LEWISTON — The intricate designs pressed into the fabric screens are beautiful and dramatic — and Rachel Desgrosseilliers, executive director of Museum L-A, thinks they might be worth something.

“I think they would be considered industrial art,” she said. “But nobody is familiar with things like this because there really are not many left anywhere. So nobody really knows what they’re worth.”

Desgrosseilliers said the screens were among the first things rescued when she joined the museum in 2004. She had just started, and was inspecting the Bates Mill complex to see what was left behind.

“I took a lot of trips into the trash trucks, looking to see what could be saved,” she said. “I got called to look down in the cellar at Mill No. 5. We found a guy was cutting out the patterns, throwing them away and selling the alloy-metal frame. So, we stopped that.”

In all, there are 236 silk-screen patterns. She didn’t know how many the worker destroyed.

“We had no idea how many patterns he’d gone through,” she said. “They were just in the trash.”

The screens range in size from about 8 square feet to 8 feet by 4 feet. Millworkers would use big squeegees to spread ink on fabric to decorate Bates Manufacturing’s signature sheets and bedspreads.

“Later on, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, they automated the process,” Desgrosseilliers said.

For years, the museum kept them in paid storage in the Hill Mill, before moving them back to the Bates Mill complex. They are among the many things left over from the Twin Cities manufacturing history that the museum has been working to preserve.

Desgrosseilliers said she’s ready to put some work into the screens and plans to create an exhibit by 2017.

Right now, the job is cataloging them and seeing exactly what the museum has. She figures the most spectacular will get displayed at the museum.

“They look really neat lit from behind,” she said. “We’ve used a few; most have stayed in storage.”

“We’re trying to set aside the best ones, ones we want to work with,” she said. “We’ve started cataloging them, to see which ones we won’t do anything with but keep in the collection. The less fancy, maybe we could loan them out if somebody wanted to dress up a lobby for a few months. We could raise money by doing that.”

She’s contacted international art auctioneer Sotheby’s, as well as other auction houses, to try to determine their value.

“We don’t want to sell them, but we have 236 of them,” she said. “That’s why we’re cataloging them. Do we need to keep all 236? Maybe we could sell some at auction, and keep the ones we really don’t want to lose.”

They are also extremely rare, she thinks. Most screens of their kinds, especially those in the United States, were torn apart and sold for scrap years ago — exactly what almost happened in 2004.

“We have children’s themes and ornamental designs and they are all beautiful,” she said. “So much of this was destroyed everywhere else. They all threw theirs away, so we are one of the few that have something like this left. But nobody has this big a collection.”

staylor@sunjournal.com