DOWN EAST magazine • November 2024
The Coburns were among the state’s first timber barons amassing fortunes by logging huge swaths of Maine’s north woods. And, in a roundabout way, the Coburns also sowed the seeds of the woods’ eventual conservation. Among their holdings was virtually all of Attean Township. Fast-forward nearly a century, when the Coburn heirs were looking to liquidate their Attean lands but worried about seeing a gated subdivision spring up. What if some 18,000 acres could be placed under a conservation easement? In 1984, the Forest Society of Maine was incorporated to hold this giant new easement. Today, as the organization marks its 40th anniversary, it’s one of the nation’s largest land trusts, having conserved more than a million acres of Maine woodlands using the same forestry-friendly legal tool pioneered with the Attean parcel. To hear president and CEO Karin Tilberg tell it, FSM arrived on the scene in the nick of time, as the twilight of the gargantuan paper companies was beginning to fragment ownership — and stewardship — of the Maine woods.