The former 3M/Kodak factory in Middleway (circa 2018, photo by Commercial Liability Partners).
The industrial site near Middleway that is being proposed for redevelopment as a water bottling factory by Sidewinder Enterprises dates to just after World War II, when Berkeley Woolen Mills (and related companies) acquired two large farms to the west of the village for a fabric washing plant.
The Woolen Mill company started to wind down in 1950s. Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing company (3M) purchased the Middleway facility in 1960. 3M used the site for a factory into the mid 1990s. Based on conversations with several individuals who worked at the plant, it was a good working environment and the company treated its employees well.
The 3M factory produced high-quality printing plates that it sold to printers. The 3M product was similar to photographic film, with a thin chemical emulsion layer bonded to an aluminum sheet. Unlike photographic film, the image layer was exposed with UV light, so the factory didn’t need to operate in the dark.
According to the 3M employees, the bulk of the material handled by the factory was the aluminum, which came in as rolls and left as pre-cut sheets. The first step of the manufacturing process was to clean the aluminum using solvents. The photo-sensitive layer was then applied to the cleaned aluminum and the rolls were cut to specific sheet sizes to fit a wide range of printing presses. The rolls of aluminum were delivered in specific widths and the trimming was very precise, so there was very little waste from either the metal or coating chemicals.
The factory shipped its products to 3M’s internal distribution warehouses around the country. Workers who were there in the 1980s and early 1990s estimated that there were between 20 and 40 trucks per day.
According to public records, the 3M factory was expanded in 1967, 1977, 1987, and 1991. In the image above, the storage of the aluminum was located in the two-story structure on the right side of the complex (both receiving and shipping operated from the same loading bays, visible at the front).
By the mid-1990s, 3M foresaw that digital products would be replacing the older analog products in its product portfolio, which also included floppy disks and VHS tapes. In 1996, 3M’s Imation subsidiary took over all of these film-based products, including the printing plate manufacturing operation in Middleway. Around the same time, the factory was expanded a final time, to house a new manufacturing line (the long structure at the far left in the image).
Imation’s ownership of the factory lasted for only two years before it was sold to Spectratech, a North Carolina-based company that focused exclusively on printing plates. According to documents filed as part of an employee lawsuit against Spectratech, the workforce at the plant, which had numbered around 300 during the 3M ownership, was reduced to 150 during the Imation ownership and then to under 30 workers after the facility was sold to Spectratech.
Kodak acquired the factory in 2004, operating it under its CREO and NPEC subsidiaries and then direct ownership until 2015. Under Kodak’s ownership the production equipment was eventually removed from the facility and it was shut down.
By Steve Pearson