Maine Appalachian Trail Land Trust

The Maine Appalachian Trail Land Trust (MATLT) today announced the acquisition of a one acre parcel of land along the Appalachian Trail in Bowtown Township. The land is just south of Pierce Pond and protects the Trail corridor and the shoreline of Pierce Pond Stream.

“Our mission is to acquire and protect land surrounding the Appalachian Trail in Maine for future generations,” says Thomas D. Lewis, President of the Land Trust. “We work on projects of all sizes, with a variety of types of landowners and funding sources. This project involved an individual seller and an individual donor. Other transactions are much more complicated involving multiple funding sources and a longer fundraising timeline.”

This acquisition follows MATLT’s purchase last fall of 1183 acres on the southeast slopes of Saddleback and the 1159 acre Mt. Abraham summit and ridgeline. Funding for that purchase was arranged with a loan from the Norcross Foundation and grants from the Land For Maine’s Future Program, the Maine Bureau of Parks and Land, and the Open Space Institute’s Northern Forest Protection Fund. The group has recently embarked on a $450,000 fundraising campaign to raise the money to repay the loan and other acquisition costs and to provide stewardship of the parcels.

The Maine Appalachian Trail Land Trust was formed in June 2002 by a group of Mainers dedicated to the preservation of the natural qualities of the lands surrounding the Appalachian Trail in Maine. “The potential of the AT to advance a conservation strategy by anchoring a network of protected reserves represents a huge opportunity to advance conservation planning on a statewide basis”, said Lewis.

The Appalachian Trail, which stretches more than 2,000 miles from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Katahdin in Maine was completed near Sugarloaf Mountain in Maine in 1937. It was designated a National Scenic Trail in 1968. The idea for the Trail appeared in a 1921 scholarly journal article by Benton MacKaye, forester, planner and philosopher. Much of the credit for organizing construction of the Trail by volunteers in the years following MacKaye’s article is given to Myron Avery, a lawyer from Lubec, Maine Lewis stated that the Land Trust’s efforts to protect the environment around the narrow Trail corridor is the next step in realizing the vision first articulated by MacKaye.

For further information please contact:

Carole Haas

MATLT Administrative Director

(207) 767-6303

chaas@matlt.org