Northeast
Off Maine Street: From Madawaska to Caribou, life on America’s northeastern frontier is out of the ordinary.
Had any moose stings yesterday?” Sam Collins asked me on my return from a drive through his part of far northern Maine. In most regions of the country, it’s impossible to hit a moose, whose “sting” can total a truck. Here, it happens hundreds of times a year.
Dealing with outsized wildlife, be they moose on the highway or bears in the backyard, is part of life in the Madawaska region at Maine’s northern tip, as well as in Collins’ hometown of Caribou just to the south. For the most part, what isn’t forest is often a potato farm. In fact, schools still close here for a couple of weeks in late September for the harvest.
And when you’re not dealing with the flora or fauna, there’s always the weather, for this is one of the coldest, snowiest regions in the United States, a land where the overnight low averages just 2 degrees in January and February, the winter sun sets at 3:30 p.m., and you can still find snow on the ground in May.
Conditions like that help explain why Collins has a pair of cross-country skis in his office at the S.W. Collins Co. When you live in an area that lies farther north than most of Canada’s population, you tend to make the best of what Mother Nature gives you. Snow is one such gift.
Trees are another, for this is a region born from a lust for lumber. Canada and the United States nearly went to war in the 1830s over the area’s pine and cedar forests. Maine was so eager to populate what until then was a disputed wilderness that it offered 160 acres of land for each saw and grist mill a settler would build. It was for that reason that Collins’ ancestor, Samuel W. Collins, came here in 1844 and created the company that Sam Collins leads today.
It remains a border region with plenty of examples of what unites and divides the locals. The county has as many Canadian-bred Tim Hortons coffee shops as Dunkin’ Donuts, you can watch the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. on local cable TV, and it’s an easier shopping trip to Quebec City than to Boston. At Central Building Supplies in Madawaska, just across the river from Canada and the most northeastern town in the United States, it’s common for workers to make sales in French. That’s a legacy of the Acadians who settled on both sides of the St. John River, whose yards contain statues of the Virgin Mary, and who go by names like Ouimet, Roy, Beaulieu, Levesque, and Pelletier. Sam Collins is married to a French-speaking Canadian woman from just across the border in Edmundston, New Brunswick.
On the other hand, there aren’t any high school hockey teams in this part of Maine–basketball is the big school sport. The past weakness of the Canadian dollar against its Yankee equivalent has meant that companies like S.W. Collins and Central Building Supplies couldn’t count on making sales to Canadians. Central owner James Wetmore, who can see Canada from the back of his store, describes his trading area as a half-circle extending 50 miles south into the United States but not a single mile north.
But jobs in Canada power the local economy. “We’re a mill town,” Wetmore says, referring to the Fraser paper plant with operations in Madawaska and over the bridge in Edmundston. “As the mill goes, so goes the town. ? I’ll grow as our town grows.”
Even without the border’s limits, you have to go a long way to find customers here. Aroostook County is bigger than Rhode Island and Connecticut combined, but houses just 73,000 people, a population that has barely budged in close to a decade. Wetmore says Madawaska, with a population of 4,500, saw only one stick-built house constructed in the community last year. This year, perhaps five were put up.
“We don’t have housing tracts,” Sam Collins says. “We have housing starts. It is very difficult for a builder to specialize on just building new homes. He has to be willing and able to do a variety of work. There’s not a builder up here that does just new homes.”
Given the weather and the lack of new construction, Wetmore concentrates heavily on serving remodelers and has gotten into laminate flooring and commercial carpeting–stuff homeowners can install, particularly during the winter. S.W. Collins, meanwhile, is growing south. It has had a branch in Presque Isle, 12 miles south of Caribou, since 1993 that’s run by Sam’s brother Gregg. In May, it bought the Almon H. Fogg Co. in the county seat of Houlton, 55 miles south of Caribou. All three are full-service lumberyards with a 50-50 pro/retail customer mix. Sam also opened a kitchen and bath showroom in Caribou in 2004 that generates more than $1 million a year. (See “Show and Tell,” September, page 66.)
But while this region definitely is remote, don’t assume it or its people are isolated. S.W. Collins and Central Building Supplies are closer to lumber mills than most dealers, and Sam Collins is accustomed to driving four hours to attend meetings and roundtables. After all, four previous generations of the Collins family have regularly made the 250-mile trek to Augusta to serve in the state legislature, and Sam’s sister Susan routinely travels even farther, to Washington–she’s one of Maine’s U.S. senators.
Sam also notes that the area has become a center for the biathlon, a sport that combines cross-country skiing with target shooting. “It’s exciting that in a community of 8,000 people, you can meet and train with Olympians and aspiring Olympic athletes,” he says.
It’s clear that LBM dealers don’t become tycoons here, but that’s OK with Sam. “We kind of bump along,” he says. “We don’t have the valleys and mountains. There’s power in numbers, but there’s also power in geography.”
–Craig Webb