Roxanne Quimby’s township in the Maine woods, T5 R8 WELS, is 24,000 acres of rivers, ponds and woods, all tucked up against the border of Baxter State Park. The mountains in the background are part of the Traveler Range in Baxter.

Moosehead Manufacturing is at the edge of the sea of woodlands, extending to Baxter State Park, that has become known as the Hundred Mile Wilderness. All of the furniture company’s wood comes from local forests.

“To me development is the key threat. Not wood harvesting. To those of us who live and work up here, multiple-use is what we want to promote.”
—John Wentworth

Three are rugged-looking guys, a father and two sons, looking at a pair of small houses they’ve just agreed to haul away for free. They plan to sell the appliances, and use some windows and other building supplies to add on to their family trailer. It can be tough to eke out a living in this perpetually depressed corner of the Maine woods, squeezed between the remnant textile mills to the south and the struggling paper mills to the east and west.

Another person on the scene is an unassuming looking, fiftyish woman with dark hair, leaning up against a pale green Honda Civic hybrid. She’s the owner of the two houses to be dismantled, Roxanne Quimby.

Twenty years ago she was living in a cabin in the woods nearby—where she hauled her water, split her wood and generally lived pretty darn close to the land. Now she’s a millionaire many times over. You know the company Burt’s Bees? That’s hers. The natural personal-care products bearing the grizzled visage of the beekeeper who lived near Quimby’s cabin now bring in $90 million annually. Last year she sold 80 percent of the company for upwards of $150 million. She’s still CEO.

Quimby is also the most visible proponent of Maine Woods National Park. The proposed Maine Woods National Park, that is, over three million acres of undeveloped woods and waters in the woods to the north and east of here. In recent years Quimby has been buying up timberlands that might someday be keystones to the park. And every park needs a visitor’s center, right? So Quimby is having these buildings removed from the several adjoining lots she’s purchased in Monson, and she plans to eventually build a visitor’s center.

Monson is a quiet town, population 660, very near the dead center of Maine. The three downtown blocks feature a post office, a general store, an art gallery and a barbecue joint. The town is most notable for its setting—it sits on the shores of a fine lake, and is surrounded on all sides by woods and mountains.

Few are unimpressed by such vast woodlands. But while some see them as vast tracts of wildlands, others see them as the foundation of the wood products industry. The debate is fairly polarized throughout Maine. But few places offer two strongly competing visions in such proximity.

On one hand there’s Quimby, her planned visitor’s center and the national park. On the other, there’s John Wentworth, president of Moosehead Manufacturing, a furniture company that employs 200 here and in nearby Dover-Foxcroft.

Both Quimby and Wentworth are in their fifties. Both are shrewd businesspeople responsible for hundreds of employees. Both work alongside their siblings. Both can speak at length about Maine’s onerous tax structure. Both want to see the woods remain undeveloped. And both want to see Monson become a more vibrant community. The similarities end right about there. Quimby wants the national park, wants to see Monson become a gateway town for same. Wentworth wants to keep the wood products industry alive, and is no fan of the park proposal.

Roxanne Quimby
Let’s start with Quimby. Her business with the building dismantlers done, we drive out to Fairstead Farm, the house she’s recently purchased just outside town. This farm is like a grown-up homesteader’s place, with, she points out, “oil heat and running water.” Her primary residence is in Winter Harbor, on the Maine coast, and she also spends much of her time in North Carolina, where Burt’s Bees is based. She’s easygoing, and it’s easier to see her as the back-to-the-lander she was than as the hard-driving CEO she is today (she was in seven cities the week before we met).

Over the last five years Quimby has been buying up choice parcels of the Maine woods—nearly 50,000 acres, all within the proposed park—in a quest to promote her vision for the park. Quimby’s holdings now equal the size of Acadia National Park. She’d like to hand over her lands to the National Park Service, if they’d have it. But they won’t even consider it.

The park proposal has not yet mustered sufficient support among Maine’s congressional delegation to generate the feasibility study that’s the first step toward making the park a reality. And the group that proposed the park, RESTORE: The North Woods, is not too popular in northern Maine. A bumper sticker often seen on pickup trucks up here reads, “Restore Boston, leave our Maine way of life alone,” a reference to RESTORE’s headquarters in Massachusetts.

While media interest in the park has waxed and waned over the decade since it’s been proposed, Quimby’s involvement has ensured a few front-page stories in recent years. Last fall there was a little firestorm when Quimby purchased an entire township adjacent to the northeast border of Baxter State Park, paying $10 million for 24,000 acres. It’s a sweet spot, with the East Branch of the Penobscot running through it. It was a major concern for conservationists when Irving, the New Brunswick corporation that is Maine’s largest landowner, put the land up for sale. Would some forest liquidators buy, cut, subdivide and sell the land? No, it went to Quimby. But instead of cheering, many northern Maine residents jeered. The level of vitriol caught Quimby by surprise.

