WELD – A shelter used by campers for 60 years was destroyed this week by workers for L.L. Bean granddaughter Linda Bean Folkers, leaving local residents shocked and speechless Wednesday.
Foresters removed the three-walled lean-to near Little Jackson Mountain about a week after 102 residents unanimously voted at a special town meeting to deny Folkers’ request to gate town-owned Morgan Road – the access to trails leading up Little Jackson and Tumbledown mountains and the traditional camping area.
Folkers also blocked the road with several 3-foot mounds of dirt fronting 6-foot-deep ditches.
Several signs prohibiting camping, fires and motorized vehicles were also posted along the road that bisects her 2,200 acres.
“I can’t believe they did that,” Alan Beisaw of Wilton said, shaking his head at Weld’s General Store Wednesday. Beisaw has been camping in the area, known locally as Tumbledown Field, for 36 years, he said. “It’s the beginning of the end. The flatlanders are taking over,” he added after a long pause.
“It’s a shock, it really is,” Tom Bulger of Wilton said Wednesday. He remembers going to Boy Scout camporees at the lean-to in the 1950s. “I’m open-mouthed and slack-jawed,” he said, adding he’d be interested to know what Folkers is thinking.
Folkers said Wednesday she has no intention of banning hikers from her land.
“I’d like to resolve the situation with the town of Weld,” she said, not through the newspapers, she added, declining any further comment.
Steve Gettle, forester for Folkers, said at the town meeting May 17 that the property was being abused – he showed slides of trash and fire rings left behind by campers. Folkers does not want to restrict hikers but does not want ATVs, fires or camping on her land, he said.
“Hopefully, they’ll support the landowner’s rights to protect the land,” Gettle said Wednesday.
He and his crew, in addition to tearing down the lean-to, eliminated fire rings and removed garbage this week. The piles of dirt and rock they dug up will be used later to grade the road, he said.
“Whatever happens this weekend will all be fresh,” he said of any new trash that shows up over the holiday weekend. The property will be monitored by state forest rangers, he said.
Maine Forest Service Ranger Jay Bernard had not seen the “piles of sand” across Morgan Road yet Wednesday but had received a call from Gettle telling him what the crew had done.
The barricades were installed “to prevent this weekend from getting out of hand,” Bernard said.
“We’ll be enforcing (the new restrictions) in force,” patrolling it all weekend, he added.
He will issue citations for anyone using an ATV or starting a fire on the property. If he finds people camping, he said he will “let them know they’re not welcome there” and suggest they camp instead at Mount Blue State Park or Coos Canyon, a nearby private campground. If campers refuse to leave, he said, a sheriff’s deputy will remove them and issue criminal trespass summonses.
“It’s her own land, she has the right to do what she wants with it,” Jerry Nering, owner of Weld’s General Store, said Wednesday.
“I lament the loss of the shelter,” he said. But he thinks the state would manage it the same way.
“The population is changing,” he said. “It’s becoming more like a suburban community.”
Comments are no longer available on this story