PARIS — The Western Foothills Land Trust has been given a conservation easement for 27 acres of recreational land owned by the Paris Hill Country Club.

The land, which has been operated as a nine-hole golf course since 1913, will be open to the public from Dec. 1 through March for nonmotorized recreational purposes. The golf course will be open in the warm months as usual.

“What they did is donate the subdivision and development rights for 27 acres in perpetuity,” Western Foothills Land Trust Coordinator Lee Dassler explained.

“This will have a direct public recreational benefit,” Dassler said of the property that is next to the 150 acres in the Cornwall Nature Preserve on Paris Hill and  35 acres under conservation easement adjacent to the preserve.

“We were very interested in protecting the general historic landscape around Paris Hill,” she said of one of the reasons the land trust felt the acquisition was so important.

The land trust was founded in 1987 by residents committed to land and natural resource protection in the Oxford Hills area and Western Maine.

Dassler said the donation turned out to be a fairly simple process because of the work done by the country club members.

“We’d been working on it for about a year when all of a sudden Bob Moorehead (former president of the Paris Hill Country Club Board of Trustees) came up with an easement that David Dow (local attorney who worked pro bono) had crafted,” Dassler said. “It’s usually the other way around. It was a smooth and easy process.”

Moorehead said the move is not only important to the approximate 110 members who own the property but to the community in general because it puts the land in recreational use forever and it reinforces property values in the area.

Moorehead said the land under conservation easement has not been appraised, so he does not know the value of it if it were on the tax rolls.

“That’s the reason we initiated it,” he said of the move that was approved by members at their annual meeting last year. Unlike the Norway Country Club,  which is owned by stockholders, Paris Hill Country Club is owned by members. Anyone can become a dues-paying member, he said.

Moorehead said nine-hole golf courses across the state are having financial troubles, and some have put their courses in conservation easements for that purpose.

“Once people get to understand what these conservation easements are like they become more and more attractive. This is very important to Paris,” he said.

In addition to conserving the land, the Paris Hill Country Club conservation easement does allow the country club members to build on current structure sites with the same mass and size buildings if needed in the future.

The Paris Hill Country Club was started in 1899. In 1913, members purchased the farm owned by Ella Clark that included a house, constructed in 1816, which is now used as the clubhouse.

ldixon@sunjournal.com

Copy the Story Link