[at-l] Maine Appalachian Trail Land Trust

[ellen at clinic.net (Bob C.)]

>"...But, I've deleted the address.  Please repost specifics. Thanks, Jan
> PS I understand from your sister that you were instrumental in the
> powers-that-be
>"acquiring" the famous and stunning Mahoosuc Notch, which I enjoyed greatly. Is
>this true, or sisterly devotion?"

I've told these stories before, but I love to repeat them. Some 40 years ago, an
old guy who lived in a one room tarpaper shack told me a story about how Maine
had preserved 400,000 acres when it sold it's public domain between 1830 and
1850, but that this reserved land was now being treated as private land. The guy
was always coming into a tiny, 3,000 circulation newspaper where I worked with
story ideas. He was always getting me to do stories about dams blocking Atlantic
salmon migration, DDT killing eagles, searching for the route of Benedict
Arnold's expedition through Maine and countless other ideas.

But losing 400,000 acres didn't strike me as a story for the readers of a tiny
daily that circulated in only one coastal industrial town.

Anyway, I filed the story away in my memory banks and 9 years later when I had
migrated to a statewide paper, i dug it out again. Well, it was a long and
complex story that went on for 10 years but eventually the Maine Supreme Court
ruled that Maine in fact still owned 400,000 acres, even though it had been
treating it as private land and taxing it as private land for a century.

The 400,000 acres was in scattered 1,000 acre and 1,280 acre parcels of marginal
recreational value and now that they were publicly owned were a nuisance to the
paper companies that had claimed them.

Anyway, the state and the paper companies got together and engineered a land
swap. The paper companies got the scattered lots. The state got large blocks of
land with some recreational value.

As the company that owned the Mahoosuc range prepared to settle its share of the
dispute, I got a phone call from the state negotiator asking ,"what do we want
that Brown Paper Company owns?"

I replied, "the Mahoosucs."

The state as a result owns about 45,000 acres from the New Hampshire border to
the East B Hill road north of the Baldpates. Other pieces of the recovered acres
run from where the trail crosses the Height of Land on Route 17 to Saddleback,
most of the Bigelow Preserve, part of Nahmakanta and scattered other parcels in
the Maine wildlands.

Oh, you say you need our address. It's Maine Appalachian Trail Land Trust, PO
Box 325, Yarmouth, Maine 04096.

Weary