Greeneville Capehart Mill Complex

A memory from 2017 still plays in my mind. The Capehart Mill wasn't so much a building as it was a skeleton, picked clean by years of neglect and scarred by flames. My friend J and I navigated the wreckage, a landscape of slow decay. We kept our distance from the one pocket of life, the active Atlantic Carton Company, a business humming along next to a ghost.

Most of the complex was a lost cause. The fire-gutted buildings offered no safe passage to their upper floors, their secrets lost to time and the ravages of destruction. But then we found our way into one of the few structures that had been spared the worst. Inside, the light was different. It poured through thick glass block windows, relics of a bygone era, bathing the cavernous space in a soft, hazy glow. It was a quiet sanctuary amid the ruins, a moment of peace in a place that had seen too much violence.

That peace was temporary. For the residents of Greeneville, the Capehart Mill has been more of a recurring nightmare than a landmark. From a suspicious blaze in June 2003, through a week in late April 2010 when three separate Norwich fires were called suspicious and the mill burned and then rekindled, to a three-alarm fire in May 2022 and one more that July, the mill has been a playground for arsonists. By the time the city began counting, it had been vandalized and burned in five arson fires. An early plan to convert the historic buildings into much-needed housing, championed by former Mayor Ben Lathrop, literally went up in smoke as the repeated fires destroyed any chance of securing tax credits.

Today, the city has a plan to finally extinguish the problem. Officials intend to demolish the ruined buildings and transform the blighted land into a new park. For a community that has held its breath with every new plume of smoke, a public green space feels like a welcome, long-overdue exhale.

But just as the bulldozers warm up, a different vision has emerged. Developer Evan Blum, who owns the adjacent former Atlantic Packaging complex at 385 and 387R North Main Street, sees a different kind of life in the old mill's bones. He wants to purchase the property and merge it with his own, creating an ambitious art and tourism destination built around his Irreplaceable Artifacts salvage business.

Blum's proposal is a world away from a simple park. He envisions an art walk winding through the stabilized ruins, surrounded by multiple restaurants, a bustling marketplace, a theater, and even space for a solar panel manufacturer, drawing five to ten thousand visitors a week. His plan also includes a new home for the historic Shawmut Diner, the 1953 O'Mahony car he bought at a Bristol County sheriff's auction in July 2023 for $20,200 and hauled up from New Bedford to Norwich in August 2024. It's a vision of preservation through reinvention, turning industrial decay into a cultural hub.

Norwich officials, however, remain unconvinced. Building Official Dan Coley said flatly that he didn't know whether Blum had the means to do it, pointing to a sprinkler system that doesn't work in the warehouse he already owns and to the diner deteriorating where he parked it. They are moving forward with their own plan, cementing a deal that charts a very different course for the property. On February 3, 2025, the Norwich City Council voted unanimously to approve the city's purchase of the Capehart Mill from its long-time owner, listed in the city's own resolution as Foot of Fifth, Inc., for a symbolic $1. As part of the agreement, the owner would pay the city $800,000 to offset the liens and encumbrances riding on the parcel. The sale closed on March 27, 2025. With $11.8 million in state grants already in hand for demolition and cleanup, four million from the state's brownfield remediation program in June 2024 and another $7.8 million from the Community Investment Fund that September, the path toward a new park seems all but certain.

A Village Built on Water

Before the smoke and the debates over its future, the Capehart Mill complex was born from a powerful idea: to harness the Shetucket River. The story of Greeneville begins not with brick and mortar, but with the vision of a man named William P. Greene. In 1828, he and his fellow stockholders established the Norwich Water Power Company, building a dam that would forever change the landscape.

Greene dug a canal along the river's western bank and in doing so, created an island. This sliver of land, perfectly positioned to draw power from the rushing water, became the engine of a new industrial village. On the mainland, he laid out a neat grid of streets where workers would live. On the island, factories would rise. Within the first year of operation the company had leased out its power to two cotton mills, a paper mill, and a scattering of smaller works, at $150 a year per mill power, with the company itself on the hook for keeping the dam and the canal sound.

The Paper Mill at the Foot of Fifth

Here is the thing I had wrong for years, and that the maps finally straightened out for me. The mill I walked through is not the old cotton mill. Papermaking in Greeneville began with Camp, Hall & Company, which set up at the foot of Fifth Street in 1835 and never left that spot. Reorganized as the Chelsea Paper Company in 1867, it grew into something enormous: by 1870 the plant held nineteen papermaking machines and was valued at $400,000, turning out an average of thirty tons of fine rag stock a day with two hundred men and one hundred women on the payroll. Harper & Brothers in New York bought all their paper here. In 1893 the firm was reorganized again as the Uncas Paper Company, which ran around the clock on two twelve-hour shifts and was once called the largest paper mill in the world, with a second plant in Pawtucket and offices in New York City. Lawsuits finally forced it out of business in 1927.

