Kennebec Land Trust to dedicate three new conservation areas

The new lots, which will be open to the public, add more than 160 acres to KLT's extensive portfolio of permanently conserved land.

For the first time in three years, June Roullard returned to her wooded 56-acre property in Vienna.

Plant life had resurged, she said. The long, bumpy driveway was no longer fit for driving on, and her well-manicured flower garden had been replaced by wild growth.

It felt calm again. It felt fresh. Like when she and her partner, Joe Baltar, built a timber-framed home there in the late 1980s.

That house burned down in the winter of 2019. Fire crews struggled to make it up the icy driveway — a thought Roullard said never crossed her younger mind.

Baltar lost all the footage for a video project he was working on. Roullard was brought to a standstill. Devastated, the pair moved to Industry.

But coming back to the property years later with staff from the Kennebec Land Trust, Roullard said, was refreshing.

“I looked at it with those fresh eyes again,” she said. “And, I thought, ‘Yeah, this is perfect for it to go on.’”

Roullard and Baltar donated the 56-acre lot, now named the Eaton Mountain Conservation Area, to the Kennebec Land Trust in March. An official dedication of Roullard’s 74 Kimball Pond Road property and optional guided hike will kick off the Land Trust’s annual celebration Monday.

Members of the public are welcome; the Kennebec Land Trust’s 8,191 acres are preserved not just for wildlife habitat but for public access.

Two other properties will also be a part of the two-day celebration:

a 56-acre lot along Parker Pond in Mount Vernon

a 56-acre conservation easement in South Gardiner

Another soon-to-be donated property, an 86-acre farm on Sturtevant Hill Road in Readfield, will host an event at 4 p.m. Tuesday with optional hikes led by the owners, lawn games, and complimentary beverages.

Dorothy Washburne, who worked with the Land Trust to permanently conserve the South Gardiner property, named the area after her parents, Joseph and Dorothy Donohoe, who lived there for decades. Washburne is among a growing list of people donating family land for permanent conservation, Land Trust Executive Director Theresa Kerchner said.

Washburne said she wanted to prevent any future development on the wetlands and forests on the lot, which connects to another 12-acre parcel she donated in 2016.

“I think we’re black-topping the world,” Washburne said. “The other living creatures on this planet should have a place to live in addition to human beings. It’s not a lot, it’s just a few acres, but I’m certain there are some deer and fox and raccoons and beavers who call this their home, and I want it to stay that way.”

Jean-Luc Theriault, the Land Trust’s stewardship director, said connecting large tracts of conserved land — like Washburne’s two donations in South Gardiner and Roullard’s Vienna property, which connects to a large, undeveloped forest — can build up central Maine’s resilience to climate change.

“The more habitat we have set aside, the more resilient we’ll be in the future,” Theriault said. “Especially as a lot of species move north with climate change, these will become habitat for new species, as well as providing connections between different habitat types.”

Theriault said the third land donation to be honored in the Land Trust’s annual celebration, the Parker Pond Conservation Area in Mount Vernon, is a good example of the habitat connectivity the trust aims to conserve.

Donated by Fritz and Susan Onion in March, the area will permanently protect almost 1,500 feet of shoreline and more than 50 acres of hardwood forest.

The Onions spent summer after summer with their children at their camp on Parker Pond, watching loons and eagles and listening to their neighbor’s stories about bobcats on game cameras. They noticed recently that the 56-acre waterfront parcel had been put up for sale, and that donating it to the Land Trust would allow public access to the pond and other public lands nearby, like the Parker Pond Headland, another Land Trust preserve.

“It’s a nice corridor connecting KLT properties that already exist,” Susan Onion said. “We’re really interested in access for community members who don’t necessarily have property along the pond. We’re very lucky to have a camp, but not everyone does.”

A public trail and a hand-carry boat launch are in the works for the Parker Pond property in the next several years, and hunting will be allowed. Hunting will also be allowed in the Eaton Mountain Conservation Area, but not on the South Gardiner land.

The land dedication at the Eaton Mountain Conservation Area is scheduled to begin at 4 p.m. Monday, kicking off the two-day annual celebration.

It’ll be a bittersweet occasion, Roullard said. Six years after the fire that took everything, she’s proud her land will be preserved for generations to come, but sad her partner of 44 years won’t be there to enjoy it with her. Baltar died in June.

“He’s not able to be at the dedication, but he’ll be there in spirit,” she said.

Manchester family donates almost 100 acres to Kennebec Land Trust

Matt Sinclair and his grandfather, Robert Hopkins, are hoping their gift of land in Manchester will give future generations an opportunity to be in nature.

