WEST LINN, Oregon (From news reports) -- Six months after announcing an impending closure, Willamette Falls Paper Company is still seeking a buyer.

The paper company, which began operating the 135-year-old mill on the West Linn side of the falls in 2019, gave notice of mass layoffs to its team of more than 200 employees last August.

Today, the company has just 10 employees managing the property and its remaining inventory, President Brian Konen said.

"Right now, we're still taking care of the place and talking to potential investors and talking to scrappers" Konen said.

If no one buys the company in the next three months, Konen said it will go to auction to be bought piece by piece.

The mill first opened in 1889 as the Willamette Falls Pulp and Paper Company, joining what was then a growing industrial hub at the falls with the Blue Heron Paper Mill already operating on the other side of the river. Ownership of the mill changed hands several times until it eventually became the West Linn Paper Company in 1997. The West Linn Paper Company owned and operated the mill for two decades before closing in 2017. Investment company Columbia Ventures bought and reopened the mill as the Willamette Falls Paper Company in 2019.

Last month, a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon issued an order stating that the company defaulted by failing to respond to a lawsuit from one of the employees laid off in August. The lawsuit alleged that the company failed to give employees proper notice of the impending layoffs in violation of the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, which requires companies with 100 or more employees to give employees 60 days notice before mass layoffs or impending closures.

Konen declined to comment on the lawsuit.

He added that there should be a clearer picture for the mill's future come June.

"There's still a chance that it could restart if someone buys it before the auction, but once the auction happens, then after that all the equipment will be sold to different people, and it basically makes the mill inoperable," Konen said.