Sanborn sheet 16, June 1897. Chelsea Paper Co. sits at the bottom left, at the foot of Fifth Street, with the Norwich Dyeing, Bleaching and Printing Co. filling the ground between the canal and the Shetucket.

The United States Finishing Co. "Norwich Branch" bleach, dye and print works, surveyed September 10, 1913. The sheet records 802 hands employed, 672 by day and nine at night, and dates the buildings one by one, the oldest to 1871. The Shetucket Company's own works sits off the top edge.

The Cotton Mill Next Door

The other giant to answer Greene's call was the Shetucket Company, which was the old Quinebaug Company reorganized after it failed in the Panic of 1837. Around 1840 it built a cotton goods mill at the foot of Second Street, a sturdy brick building with a tall stair tower and loading doors at all four floors, ready to receive the raw materials of an empire. It grew relentlessly, adding a four-bay pavilion here about 1860, a gabled two-story wing there about 1880. By 1867 it had three buildings plus a picker and dye house, and during the Civil War it doubled its spindle capacity along with the rest of the city, so that by 1870 Norwich was turning out more cotton than Lowell. Four Norwich mills together were making six million dollars' worth of cloth a year by 1888. The Shetucket Company wasn't just a factory; it was the town's lifeblood, owning scores of rental homes where its employees lived and raised their families, block after block of them still standing on Fifth and Sixth and Prospect.

Between the two of them, filling the ground from Fourth Street down to Eighth, stood the Norwich Bleaching, Dyeing and Printing Company, known to everybody in the village simply as the Bleachery. At its peak in 1894 it had at least twenty buildings on the canal, five waterwheels and two thousand horsepower of steam, and it finished sixty million yards of goods a year.

1934, 1952, 1970, 1986 and 2004 from the air. Watch the island empty out: the long ranges along the canal thin, then vanish, until only the Fifth Street end is left.

The Long Retreat

The 20th century, however, brought waves of change. The end of World War I saw military contracts dry up, and New England's textile industry began its slow, painful decline. The Shetucket Company started laying off as early as 1915 and finally shuttered its doors in 1923.

But the buildings did not stay silent for long. A new industry, paper, moved in next door. The Atlantic Carton Company, a maker of folding paper boxes founded in 1916 over on South Golden Street, took over the old Shetucket plant in the years after it closed. They thrived where the textile looms had fallen silent, producing hundreds of millions of cartons a year and becoming the new anchor of Greeneville's economy.

Over the decades, the complex became a patchwork of different enterprises. Then, in 1963, a new sound filled the old Uncas Paper buildings at the foot of Fifth: the assembly of television cabinets. A company called Wakefield-Capehart moved in, and in doing so, gave the site the name that would stick long after they were gone. It had started life in Mystic in the 1920s as Connecticut Cabinet, and merged with the electronics firm Wakefield Industries after the Second World War.

The Capehart name on a Woolco page: model 8TW, solid state AM/FM stereo with an 8-track player, $79.95, no down payment.

A Saturday warehouse sale at the Greenville Plant, 5th Street, Norwich. The address on the ad is the clincher: Capehart was running out of the old paper mill at the foot of Fifth, not the cotton mill down at Second.

The great industrial retreat continued. United States Finishing, which had taken over the Bleachery, closed the Norwich plant and moved its operations south in 1958, and every one of its buildings, along with the Hubbard paper mills above them, came down. That left the Capehart complex as the last major remnant of that ambitious, water-powered island. Capehart itself was gone by the early 1980s. Even the Atlantic Carton Company next door, which had survived for nearly a century as Atlantic Packaging, finally closed in November 2016, and I photographed it in its last months of life without knowing it.

📋 Reader Records

🏭 Did you work at the foot of Fifth Street?

Capehart assembled television and stereo cabinets in the old Uncas Paper buildings from 1963 until sometime in the early 1980s, and nobody I have found can tell me the year the last shift walked out. If you ran a line there, sold a console off that Saturday warehouse sale, boxed cartons across the canal at Atlantic Carton or Atlantic Packaging, or finished cloth at the Bleachery before it went south, I would like to hear it. Photographs of the complex whole, before the fires, would be worth more than anything else I could put on this page. Do you remember when Capehart shut down?

