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Crazy Idea Saved a Piece of Paradise Along the Saco

April 07, 2009 - HOLLIS -- John Mattor's wife thought he'd gone off the deep end.

It was the winter of 2007 and word was spreading like wildfire throughout their Hollis neighborhood that a land developer planned to carve the nearby Indian Cellar, a pristine stretch of Saco River shoreline, into a dozen high-priced house lots.

And Mattor, the newest member of the two-person Hollis Conservation Commission, found himself wondering aloud about buying the 58-acre tract from the developer and leaving it untouched forever.

"My wife said I was insane," recalled Mattor. "She said we could never do this."

Well, chalk one up for the dreamers. Last week, two years after Maine Woodland Properties first submitted its Indian Cellar subdevelopment plans to the Hollis Planning Board, the Falmouth development firm sold the not-so-little piece of paradise to the town for $830,000.

And here's the truly amazing part: Everyone walked away happy.

"We're all pleased it came together the way it did," said Jim Boyle, project manager for Maine Woodland Properties. "We didn't make as much as we would have with a subdivision, but we didn't lose money, either."

People on both the Hollis and Buxton sides of the river had good reason to worry when news of Maine Woodland Properties' plans first surfaced in early 2007. As anyone (myself included) who has visited the placid stretch of river just downstream from the Salmon Falls Bridge will tell you, it's an oasis of peace and quiet amid two towns that have had growth written all over them for the past decade.

On the Buxton side is 65-acre Pleasant Point Park, complete with rope swings, a small beach and plenty of room for summer visitors looking for an alternative to, say, Old Orchard Beach.

On the Hollis side is the Indian Cellar property, so named because native Americans once stored their food in stone caves along what was a deep gorge before it was flooded by the Skelton Dam in 1948.

Mattor and 50 or so other concerned citizens were understandably upset when they heard the news that Maine Woodland Properties had bought the Indian Cellar property from a local family for $400,000 and was hard at work dividing it into 12 house lots. But Mattor and the others had no real plan for doing something about it when they first gathered at the Salmon Falls Library back in February of 2007.

But they did one thing right – inviting The Trust for Public Land, a national nonprofit conservation group with an office in Portland, to help them with their quixotic quest.

"It begins always with listening," said Wolfe Tone, a project manager for The Trust for Public Land, recalling his first sit-down with the group. "Why is the property important? What are you ready to go and do? And are you ready to roll up your sleeves? Because this is a lot of hard work."

We're in, the group told Tone. What's more, they pledged $50,000 of their own money to help get the ball rolling.

But it was at the end of that first meeting when something truly dramatic happened. Rodney Littlefield, who owned land adjacent to Indian Cellar and was no fan of the proposed housing development, stood up and told the group that if they could pull this thing off in 18 months, he'd donate his 23-acre parcel to the preserve in memory of his parents.

"It was pin-drop silent," Tone recalled. "You could see the whole group galvanize at that moment."

Members of the newly formed Committee to Preserve the Saco River Indian Cellar never looked back.

They resolved to raise $300,000 in private donations for the purchase – and did it.

They asked the Lands for Maine's Future program for $375,000 – and got it.

Finally, they went to the town of Hollis seeking $250,000 – a hefty chunk of money for local taxpayers in any small town. Yet when the request went to the voters in November of 2007, a whopping 71 percent said yes.

The sale closed last Tuesday: Maine Woodland Properties deeded the property over to The Trust for Public Land, which then handed it back to the town.

Mattor, who's seen the Hollis Conservation Commission grow from two to seven people since the Indian Cellar effort began, said there's still work to be done.

Buoyed by a $150,000 donation from Poland Spring ($100,000 of which is being funneled into an endowment for the preserve), Mattor and other volunteers will soon start blazing a loop trail around the parcel to make it more accessible.

But that's the fun stuff. What makes this deal worth noting – and celebrating – is that a treasured piece of Hollis' past will now be part of its future.

And unlike most battles over Maine's most desirable places, it all happened without a single protest, court fight or harsh word.

"This," noted Mattor, "was a phenomenal event."

BILL NEMITZ, Portland Press Herald, April 7, 2009


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Regions: Sebago


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