“I didn’t realize it was going to have quite that fallout after that. It didn’t occur to me that it was any different from anything else I had been doing,” says Quimby. “I don’t know if that was because it was next to Baxter, or if it was a larger piece, as opposed to some of the smaller pieces I’ve bought.”

In fact, in the months since she closed on that property, she bought another piece in the same area: spending $4 million dollars to buy 10,000 acres at the confluence of the East Branch of the Penobscot River and the Seboeis River. This deal went down in relative obscurity. “No one said boo about that,” says Quimby. This new “Three Rivers” parcel is not only a nice chunk of land, it also abuts Maine’s 3,500 acres of public reserved land along Wassatoquoik Stream. Taken together, the two create over 13,000 acres along the three rivers. This is part of her overall land conservation strategy.

“Almost every conservation acquisition I’ve made has been next to other conservation land,” says Quimby. “And that’s one of the ways that I leverage the impact of the conservation project. Because that creates extended contiguous habitat, which is kind of the point. A bunch of little islands here and there are not as valuable, I don’t think, as butting up to Audubon or butting up to The Nature Conservancy.”

Few would deny the conservation value of Quimby’s acquisitions. The criticism tends to be from those who don’t want more restrictions on their traditional use of the woodlands, and those who worry that a park would harm the already ailing timber industry. People who lease camp lots on some of the land Quimby purchased are seeing the cost go up. The lands will be posted against hunting, and snowmobiling phased out. Says Quimby, “I don’t see how snowmobiling is traditional use.” They will remain open for non-motorized public access: activities like hiking, canoeing and cross-country skiing.

A Park Ambassador
Despite some negative reactions to her land deals, Quimby cites the universal disdain for liquidation harvesting as an example of how the debate over the woods is less polarized than it was a few years ago.

“Now I believe we’re finding more people in the middle who are saying ‘Yes, perhaps we need this forest products industry to support the economy in northern Maine, but at what price?’ And perhaps asking more probing questions about the long-term effects of this industrial forest and how it’s being harvested,” says Quimby. “Those questions are coming up in polite society, and they should.”

Much of the land Quimby owns, including her first purchases, is in the area known as the Hundred Mile Wilderness, the woods and mountains just northeast of Monson, including the northernmost section of the Appalachian Trail. The region takes its name from this notoriously remote last stretch of trail. Quimby’s son and daughter have hiked the entire Appalachian Trail, separately, so she knows Monson’s legendary status as a “trail town.”

When the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) bought 37,000 acres in the Hundred Mile Wilderness last fall, the deal was greeted with universal acclaim, partly because most of the land will remain in timber management. Some of the most vocal opponents of Maine Woods National Park applauded the AMC deal. “I’m glad they are not fighting the AMC up here with the vehemence and the nastiness I’ve seen,” says Quimby. “Because potentially, the AMC could add a lot of value to the region.”

She is a bit frustrated by the Balkanization of conservation in the Hundred Mile Wilderness. In that region alone, conservation owners include Maine Audubon, the Nature Conservancy, AMC, the State of Maine and Quimby. While none of the others publicly support a park, Quimby feels there is a certain inevitability to all these groups eventually coming together under the same conservation umbrella, just as it was inevitable that the European Union would be formed.

Quimby thinks part of the backlash against the park results from a negative perception of RESTORE. She recently left the board of RESTORE, and is now active with a group called Americans for a Maine Woods National Park. The group is actively working to get more people outside northern Maine interested in the park proposal.

“We have attempted to take the question out of Maine, certainly out of northern Maine, where there is an enormous backlash but very few people,” says Quimby. “This is a national park, it should be on the national agenda. ... So our strategy is to take it out of Piscataquis and Penobscot counties where it will simply bubble away and nothing will ever happen.”

In her travels, Quimby has become something of a Maine Woods National Park ambassador. The previous weekend she had spoken at a Florida conference organized by Inc. Magazine to showcase some of the fastest growing businesses in the country. There she met A.E. “Hotch” Hotchner, Paul Newman’s partner in Newman’s Own. Of course, she told him about the park. The next day she was in Washington D.C., having lunch with Gil Grosvenor, chairman of the National Geographic Society. To talk about the park.

“Once you get out of the state, there’s very little resistance,” says Quimby. “Between Shenandoah and Acadia, there are no national parks. ... We have such enormous pressures for open space. Everyone in Newark knows it, everyone in New York, and Philadelphia and Providence, they know there’s not enough green space to feel like you are having a wilderness experience.”

