Hello there, we are senior students from Zeeland East High School asking for permission to explore the Allied Paper Mills. For why we are asking permission, we want to explore this mill to capture and film this “abandoned” place for our class in Broadcasting. It is a class that is heavy in video editing and creating. We are also asking because we know that this is private property. It would be an exciting experience to see the ins and out of this place. If you have questions please ask. Please consider, thank you.

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Hi, and thanks for your message!

I don't own any of these paper mills so I can't give you legal permission to explore them. Also, the Allied Paper and Watervliet mills have been completely torn down, so you won't be able to explore them anymore anyway. Portions of Mill 2 and the entire powerhouse at the KVP / Crown Vantage mill in Parchment are still standing, but there are some special considerations to be aware of regarding that property which I will say more about later.

That all said, I too was in high school when I started exploring these mills and taking the pictures that now appear on the website. I was, for the most part, a very rule-following/do-gooder type of person at that time, so I did discuss the idea of exploring them with my dad, who told me something along the lines of: "It's fine with me, just be careful, don't do anything stupid, and try not to get caught." I never did get caught, so I guess that part worked out alright.

If you do choose to explore these buildings, I would like to share some advice I once heard from a lawyer about what he called his "one crime at a time" doctrine. Basically, the idea there is that if you're going to do something on purpose that might be against the law, you should make SURE not to do any additional crimes at the same time as you're doing the first one. So, if you decide to enter these buildings for the purposes of exploration (which presumably could constitute criminal trespass or something of that sort even though it arguably doesn't hurt anyone/anything), you should make sure that (for example) neither you nor anyone who is going with you has any weed on them, or alcohol (assuming you are underage), or picks up an interesting artifact and puts it in their pocket (stealing), or anything like that. The idea there is that if you get caught trespassing by the police, you want to give them every possible excuse to just tell you "Look, kids, just get out of here and don't come back!" and let you leave instead of arresting you. If the _only_ crime you're doing is an arguable case of criminal trespass, maybe they will do just that. But if you're also breaking other laws at the same time, they are much more likely to arrest you. Even if they do arrest you, you're probably going to get in a lot less trouble if you can truthfully say all you were doing was looking around and taking pictures than you would if the police can come back with "yeah but they were also smoking weed and stealing stuff" (or whatever).

OK, so, on to the specifics at the old KVP/Crown Vantage mill in Parchment. You should be aware that a company has bought and is now actively using / working on part of that property. They have built a big warehouse behind (to the west of) Mill 2, and they also seem to have bought and are starting to fix up some of what I think were the old engineering department buildings along Island Ave. (Look for the plastic sheets covering up the broken windows, and the newly-installed gas and electric meters to that building.) In my opinion you should stay away from those parts of the buildings and also take care not to be seen by employees of the new company.

There is also some kind of environmental remediation project going on at / behind the old landfill adjacent to that mill; more details on that can be found at http://www.alliedpaper.org/cvantage/remediation2021/ if you haven't already seen it. That area is fairly far from the buildings you are probably interested in, but still you'll need to be mindful that there are people working in that area and probably want to stay away from / make sure they don't see you.

I think that's all the advice I have for you on this. Please write back and let me know if you do end up getting any photos or videos of the area; I would love to see them!

Cheers,
Rusty / alliedpaper.org admin