It’s often said that people who spend way too many hours at work “live at the office.”

It’s a figurative reference, of course, but not so much for lifelong Nashuan Bob Dumont, who lives in the same building in which he worked for more than 35 years.

“This is where the moulders worked; there were three big moulding machines right here,” Dumont, a robust man of almost 80, told a visitor. “And over here there was a little room where a guy sharpened cutters. That’s all he did all day.”

The picture Dumont’s keen memory paints is a far cry from what a visitor observes today in this corner of Nashua’s Palm Square Residence – a tidy dining room dotted with appointed tables, a giant buffet station along one wall, sparkling windows framed by curtains on the other.

Passing through a set of doors, Dumont gestures with a sweeping motion at a fine-looking restaurant and lounge before him.

“All this here is where the offices were,” he said. “Bosses’ offices.”

Dumont is one of several longtime Nashuans who have a unique perspective on the place they now call home: They once worked in the same buildings back when the rambling brick complex between West Hollis, Pine and Palm streets was the former Merrivale Casket Co. and, from 1973 on, the Batesville Casket Co.

The formidable landmark, born in 1886 as Estabrook-Anderson Shoe Co. – the largest shoe factory in the nation – would go on to house a variety of businesses until Batesville bought it in 1973.

Twenty-two years later, after Batesville merged operations with its Panola, Miss., plant, Mario and Denyse Plante’s Hudson-based MDP Associates purchased the vacant building and drew up plans for its most sweeping transformation to date: a 140-apartment residence with a restaurant, hairdresser and retail mall on the ground floor.

Like Clocktower Place before it, Palm Square Residence idealizes urban repurposing, a fancy term for taking a sturdy, old – and sometimes historically significant – inner-city property and giving it new life that fits the city’s 21st century economic and societal landscape.

Today, most Nashuans
remember the 26-year-old, roughly 160,000-square-foot complex as Batesville, the big, bustling factory where millions of board feet of lumber went in one end and shiny, meticulously crafted caskets rolled out the other.

A branch of Hillenbrand Industries that got its name from the firm’s Batesville, Ind., headquarters, the Nashua plant proved highly successful and productive over its relatively brief stay.

Before Merrivale began operations in 1948, a variety of smaller industries such as Jamey Shoe and Biltwell, a work-clothing manufacturer, had occupied the building since Moody, Estabrook and Anderson phased out its operation. When Batesville began operations, 140 employees turned out 70 caskets a day.

As its reputation for fine craftsmanship and reliability spread through the industry, Batesville flourished over the next decade. In Nashua, executives added employees and increased production that, by 1983, helped the company earn distinction as America’s largest casket manufacturer.

Dumont recalls those years as his company’s heyday. Employing 273 hourly and 38 salaried employees and offering a “complete line” of seven species of wood, the firm officially turned out 240 caskets a day – a figure that still sounds low to Dumont.

“Ah, we did a little more than that,” he said. “At one point, we were doing more than 300 a day. We worked – boy, did we work. We got a lot of extra hours. Maintenance used to call me in after hours for help. I was averaging 60-70 hours a week.”

The May 2005 announcement that Batesville was closing the Nashua shop disappointed some and threw others for a loop, Dumont remembers. During the transition, he was one of several veteran Batesville craftsmen management sent to other Hillenbrand and Batesville factories to train workers on new technology.

One of their stops was Panola; Dumont wasn’t impressed.

“They built a plant in Mississippi and ran it with robots … until they found out they couldn’t do the job as well as we did,” he said, smiling with pride.

Just past the Estabrook Grille, the foyer suddenly opens into a spacious, freshly appointed atrium rising from floor to roof and featuring ample seating, water fountains, circulating fans and various tropical plants from around the world.

“All the material used to go back and forth through here,” Dumont said, admiring the present-day atrium.

At 12,000 square feet, it was the same size, but little more than “a 4-foot hole in the ground where the power came into the building” in Dumont’s working days. The unsightly steel columns holding up the roof are also still there, but look a lot better boxed in and decorated.

On all three floors, apartments on the inner side of the main hallways look out onto the atrium. That’s an amenity to some, perhaps, but not for Dumont.

“I’ve got to look outside.
I need windows,” he quipped.

Greeting staff and residents – sometimes in French – as he showed a visitor around the other day, Dumont turned a corner near the passenger elevator and stretched out his arms.

“Right about here,” he said, framing with his arms a section of wall between apartments 119 and 121. “This is where I worked. I started out as a sander. Used to be a big aisle, right next to No. 121 there.”

On one side were the giant sanding machines – “his” among them – that each stretched 14 feet and drove the biggest sandpaper belts made.

Dumont exits onto the Palm Street side, where handsome landscaping and flower gardens meander around sidewalks and benches. Scanning the dozens of sets of windows, he pinpoints what was where back in the day.

“Stockroom was about the fifth and sixth windows from that corner,” he said. “Up there, the top floor, was the staining and inspection area.”

In between, the “stitching area” occupied a chunk of the third floor. That’s where the caskets were fitted for their linen linings, pillows and such, Dumont said.

Each section is a stop along the route of the giant conveyor, which caskets rode one after the other from birth as rough-hewn wooden boxes to maturity as showroom-ready caskets.

“It came up from downstairs, then back down to the trucks,” Dumont said. “It ran the entire length of the Pine Street side.”

Dumont has also resumed working in the building, taking a few four-hour shifts as a front-desk security guard now and then. Woodworking, the skill that put food on the table and paid the mortgage for decades, has become a hobby that he and similarly inclined residents carry on in the basement wood shop.

As active as ever and still filling his calendar, Dumont sees no rocking chairs in his future.

“I like to keep going. … You’ve got to,” he said.

But there’s always time for some quiet reflection, especially on his role in Batesville’s glory days.

“Yep, we sure had some beautiful work coming out of here,” Dumont said, scanning the brick facade that has dominated the neighborhood skyline for more than a century.

Dean Shalhoup can be reached at 594-6443 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com. Also, follow Shalhoup on Twitter (@Telegraph_DeanS).