And of all the possible strategies for preserving that wilderness, Quimby feels passionately that a national park is the best. “National parks are owned by every American, every single American,” says Quimby.” The recent immigrant from Mexico can go there in a station wagon with six kids for ten bucks, and that’s what I love about it, as well as the wealthiest guy in Camden, he still has to pay his ten bucks to get in. It’s just such an equalizer and it’s so symbolic of this country at it’s best.”

Monson in Transition
A park may or may not be coming, but Monson is changing, and Quimby is a big part of the change. What will Monson look like in a few years? Quimby expects lots of art types, building on the town’s heritage as the home, over the last century, to a surprising number of painters and photographers.

“I think it could be a fascinating art and outdoor recreation town.” Quimby says Monson could be like Asheville, North Carolina, near Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a fine town that attracts a lot of young people. “It has an incredible counterculture there, there are museums, great restaurants,” says Quimby. “It’s in the middle of nowhere, it’s in the mountains, the same mountains, in fact, that run through Monson.”

In fact, it was the similar remoteness of northern Maine that was one of the factors that led Quimby to make the move many in the region have not forgiven her for. A decade ago, she moved the fledgling Burt’s Bees from Guilford, just south of Monson, to North Carolina. In Maine, transportation costs were high, it was hard to retain a skilled workforce and taxes were “debilitating.” She offered some of the then-40 employees the opportunity to relocate, and helped set up the rest with a small business in the building she’d occupied, which she gave them.

Still, she feels strongly that she did the right thing, and has been vindicated by her success. “The single most important decision I ever made for the company was to get it out of Guilford,” says Quimby. And Quimby has little patience with those critics who say that after moving her business from northern Maine she has no business coming back and offering economic advice. “I have invested $20-million dollars in land that I hope will become public land for the state,” says Quimby. “If people want to criticize, well go right ahead and criticize, but what are you doing, buddy.”

The same remoteness that made Guilford a difficult place for Quimby and others to do business also makes northern Maine unique, as such remote, undeveloped lands are increasingly rare in the eastern U.S. And yet, says Quimby, the state does not value Maine’s undeveloped land. “We have these resources in Maine that we are not placing a high value on. We are selling it short. ... As a business person, that’s just stupid. To sell yourself down the river for nothing when, with a little bit more strategic thinking about the resources that we have here, they could command a much higher value. That’s what it’s about and yet we don’t seem to have the will to make a few investments in that higher valuation. We’re taking short money all the time. And now it’s gotten to the point where even that has dried up. Now perhaps we have the humility and the wisdom to look at other opportunities.”

But is there a place for a national park and working woodlands as well, for businesses such as Wentworth’s Moosehead Manufacturing?

“I think so, particularly in his business, where he is adding so much value to each tree,” says Quimby. “That seems to be the highest and best use of a tree—to make a beautiful piece of furniture, rather than just cut it down, chip it up and put it in the mill. I have no objection to what they’re doing, and they’ve been doing it for so long, and they’re not wasting much. I’m sure they are very, very careful with the resources they use.”

John Wentworth
A week later I’m visiting Moosehead Manufacturing, a jumble of buildings tucked into the woods just outside of Monson. The buildings come right to the edge of the quarries that provided the Monson Slate for which the town was once well known. And the woods extend in an uninterrupted swath to the northeast, past Borestone and Barren mountains, all the way to Baxter State Park and beyond.

John Wentworth is showing me around today. Wentworth, 53 years old, was born and raised in Monson. He’s the president of Moosehead Manufacturing, a company founded by his grandfather and his grandfather’s brother. “The great Maine furniture makers,” their slogan reads.

It’s a deceptively simple-looking business. Sawlogs—maple, ash and yellow birch—come in and furniture goes out. It’s the sort of value-added wood products company that virtually everyone seems to like. The thing is, nearly all those sawlogs—about one truckload annually for each of Moosehead’s 200 employees—come from the woods in a 100-mile radius of the plant. Given that the land to the south is mostly farmland and old farm fields now overgrown with young trees and shrubs, most of the woods are to the north and east, smack dab in the middle of the proposed park.

Have I mentioned this yet? Wentworth is not a big park proponent. He likes to get out in the woods and fish, but he also likes the “multiple use” system that’s evolved here over time. Essentially, this means the woods are owned by paper companies, which log them as they see fit, and typically allow public access for traditional uses such as hunting and fishing.

“It’s always been multiple use,” says Wentworth, “and that’s the strength of it.”

Further, Wentworth has a hard time imagining the park-related economy that might emerge to replace the existing one. “If you wanted the Hundred Mile Wilderness to pay its way, you’d have a steady stream of hikers and a trail four-feet wide. The wilderness experience wouldn’t be there,” says Wentworth. “It’s kind of a false economy in my opinion.”

