More than a half-million acres, the bulk of it in Oxford and Franklin counties, has been sold by MeadWestvaco to a group of anonymous buyers.

The deal, valued at more than $125 million, encompasses 528,000 acres in Maine and 111,000 in New Hampshire, according to corporate spokeswoman Donna Owens Cox, and includes a 50-year supply of fiber to the Rumford mill.

The land will be managed by Wagner Forest Management Ltd., whose chief executive officer, Tom Colgan, declined to name the buyers.

“Our clients are confidential, always have been and will stay that way,” he said.

The news released Wednesday signaled the near-end of Mead’s history of land ownership in Maine: the company is in talks to sell its last 10,000 acres here to conversation groups.

“There is a continuing trend where the mills have decided it’s not in their best interest to continue to own large tracts of land,” said Alec Giffen, director of the Maine Forest Service.

Georgia Pacific and SAPPI Fine Paper both sold their Maine acreage in the last 10 years.

Maine is made up of 19 million mostly wooded acres.

Back in 1972, nearly half the forest land here was owned by industry and paper companies.

By 2002, that was down to 30 percent.

Colgan said his New Hampshire company manages more than 2 million acres of land, more than a million of it in Maine, mostly to the east and to the north.

“It’s too early to say exactly what we’re going to be doing (to the MeadWestvaco land,) but I think it has been managed well,” he said.

The paper company’s land here had already met industry certification standards known as the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, and will remain certified, Colgan said.

Giffen said the anonymity of the new buyers is not unique in land transactions. He’s inquired about the owners of other parcels managed by Wagner and gotten the reply that that information was confidential.

“The land that they manage that I’ve seen … which was in the Down East area, I was quite impressed with,” Giffen said. “The stuff I saw, they were doing partial cuts and leaving substantial residual stand.”

He was pleased with both the continued certification and wood supply for Rumford’s paper mill.

The sale of the land is expected to go through by the end of the year, according to MeadWestvaco. Purchase price in a release from the company was named only as more than $200 per acre.

Mead and Westvaco merged in January 2002. The company operates in 29 countries and is headquartered in Stamford, Conn. The Rumford mill is its only Maine mill.

kskelton@sunjournal.com

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