GOULDSBORO, Maine — Publicity-shy philanthropist Roxanne Quimby knew she had won her controversial campaign to create a national monument in Maine’s North Woods when the U.S. Department of the Interior finally accepted her offer of 87,563 acres.
Now that President Barack Obama has designated that area the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument, putting it under the National Park Service’s control, “I just feel this great sense of freedom that I’ve turned this responsibility over to this agency that really knows how to handle it,” Quimby said Wednesday evening.
Sipping red wine while on the deck of a guest house at her West Bay Road farm here, the 66-year-old co-founder of the Burt’s Bees cosmetics company said that when she first started buying land in northern Maine her immediate goal was just to protect it from logging and development.
“We bought our first piece of land in the year 2000, when I was still running Burt’s Bees,” Quimby said, recalling that timber companies were selling off land at relatively low prices. “Burt’s Bees actually bought our first piece of land. I considered it to be an investment. Not for a financial return, I didn’t need that. It seemed like a good investment in the future in terms of preservation, conservation, recreation,” she said.
In early August, after months of work, Quimby’s nonprofit foundation, Elliotsville Plantation Inc., found out that the proposed transfer of land to the federal government had cleared all the internal hurdles at Elliotsville Plantation and the Department of the Interior, according to Lucas St. Clair, who is Quimby’s son and the foundation’s president.
Once the National Park Service agreed to take ownership of the land from Elliotsville Plantation, Quimby prepared for a celebration. “I bought champagne” — three bottles, she said. Relatives drove to Maine to celebrate with Quimby and St. Clair.
After the deeds were transferred to the federal government on Aug. 23, official word that the donated land was becoming a national monument came the following day: St. Clair got a call that morning at his Portland office from the Obama administration. A little while later, White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett called Quimby at her summer home here.
“I was really happy. It was a great, great day,” Quimby said.
Obama, who used his power under the Antiquities Act of 1906 to create the monument, has not personally contacted Quimby to thank her for the acreage.
Three days after the monument was formally announced on Aug. 24, Quimby and her son toured the area with Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell. But Quimby has spent much of the past week relaxing and simply enjoying a sense of relief at no longer being in charge of a large swath of publicly accessible forest east of Baxter State Park.
She said that she had been comfortable with acquiring and conserving the land but not with managing it for use by the public.
A former director on the board of RESTORE: The North Woods who now sits on the board of the National Park Foundation, Quimby said the idea of conserving land for public use in northern Maine has been around since the time of Henry David Thoreau. Her interest in developing a plan to make her land open to the public for low-impact recreation evolved over time, she said.
“It seemed like everything was changing and that the future was uncertain,” Quimby said. Giving the land to the federal government “seemed to be a way of creating some certainty around this landscape that I thought was really beautiful. I wasn’t exactly sure how it would all turn out.”
Along the way, Quimby established Elliotsville Plantation to own and manage her growing land holdings in Penobscot and Piscataquis counties.
About five years ago, she also handed over her role as primary advocate for federal ownership of the land to her now 38-year-old son, who, she said, is a more persuasive advocate.
“It wouldn’t have happened without him,” Quimby said. “I’m enormously proud of him.”
She added, “I don’t have the social skill. Given my background in business, I just didn’t have the patience for it. I’m used to being the boss.”
St. Clair, who on Wednesday was at Quimby’s Gouldsboro farm with his family, called designation of the new national monument “exciting.” Now that it’s happened, he added, Elliotsville Plantation will shift its focus away from elevating the protected area to a national park and toward a new mission that includes managing the approximately 35,000 acres of woodlands it still owns, the vast majority of which is in and around Monson in Piscataquis County.
He said the foundation still would like to see the monument eventually become a national park but pushing for national park status is not something they plan to do soon.
“We don’t need to do that yet,” St. Clair said. “Let’s let the dust settle here. Let’s start working on the future of the Katahdin region.”
Higher priorities, he said, include encouraging tourism-related infrastructure in the Millinocket region. For example, signs are needed to help direct people to the monument, he said.
St. Clair and Quimby both said that growth in the region’s tourism industry should make it easier for entrepreneurs to start businesses there.
“It’s not like creating a paper mill or creating a big factory, which takes expertise and loans and pretty high investment,” Quimby said of offering tourism services. “It’s a good way of creating an economy from the ground up for people who don’t have the means to start a more elaborate, expensive business.”
Many of those people, Quimby added, are women who have never worked in the forest products industry but who might, like her, have an entrepreneurial knack for starting a small business.
St. Clair said that, 20 years from now, he expects towns near Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument will have quite a few year-round tourism businesses.
“I can imagine a brewpub in Millinocket that brews their own Katahdin Ale and there’s a bike shop on Main Street and there are some more guide services and the hotels have begun to adapt to the new type of visitors that are coming there,” St. Clair said. “The largest vacationing American group are baby boomers that aren’t as willing necessarily to sleep on the ground. They’re willing to get out and explore, but at the end of the day they might want a warm shower and a nice room to stay in and a good meal.”
Just the news about the creation of the national monument, he said, has already boosted tourism in the Millinocket region.
“I’m pretty confident that as people start to figure out what’s up there, it’s going to bring more and more people” and will benefit more and more Mainers, St. Clair said.