Even if the economy could take off while preserving the wilderness values, Wentworth points out that rafting guides, and others bound to be employed by the park economy, will not get what his employees do: a company match for their 401(k) pension plans, paid holidays and a health care plan. “You don’t get that in the restaurants,” says Wentworth, “selling hamburgers to the tourist trade.”

Wentworth agrees emphatically with Quimby on one point. “We’re all concerned about development,” he says. Once woodland is sold off piecemeal for house lots, you lose everything: public access, working woodlands and conservation values. “To me development is the key threat. Not wood harvesting. To those of us who live and work up here, multiple-use is what we want to promote.”

Wentworth thinks some people simply don’t like the idea of logging, period. “Some people have three or four houses,” says Wentworth, “where do they think the wood comes from?”

Lumber, Paper and Wood Chips
As we’re heading down the hill from the furniture assembly plant to the sawmill, we hear a truck and step aside. A local farmer is tooling down toward the mill with a load of yellow birch and maple in the flat bed of his dual rear-axle truck. He jokes around with Wentworth a bit, then gets the wood scaled. It’s around 2,500 board feet. At approximately $800 per thousand board feet, the truck load will fetch $2,000 for the farmer.

Back in the mill, it’s hard to hear over the shriek of the debarker and the whine of the saws. When a maple sawlog gets stuck, the debarker operator jumps down and repositions the log with a peavey. Wentworth proudly notes that the peavey, a tool named after an old Maine lumberman, is made in East Eddington, Maine.

A large maple log, clear and probably 20 inches in diameter, is being sliced in the mill. “It’s very unusual to see a log that big that clear,” says Wentworth. “It’s a shame to have a tree like that fall down and rot.”

It’s not a simple business cutting wood in Maine. Unlike the hardwood forests of the mid-Atlantic, where most of the harvesting is for high value veneer and sawlogs, most of the trees felled in Maine make pulp and, eventually, paper. Now that the paper industry has fallen on hard times, some of these other wood-dependent companies like Moosehead are nervous.

“Without the paper companies, the rest of the logging industry is going have a hard time,” says Wentworth. Here’s why: When a logger is harvesting he’ll typically sort the cut into different types of wood. Hardwood gets broken down into four grades: veneer, sawlogs, pallet and pulp. But pull the pulp wood out of the mix, and few people will be in the woods at all, says Wentworth. “Nobody’s going to cut just hardwood.” As another example of the interdependencies, Moosehead sends a truckload of wood chips to Georgia Pacific or International Paper pulp mills every week.

All of the trees that end up at Moosehead are put to good use, every square inch of wood fiber. There are even a pair of women working at a joiner, cutting down the rounded-off edges of the logs to create usable pieces as small as three inches by two feet. Even shorter pieces are glued up as feet for furniture. They heat the facilities with wood chips. Kiln dry their wood with wood chips. Steam bend the chair backs with wood heat. “If we had to heat with oil,” says Wentworth, “we wouldn’t be here.”

Squeezed from Overseas
Even squeezing all the use out of every stick of wood, Moosehead is being squeezed a bit by competition, and the plant’s employment is down from a peak of 250 four years ago. Overseas competition especially bothers Wentworth. If American workers want health care and holidays, he says, we need to “level the playing field.” In China, says Wentworth, workers get no such perks. And the manufacturing facilities in China don’t have to comply with the environmental regulations that Moosehead has to comply with. “We’re exporting all of our pollution to China,” he says.

Still, Wentworth is not going to bank on the company’s Made-in-the-U.S.A., Made-in-Maine identity. “You can’t bet your business on it,” says Wentworth. “People are going to vote with their dollars, so give them a good value.”

And despite the fact that most of Moosehead’s wood, 90 percent or so, comes from land that is “green” certified under either the FSC or SCI programs, Wentworth is not eager to market his company as environmentally friendly. “If someone wants to buy a set of bedroom furniture, I don’t ask what their politics are.”

What will be happening in 10 years at Moosehead? “We’ll still be here,” says Wentworth. “We may be doing something different,” perhaps building more custom furniture. And what will become of Monson? Wentworth thinks Monson will continue the trend of getting spruced up. The real estate market is already improving, he says, driven in part by demand for recreational homes for snowmobilers. “There’s no doubt it will be more of a tourist economy.”

Monson may be an indicator town. Will it be an art town, with, perhaps, a health food store, a cafe, a few more galleries and a couple of adventure sports outfitters? Or will it remain the way it is, a quiet town in the woods, with pickups and logging trucks rumbling through, and a bit of Moosehead Lake-bound traffic in the summer.

For now, a couple of things appear certain. Quimby’s visitor’s center will be coming within a couple of years. And just down the road, the saws and mallets will remain in motion at Moosehead. As for the rest, we’ll have to wait and see.