The public is invited to a free screening of “Bills Lumber,” a 45-minute documentary about the last days of the Bills family’s beloved 86-year-old sawmill in Wardsboro, Vermont. Dutton Gym is next to Leland and Gray High School at 2030 Vermont Route 30 in Townshend. Showtime is 7 pm on Saturday, 5 April 2025. Snow date is Sunday, 6 April.

The video follows octogenarian brothers Alan and Everett Bills and their co-owner niece, Debbie Bills Bauer, after the mill sold along with 433 adjoining wooded acres, as they prepare to demolish the working sawmill that their late father, Melbourne Bills, had established in 1936. Great storytellers, Alan and Everett talk about what it was like to grow up on “Bills Hill,” their family compound on Route 100 in Wardsboro, recounting harrowing tales of fire and flood with equanimity and a good laugh.

“These are amazingly resilient people,” said video maker Theresa Maggio. “I feel lucky to know them.”

Alan Bills says he plans to be at Dutton Gym for the show because that was where he learned to play trumpet. He will answer questions and maybe tell a few jokes and play a tune after the movie.

Maggio had interviewed the formidable Melbourne Bills, the sawmill’s founder, and his wife, Mabel, in the early 1990s when she was a reporter for the Brattleboro Reformer. Some 30 years later, when she learned from Everett’s son that the mill had been sold, “I knew I had to tell the story. Theirs was a world fading away.”

The video was mostly taped the summer and fall of 2023. “I drove back roads a half hour up to the mill several days a week to capture the demolition and removal of the sawmill, the debarker and the planer shed,” Maggio said. Seeing them having to destroy their father’s legacy was so sad that “every day I drove home crying.” But in the end, the Bills’s buoyant spirits vanquish all.