MILLINOCKET, Me. — Pass a playground and follow a dusty road, and there, on the other side of a chain-link fence, is the wreckage of the paper mill that was born before this town was.

One recent afternoon, backhoes picked through the rubble of a vast room that once held 10 paper machines, while a handful of townspeople, some smoking in their idling cars, watched.

It is something to do here, witnessing the disintegration of the Great Northern Paper mill, which conjured this town out of the backwoods and sustained it for a century. Once among the biggest mills of its kind, it pulled power from the river and made pulp from spruce, filling wallets and pantries for thousands of families and supporting a bustling main street. People called Millinocket the Magic City.

The mill stopped running in 2008, a turn of events that had once been unthinkable. Since the closing, the town has been unable to find a strategy that could provide an economic engine on anything near the scale the mill did. Its last paper machine was auctioned off in June, snuffing out any wistful hope of a restart.