Everything that goes into restoring a Rockville Mill

Ken Kaplan, like many other local residents, was discouraged watching Rockville’s vacant mills run into the ground over the years. But he said his discouragement turned into a drive that got him focused on fulfilling a lifelong dream.

Kaplan said it has now been nearly 9 years since he started renovation on the old Hockanum Mill in downtown Rockville. He has turned it into a motorcycle business and museum.

“I think the sheer potential of the site, the grandiosity of it, the challenge,” he said. “I feel like it was meant to be, if that makes any sense.”

Kaplan said that Hockanum Mill had been abandoned for more than sixty years yet he still saw so much potential in it.

Now, Hockanum Mill is now the home of the New England Motorcycle Museum and Kaplan Cycles.

“I never really doubted it [the vision]. It’s kinda like when you race motorcycles, when you go do the 100-foot triple jump,” Kaplan said. “You know, you don’t think ‘well I might kill myself, I could end up in a wheelchair. This is going to suck. I’m going to get hurt’. You’re like ‘I’m going to send it.’”

Kaplan hopes that what he has done with the Hockanum Mill inspires others.

“Hopefully this can be a symbol for the country of how to revive a forgotten, industrial town,” Kaplan said.

He said he also shows off the museum and business on his own TV show featured on the Discovery Channel called “Kaplan America”.

Kaplan said the restoration of the mill is a gift to the community and something he would like to pass on to future generations.

Drew Crandall, a member of the Rockville Downtown Association, said that in the 1800s Rockville was a hotspot for manufacturing. There were about thirteen mills who made textiles and other types of goods. He said that Rockville now has three unoccupied mills that “need a lot of work”.

These mills ran off of hydraulic power since they were on, or fairly close to the Hockanum River, Crandall said.

Since the companies have shut down or moved away, Vernon has struggled to find developers to convert these historic mills into something new, Crandall said.

“To convert the old mills back into manufacturing like they were in the 1800s is not feasible because manufacturing is not done the way it was done in the 1800s,” Crandall said.

Since the mills can no longer serve as manufacturing centers, Vernon is looking for new ways to utilize them, Crandall said.

Shaun Gately, the community and economic development coordinator for Vernon, said there are many types of problems when it comes to reviving these vacant mills.

“It’s the brownfields, it’s the cost, it’s the end use, it’s all of those things combined,” Gately said.

Mia Jordan, an environmental engineer from the University of Connecticut, said the mills have become brownfields over the years because the practices manufacturers previously used polluted the sites and nearby river. She said brownfields are previously developed land that could possibly be contaminated.

“Nobody was particularly concerned with the effects of polluting the environment because they hadn’t really witnessed the effects yet and very little research was going into it,” she said.

Back when these mills were running, the manufacturers would dump dyes and various other chemicals out into the river or buried it on site, Jordan said.

“The contamination built up both inside and outside of the buildings,” Jordan said. “This doesn’t just go away on its own so remedial action would be necessary in order to protect whoever is using this area in the future from the harmful effects still there.”

Along with the contamination, it is very expensive to do anything with a property that has been sitting for so long, Crandall said.

“It is so expensive to clean up the properties so you can do something positive with them,” Crandall said.

Restoring a historic building is also expensive, Gately said.

Since these mills are labeled as historic, Vernon requires that whatever is replaced must be like the original thing. For example, a regular window replacement is about $500 but because mill windows are custom-made and could cost almost $1,500, Crandall said.

Since it is so expensive to fix up the mills, a lot of developers get discouraged when most of their money is spent so early in the reconstruction, Crandall said.

“By the time developers spend money to clean up the site, they don’t have money left to do something good with it,” Crandall said. “It really has to be a public, private partnership where government entities help the developers with the environmental remediation. Without that step, nothing can happen.”

Gately said that mills have also been vacant for so long that developers would be unable to utilize the hydraulic power they once ran on.

“Those dams haven’t been maintained over the years, so there’s costs associated with those,” Gately said. “The diversion permits have gone away in most cases, so it's not like you can harvest the water again for power without going through a lot of regulatory hoops.”

Gately said some of the mills in Rockville have successfully turned into apartment complexes. But not all mills can be easily turned into housing.

“You can’t lay out units by what makes sense. You have to take what the building gives you and then try to fit it in there,” Gately said. “This affects your yield or how many units you can get in, which affects whether or not it pencils down or not.”

Gately said that Amerbelle, one of the vacant mills in Rockville, has only been empty for eight years and has gone through four possible developers, all which ended up giving up on the project.

“We are working with a developer on Amerbelle. We are doing our best to get it to the point where we can hand it over to them,” Gately said. “But it is a long process and we’ve already worked with developers in the past and it never panned out.”

Jennifer Bates, a resident of Vernon, has lived in Springville Mill, a renovated mill, in Rockville that was turned into an apartment complex.

Bates said her West Main Street home is a great place to live, and she wants more to be done with the other mills around town.

“I’ve never been inside Amerbelle even when it was open so I don’t even know if apartments would look attractive there,” she said. “But to see some type of business in there would be great.”

State Rep. Michael Winkler, a Vernon Democrat, said that the town has gone through so much with Amerbelle specifically because it has had many different problems throughout the years such as theft and water damage.

“I’m sure they [the town of Vernon] would like to hand it [Amerbelle] over to anybody,” Winkler said.

Even though Amerbelle has been through multiple developers, Winkler said the town has put a lot of effort towards restoring the vacant mills, like Amerbelle. He said that Amerbelle has potential.

“But the bottom line is Vernon’s traffic is getting a little crowded and we have hundreds of new apartments already approved,” he said. “So I think office space would be better than apartments at Amerbelle.”