The York County Mini Maker Faire was featured on the online magazine Makezine‘s blog with an article entitled “Shuttered Textile Mill To Haven For Makers” written by Briana Campbell.
The textile mills of Biddeford, Maine were once the economic center of the area, employing over 3,000 people from 26 countries. In the 1980s, as in many industrial towns in America, the mills began to close and the jobs that went with them went away, leading to decades of economic decline and attrition in Biddeford. Starting in the mid-2000s, however, something kind of cool began to happen – those former textile mills began to make a comeback, becoming home to modern textile companies, glass blowers, beer brewers, gin distillers, coffee roasters, circus performers, and artists of all stripes. It’s what we like to call “the Biddaissance.”