Brown's Mill: Inside CT's Abandoned Paper Factory on the Salmon River

The old brick walls of Brown's Mill still rise above the Salmon River like a stubborn memory. Trees push through cracked floors. Rusted metal hangs from the ceilings. Broken plaster and splintered wood cover the ground inside what remains of the once-busy paper mill. Yet even after decades of abandonment, parts of the machinery still stand. Two hydro turbines sit silent beside the river, and a massive steam engine remains planted inside the ruins, a reminder of the years when the mill pulsed with noise, heat, and labor.

Locals still call it Brown's Mill, though its official name was the Brown Brothers Paper Mill. For generations, the factory sat along the western bank of the Salmon River beside Comstock Bridge Road, shaping both the economy and identity of the Colchester community in eastern Connecticut, just across the water from East Hampton. The parcel has no street address at all — the town knows it only as Map 4W-15, Lot 24-000, on the south side of Comstock Bridge Road about five hundred feet east of Route 16. Of the seven mill buildings that once stood here, only the main structure and the northern building still read as buildings, both rebuilt during a modernization effort in 1929. Environmental surveyors walking the site in 2022 counted the remnants of four.

From Mohegan Land to Grist Mill

The site's history stretches back much further than the surviving walls suggest. Long before paper machines and turbines arrived, this was Mohegan country. In the 1600s, the land in and around what became Colchester passed to early settlers through Uncas, the influential sachem of the Mohegan, and his sons — Uncas had been born into a Pequot royal line but broke away to lead the Mohegan as a separate people, and the distinction matters to their descendants. By around 1725, Andrew Carrier and U. Skinner established a grist mill on the site, using the steady current of the Salmon River to power grinding machinery. There is some historical dispute over whether a grist mill stood here first or whether it was built further away from this location.

Over the next century, the property evolved alongside the industrial growth of New England. Maps from 1833 show a grist mill operating there. By 1854, the site included Wetherell's Paper Mill along with S. William's grist and saw mill. Water power made the location valuable, and owners continued adapting the property to meet changing demands. In 1868, W.A. Snow Paper Mill shared the same water-powered site with the grist and saw mills.

The Brown Brothers Era

That transformation accelerated in 1870 when brothers Howard C. Brown and Edward M. Brown purchased the site and renamed it Brown Brothers. The two men became prominent figures in the area, each building large Queen Anne-style homes nearby. One stood close to the historic covered Comstock Bridge, while the other overlooked the hill above the river valley.

The trade directories of the period let you watch the business grow. The Paper Mill Directory of the World for 1883 lists Brown Brothers at the post office address of Comstock Bridge, turning out news, manila and card stock at three thousand pounds every twenty-four hours, with a separate pulp mill producing a ton of wood pulp in the same span. Lockwood's directory of the paper and allied trades, a little later, records the operation under Ed. M. and Howard C. Brown running a rail siding a quarter mile off the Air Line Division of the New York, New Haven and Hartford, with one six-hundred-pound engine, two ten-hundredweight Umpherston engines, a Jordan engine and a sixty-eight-inch three-cylinder machine, all on water power — and card production had climbed to twenty thousand pounds a day. The same page carries a second Brown Brothers entry, a pulp mill with two grinders and a forty-inch wet machine sited at Lyman's Viaduct, marked idle.

Comstock's Bridge in those years was a village of about a hundred people. The nearest telegraph and express office was three miles away in East Hampton; the nearest bank was seventeen miles off in Willimantic.

How the Mill Worked

Inside the mill, workers turned scrap paper into cardboard products used for tickets and packaging. Materials arrived from another mill north of Hartford, where they were broken down into a wet slurry before being processed into heavy paperboard. Later, the business expanded into fishing line and trimming cord for tennis racquets, products made by twisting and braiding silk fibers through mechanical equipment.

The river powered nearly everything. A dam diverted water into a raceway that forced water across turbines housed inside the mill before returning it to the Salmon River. When water levels dropped too low, a coal-fired steam engine took over. The steam system also heated the sprawling factory and likely helped dry cardboard during production.

