This view of Mill Street, in Springvale, was taken looking toward Main Street sometime in the late 1890s. As of 2013, the building on the left still stands and is one of the landmarks of Springvale. It was constructed in 1864 by Sylvester Cummings as a shoe factory.

Cummings and his successors, including I.A. Butler and the Thomas G. Plante Shoe Companies, operated it as a factory, usually a shoe factory, until about 1928. At one time in its history the factory housed the hall of the local lodge of the Knights of Pythias.

For a few years before its purchase by Nasson College in 1964 the building was used as an office, workshop, and warehouse by W.E. Roberts Inc., a local oil firm. The college remodeled the structure and used it as the headquarters for its Buildings and Grounds Department.

The building on the right of the photograph was built in the 1840s and was used for about one hundred years to house the office of the adjacent factory. The Maine Alpaca Company was its best known occupant. It was torn down a number of years ago. The building at the upper right was a tenement which once stood at the corner of Mill and Main Streets.