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📍 The Capehart Mill stands at the foot of Fifth Street in the Greeneville section of Norwich, Connecticut, on ground that has made paper since 1835 as Camp, Hall & Company, the Chelsea Paper Company and the Uncas Paper Company, and that took the Capehart name from the cabinet works that moved in during 1963. The City of Norwich bought the 6.05-acre site for $1 in March 2025 and intends to demolish what is left and build a riverfront park.

Source(s):

1. Cunningham, J., & Warner, S. (2005). Greeneville Historic District, Norwich, New London County, Connecticut (National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, reference no. 05001047). National Park Service. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/ae0eecec-2121-4766-ab14-23fc894a25b3
2. The Cecil Group, Inc., & Tighe & Bond, Inc. (2012, September). Norwich Area-Wide Brownfield Study. Prepared for the City of Norwich. (Capehart Mill property profile, pp. 76–77.)
3. Sanborn Map Company. (1897, June). Norwich, Connecticut, sheet 16. Library of Congress.
4. Associated Mutual Fire Insurance Companies. (1913, September 10). The United States Finishing Co. “Norwich Branch” (Bleach, Dye & Print Works), Norwich, Conn. Surveyed and drawn by G. P. Deering; traced by E. F. Schultz. Serial no. 11140, index no. 17256.
5. City of Norwich. (2025, February 3). Journal of the Council of the City of Norwich. https://www.norwichct.gov/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Minutes/_02032025-6385
6. Connecticut Senate Democrats. (2024, June 14). Sen. Osten, Reps. Wilson and Ryan welcome $4 million state investment to remediate Capehart Mill, create riverfront park. https://www.senatedems.ct.gov/sen-osten-reps-wilson-and-ryan-welcome-4-million-state-investment-to-remediate-capehart-mill-create-riverfront-park
7. Community Investment Fund 2030 Board. (2024, September 24). Board meeting packet (amended). State of Connecticut. https://portal.ct.gov/communityinvestmentfund/-/media/communityinvestmentfund/cif-board-meeting-packet-september-24-2024-amended.pdf
8. Grahn, M. (2024, August 20). Norwich accepts $4 million to remediate Capehart Mill property. Norwich Bulletin. https://www.norwichbulletin.com/story/news/local/2024/08/20/norwich-accepts-4-million-to-remediate-capehart-mill-property-brownfield-remediation-grant/74862544007/
9. Grahn, M. (2025, March 28). Norwich plans Capehart Mill site to be a park; Evan Blum wants art, tourism at Atlantic Packaging. Norwich Bulletin. https://www.norwichbulletin.com/story/news/local/2025/03/28/norwich-plans-capehart-mill-site-to-be-a-park-evan-blum-wants-art-tourism-atlantic-packaging/82598436007/
10. Greater Norwich Area Chamber of Commerce. (n.d.). State approves demolition of former Capehart Mill in Norwich. GNACC News. https://web.gnacc.org/news/newsarticledisplay.aspx?articleid=6833
11. Envision Norwich 360. (n.d.). Capehart Mill. https://envisionnorwich360.com/en/projects/capehart-mill-1
12. Detelj, T. (2024, January 23). Norwich mill could become riverfront park. WTNH. https://www.wtnh.com/news/connecticut/new-london/norwich-mill-could-become-riverfront-park/
13. Detelj, T. (2016, November 17). Vacant mills continue to be concerns in Norwich. WTNH. https://www.wtnh.com/news/connecticut/new-london/vacant-mills-continue-to-be-concerns-in-norwich/
14. Firehouse. (2003, June 9). Norwich, Connecticut officials scour mill for clues in possible arson. https://www.firehouse.com/community-risk/news/10539022/norwich-connecticut-officials-scour-mill-for-clues-in-possible-arson
15. NBC Connecticut. (2022, July 8). Police investigating another fire at vacant Capehart Mill in Norwich. https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local/police-investigating-another-fire-at-vacant-capehart-mill-in-norwich/2821587/
16. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (2007). Capehart Mill Site, Fifth Street End of Canal, Norwich, CT (On-Scene Coordinator site profile). https://response.epa.gov/site/site_profile.aspx?site_id=3308
17. Patch. (2023, October 27). Diner closed almost a decade to be reopened in Norwich. https://patch.com/connecticut/norwich/diner-closed-almost-decade-be-reopened-norwich
18. H.R. 1300, the Recycle America's Land Act of 1999: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, House of Representatives, One Hundred Sixth Congress, First Session, May 12, 1999. (2000). U.S. Government Printing Office, p. 201.
19. Iconic Norwich. (n.d.). Greeneville Mfg. Site. https://iconicnorwich.org/mfg-site-greeneville/