Fire, Flood, and the 1938 Hurricane

Even during its productive years, the mill fought constant battles against disaster.

Two major fires struck between 1870 and 1895, forcing repeated rebuilding efforts. Then came the hurricane of September 21, 1938, the storm remembered as the Great New England Hurricane. Floodwaters slammed into the property and badly damaged the factory. Though the mill had been modernized just nine years earlier, operations slowed dramatically after the flood and eventually stopped altogether. The buildings have remained abandoned ever since.

Decay and the 1982 Fire

Nature and time have done what fire and water could not fully finish.

Much of the original raceway was filled in during an Army Corps of Engineers erosion project in the early 1980s. In the same decade, another fire tore through the property in 1982, destroying much of what remained of the complex.

Today, wire fencing surrounds the ruins. "No Trespassing" signs hang in several places, even spray-painted ones in bold green on brick walls, though the site still attracts curious explorers, photographers, anglers, and hikers drawn to the haunting remains beside the river. What most visitors do not realize is that the fence went up in the winter of 2022 and 2023 under a state environmental hazard order, paid for by the owners themselves. The appeal is easy to understand. Brown's Mill feels frozen between eras. One moment, it resembles an industrial cathedral. Next, it looks like the forest is swallowing it whole.

What Comes Next

But the ruins hold more than atmosphere. They also raise difficult questions about preservation, safety, and what communities choose to save.

In June 2021, the Comstock Bridge Road property received a $27,500 Connecticut Brownfield Assessment grant under the state's Round 13 municipal program, awarded to the Town of Colchester to test for hazardous materials. The town's board of selectmen signed off that October. ALTA Environmental Corporation carried out a Phase I assessment and then a Phase II investigation through the autumn of 2022, and the picture that came back was less about asbestos than about a century of coal smoke, ash, lead paint and burned debris settled into the top few feet of ground. Releases were confirmed in six of the eight areas surveyors had flagged. A Phase III investigation is still needed to map how far the contamination runs and what it would cost to clean up.

The findings started a clock. On October 18, 2022, ALTA notified the town and the landowners that soil at three locations held arsenic, lead and/or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons at more than thirty times the industrial and commercial direct exposure criteria in the upper two feet of ground. Under Connecticut law that is a Significant Environmental Hazard, and it gave the owners thirty days to answer on water and ninety on soil. David and Joan Hageman, a retired couple on a fixed income who describe themselves as ancestral landowners of the property, paid for the expanded testing and the site enclosure themselves, roughly $12,800, because the deadlines ran faster than the grant could. The total cost of the work came to $42,553 against a $27,500 award, and in March 2023 First Selectman Andreas Bisbikos asked the state for $13,750 in supplemental funds to reimburse them. The fencing and locked gates are inspected and repaired annually. Groundwater impacts were minor, and an on-site spring, re-sampled using low-flow methods, showed no contamination at all.

The current owners say they want a different future for the land. Their goal is to preserve the nearly four-acre property as an undeveloped public space along the Salmon River. The site includes more than 1,500 feet of riverfrontage within Salmon River State Forest, making it attractive for fishing access, hiking, kayaking, and other low-impact recreation. State land already wraps the western edge of the parcel, where the parking lot for Comstock Bridge and river access sits on the East Hampton side.

There is also growing recognition that the mill and nearby Comstock Bridge are deeply woven into local identity. Generations of residents have grown up hearing stories about the old factory, and many photographers have taken pictures of the covered historic Comstock Bridge. Anglers still gather along the riverbanks nearby. Hikers stop to photograph the crumbling brick walls rising through the trees.

The long-term plan may involve demolishing much of the remaining mill structure. Still, preservationists hope several historic elements, likely including portions of the machinery or stonework, can remain as evidence of the site's industrial past. Exactly what will survive has not yet been decided.

Reader Callout

📜 Did Your Family Work at Brown Brothers Paper Mill?

