By Joe Rankin Forests for Maine’s Future Writer Autumn, or at least the fall foliage part of autumn, is rapidly disappearing in the rear view mirror. One day is golden — and red and maroon and orange — and then a fall nor’easter blasts through, stripping the color from the trees. Fall in New…
Travel the rural roads in this part of the country and you’ll see them along roadsides and driveways and in yards. Green in summer, a painter’s palette of orange, yellow, and red for a few glorious weeks in the fall. These giant sugar maples are New England’s signature trees, now that most of the old…
The Moosehead Lake area has been a destination for a long time. Native Americans came hundreds of miles to collect the rare igneous rock of Mt. Kineo, prized for arrow and spear points. Later, wealthy city slickers came for the scenery and the hunting and fishing, staying in grand hotels and rustic hunting camps. Lumbermen…
They produce gun stocks, flooring, cedar shingles, log homes, wooden playsets. They make cigar tips, wooden pack baskets, doors and staircases. Cutting boards and chairs, cabinets and baseball bats, grilling planks canoe paddles. Colorful wooden eggs made by Wells Wood Turning in Buckfield have been featured at the White House Easter Egg roll since 2006,…
Tom Shafer’s business is mining trees. It’s not really harvesting; maybe re-harvesting. “Recovering a forgotten forest” is his company motto. He likes to think of it as mining. And Shafer’s not just selling lumber to panel offices, restaurants and your home den or man cave. He’s selling history. He’s selling green. Shafer, a former stock…
Erik Carlson remembers exactly where he was when he got the idea of getting into the wood pellet manufacturing business. It was September of 2015 and he was emptying a bag of pellets into the stove at his home. He looked at the bag and noticed that the pellets were made in — Canada. Canada?…
New mills, investments and products help offset losses in some sectors By JOE RANKIN Forests for Maine’s Future Writer When Verso Paper Co. executives announced in October that the Bucksport paper mill would be closing Dec. 1, it sparked a familiar round: how to cope with the loss of tax revenue and the loss of…
By Joe Rankin Forests for Maine’s Future writer With not quite 14,000 acres, the University Forests aren’t in the big leagues of Maine forestland owners. No Irving Woodlands or Plum Creek Timber Co, certainly. But with dozens of parcels scattered the length and breadth of Maine, it’s not exactly small time either. Some of the…
By Joe Rankin Forests for Maine’s Future writer Stand on almost any hill in Maine, any mountaintop, and you’ll see forest, a blanket of trees. There are rivers, yes. Roads, villages, signs of civilization. But overall it seems to be a world of trees. It is forest that created the Maine mystique. And forest…
By Joe Rankin Forests for Maine’s Future writer Over the centuries the only way to make money if you owned a woodland was cut down the trees so they could be sold and turned into framing timbers, barrel staves, chariots, ship masts, charcoal, furniture, plywood or any of a gazillion and one other things. Now…