MANCHESTER — Matt Sinclair explored the 100-acre woods behind his house almost daily as a kid. It was an entire world. He discovered mushrooms and centuries-old stone walls and foundations of long-forgotten homesteads and even moose on long treks to Jamies Pond and back.

“That property is a huge portion of my identity,” Sinclair said. “I built forts. I fished. I ran through the woods. Everything — my whole life has been tied up in that piece of property and exploring and just observing the beauty that is Mother Nature on a daily basis.”

Sinclair was the fifth generation of his family to explore the land. Before him, it was his grandfather, Robert Hopkins — and before Hopkins, it was his father and his father. But Sinclair and Hopkins, 93, weren’t quite satisfied with the two centuries of family history on the land. They wanted to preserve it — permanently.

Hopkins and Sinclair, over a cup of coffee, decided they would donate the land to the Kennebec Land Trust, a nonprofit that manages about 8,000 acres of permanently conserved land across Kennebec County and small portions of neighboring Androscoggin and Franklin counties.

That donation was finalized last month, with the land officially named the Hopkins-Sinclair Conservation Area. The Kennebec Land Trust will preserve the land for public access and wildlife in perpetuity.

Land trust Executive Director Theresa Kerchner said Sinclair and Hopkins reached out to the organization in July to begin the donation. She said she was inspired to learn about the family’s generational connection to the land and that they were so intent on preserving it — and not just for themselves.

Kerchner and her team recognized the newly donated land would connect directly to the 1,140-acre state-owned Jamies Pond Wildlife Management Area in Manchester, Farmingdale and Hallowell, as well as to the 68-acre Wagner Woods Conservation Area and Manchester’s own 228-acre conservation lands. The donation created a 1,500 contiguous acres preserved for permanent wildlife conservation.

Kerchner said the network also connects to 900 acres of rural, undeveloped land, which the land trust had already identified with state maps as being prime wildlife habitat.

This donation of land highlights evolving thinking about habitat preservation.

“It’s a great deal of undeveloped land that species like black bear, moose, all those wildlife species that have large home ranges, they need those large habitat blocks,” Kerchner said. “And we use those maps as we plan our conservation work. We work closely with state biologists to understand what their goals are and how they intersect with our board of directors’ goals here at the land trust.”

Sydne Record, an associate professor of landscape conservation at the University of Maine, has studied the impact of preserving large plots like the Hopkins-Sinclair land. Ecologists like her have begun reconsidering theories of conservation over the past decade, shifting their focus from preserving individual species to preserving high-quality, geologically diverse and well-connected land to serve as enduring habitats for hundreds of species.

“Our previous conservation efforts really focused on the actors — the organisms moving around on the stage,” Record said. “But what this movement that The Nature Conservancy and many conservation biologists have started to consider is that maybe we should actually be focusing on the stage.”

The idea behind focusing on habitat conservation, Record said, is that these key areas can house several rounds of organisms as Maine’s climate rapidly warms and species’ home ranges shift northward.

Ideally, she said, these preserved habitats would have a high level of land type variation — wetlands and woods and hills, for instance, all on the one stretch of preserved land — so that they can serve as habitats for as many species as possible.

That shift in focus has become increasingly important as smaller-scale habitats are affected by climate change.

By 2085, the climate in central Maine “could resemble current conditions in New Jersey, hundreds of miles south,” the Maine Climate Council said in a November report. The council recommended Maine convene stakeholders by the end of 2025 to develop a cohesive landscape conservation blueprint for key habitats across the state, at the risk of losing those habitats forever.

Record said she hopes her research team will be able to work more closely with landowners, state stakeholders and land trust groups like the Kennebec Land Trust with a new grant from the Northeastern States Research Cooperative. Cooperation can be difficult, Record said, but it could be crucial in making sure the right land is conserved.

“It’s a challenging thing where you have private landowners and public land, and trying to kind of fit together the jigsaw puzzle so that those ecological corridors can remain intact, but people can still be using the landscape for the resources that they need to be using,” she said.

The brand-new Hopkins-Sinclair Conservation Area already fit into one of those ecological corridors. But now, that corridor will be permanently preserved — even as the climate changes around the wildlife that lives there and as those species leave for greener, cooler pastures.

Sinclair said he often allowed other people to use the land whenever they asked, and it was a priority to make sure the land continues to be open for public hunting and bushwhacking. No official trails are planned for the property, but the public is free to explore.

“It was always like, ‘Yeah, we’re just stewards. We’re all passing through. There’s no permanency,'” Sinclair said. “So to think that we wouldn’t allow someone else to use it is kind of laughable to both of us. As long as you’re being kind, we encourage the use of the property.”

Source: Kennebec Journal

https://www.centralmaine.com/2025/03/08/my-whole-life-has-been-tied-up-in-that-piece-of-property/