of her favorite stories is of a woman who worked in the mills as a girl. She would run home after her shift and give her sister her shoes to wear to work. The parents could not afford to buy shoes for each of the girls. They had to share.

“We all learn what it means to be a superhuman person when we listen to these stories,” she said.

When the finished museum opens, Desgrosseilliers imagines kiosks for people to listen to the stories.

But that is years away.

It’s unknown how the money will be raised or how long it may take, Desgrosseilliers said. Talks are in the works over whether an outside firm may be hired to gather donations or the money will be found elsewhere.

“We still don’t know,” she said. “We are still figuring all of that out.”