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The Agnes Gray Elementary School on Main Street in West Paris has been boarded up for the winter. Maine School Administrative District 17 closed the 130-year-old building in February after Portland architectural firm LaVallee Brensinger listed numerous life safety and maintenance issues. Lisa McCann/Advertiser Democrat

Agnes Gray is more than West Paris’ community elementary school. Generations of local children have passed in and out of its doors going back almost 130 years.

It is also the icon at the center of a rural village whose vibrancy has slowly but surely dwindled since West Paris seceded from the Oxford County shire town to its south, Paris, almost 70 years ago.

Paris Hill maintains its cachet, with its stately antique homes and bragging rights as the birthplace of Maine’s highest-ever achieving politician, Abraham Lincoln’s first vice president, Hannibal Hamlin. South Paris found ways to evolve past the losses of small manufacturers and continues to be the county seat.

Over the years it has become harder and harder for small rural communities to hold onto their traditions — even their identities. And nowhere is this more apparent than in West Paris,

Mid-20th century, it was still a bustling village economy with manufacturing, dining and grocery options, and a railroad depot. It had a culture of its own as it had become a center for Finnish immigrants to settle in Maine during the previous century.

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Industry in West Paris steadily declined since the 1950s, but its yellow community schoolhouse, now known as Agnes Gray Elementary School, has stood as its Main Street pillar, going back to 1890s. One by one, West Paris’ other institutions have gone by the wayside — even the post office left town for a few years.

The town may have been prepared to eventually replace Agnes Gray with a newer, modernized school. But it was not prepared for it to be abruptly closed in the middle of the school year and then see its students redistributed to other towns — namely big sister Paris down the road.

Nor was it expecting, on the heels of that, to learn that its youngest citizens may never live within walking or bicycle distance of their elementary school again. One more institution, part of its identity, pulled away in favor of contraction and consolidation.

West Paris watched as Agnes Gray closed and its children were shuttled away from their home away from home. Then they saw the windows boarded up and the building unofficially rendered vacant, over their wishes and out of their control.

It is unclear what a lawsuit against the town will do to bring Agnes Gray back. But West Paris is not giving up hope.

Nicole Carter is a reporter for the Advertiser Democrat who covers people, schools and towns in Oxford County.

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