Were you or a relative employed at Brown's Mill before the 1938 hurricane shut it down? Do you have photographs from inside the factory when the turbines still turned, memories of the Comstock Bridge Road property before the 1982 fire, or anything from the years when the mill was making fishing line and racquet cord? Do you know anything about the second Brown Brothers pulp mill at Lyman's Viaduct? With four sets of ruins left and a fence around them, firsthand accounts are the living record of this Salmon River landmark.

📩 Share Your Memory → or drop a comment below — full credit given to every contributor.

Keep Reading

🏭 More Connecticut Mills & Paper History

From paperboard and pulp to crucibles, hairpins and textile mills — the factories that once powered the rivers and valleys of Connecticut.

Wilkinson Brothers Paper Mill: Shelton's Lost Pulp Mills Another Connecticut paper and sulphite pulp mill on a canal — demolished in 2026 for apartments. → The Former Fusion Paperboard Plant (Part 1) One of Connecticut's major recycled paperboard facilities, closed in 2014. → Greeneville Capehart Mill Complex A fire-scarred industrial ghost on the Shetucket River in Norwich. → Historic Killingly Ballouville Mill A sprawling abandoned textile mill in Connecticut's Quiet Corner. →

📜 The Brown Brothers Paper Mill ran from 1870 until the Great New England Hurricane of 1938, making news, manila and card stock and, later, fishing line and racquet cord. The 3.9-acre site on Comstock Bridge Road in Colchester is now fenced under a state environmental hazard order, with open space its intended future.

Source(s):

1. ALTA Environmental Corporation. (2022, December). Phase II Environmental Site Assessment Report, Former Brown's Mill Property, Comstock Bridge Road, Colchester, Connecticut. Prepared for the Town of Colchester.
2. Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development. (2021, June 24). Round 13 Brownfield Municipal Grant Application award letter — Brown's Mill (Comstock Bridge Rd), Alexandra Daum, Deputy Commissioner, to First Selectwoman Mary Bylone, Town of Colchester.
3. Hageman, D., & Hageman, J. (2023, March 30). Letter to the Connecticut DECD Brownfield Grant Coordinator regarding Grant No. 2710 4861-47288, Brown's Mill LLC property.
4. Bisbikos, A., First Selectman, Town of Colchester. (2023, March 31). Letter to Jennifer Schneider, Office of Brownfield Remediation and Development, CT DECD, requesting supplemental funding.
5. Connecticut DEEP. Significant Environmental Hazard Notification Form (DEEP-REM-SEH-FRM-500), Brown's Mill, signed by Joan Hageman, co-owner.
6. Town of Colchester Board of Selectmen. (2021, October 7). Meeting minutes, resolution authorizing execution of documents for the CT DECD Brownfield Assessment Grant, Comstock Bridge Road, Map 4W-15, Lot 024-000.
7. Clark W. Bryan & Company. (1883). The paper mill directory of the world: A complete catalogue of all the paper and pulp mills on the globe. Holyoke, MA: Author. (Brown Brothers, Comstock Bridge, East Hampton entry.)
8. Lockwood, H. M. Lockwood's directory of the paper and allied trades. (Comstock's Bridge, New London County entries for Brown Brothers and the Brown Brothers Pulp Mill at Lyman's Viaduct.)
9. Trumbull, J. H. (Ed.). (1886). The Memorial History of Hartford County, Connecticut, 1633–1884. Boston: Edward L. Osgood. (Uncas, sachem of the Mohegan.)
10. Town of Colchester. (2021, April 7). 2020 Municipal Brownfield Grant Program application: Assessment-only (Brown's Mill). Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development.
11. ALTA Environmental Corporation. (2021, August 28). Phase I and Phase II environmental site assessment proposal: Former Brown's Mill property, Comstock Bridge (aka River) Road, Colchester, Connecticut. Town of Colchester Planning & Zoning Department.
12. Water Resources Development by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Connecticut. (1996). United States: Department of the Army, New England Division, Corps of Engineers. p. 78.
13. Annual Report of the Chief of Engineers, U.S. Army, on Civil Works Activities. United States: U.S. Government Printing Office. p. 18.