In the wilderness of northern Maine, a long tradition of allowing public access, even on privately owned lands, has shaped the region’s culture and identity since the 1800s.
So when “No Trespassing” signs showed up around Burnt Jacket Mountain, at the edge of Moosehead Lake, this summer, it did not go unnoticed. Neither did the new surveillance cameras and locked gates in the woods, nor the crews cutting a new road up the mountain who deflected questions from neighbors by citing nondisclosure agreements.
In the tiny town of Beaver Cove, which has about 100 year-round residents, and in the wider Moosehead region, the anonymous incursion stoked unease, and a fixation: Who was the mountain’s new owner?
The project, and the discomfort it has spawned, follows years of accelerating change in the North Maine Woods, a region nearly twice the size of Massachusetts. As Covid-19 pandemic transplants and other wealthy newcomers have put down roots — and in some cases, put up fences — and as housing costs and real estate taxes have ballooned, some residents feel a deepening concern.
“When we first came here, you could go anywhere, land your kayak anywhere, and you never gave it a thought,” said Donald Campbell, a retired New York City teacher who has spent 35 summers in a modest lakeside cabin near Burnt Jacket Mountain. “Now, there’s hardly a place you can land. There’s a feeling of sadness at losing something, a tradition of access, that maybe wasn’t written down but was understood.”
In that unsettled atmosphere, a two-sentence email sent last October to Destination Moosehead Lake, the tourism center in Greenville, landed like a slap.
“I am writing on behalf of the new Owner of the property at Burnt Jacket Mountain, requesting that you remove the reference to hiking at Burnt Jacket Mountain,” it said. “As this is now private property, we’d like to deter anyone from hiking on the mountain!”
The email, with its possibly ill-chosen exclamation point, came from Karen Thomas Associates, a New York firm that manages high-end residential construction. (“We are meticulous problem solvers,” its website explains, “resolving any number of challenges that may arise in the course of a demanding, luxury construction project.”)
The tourism center promptly complied, striking mentions of the mountain’s trails from its handouts. Then word began to spread. In other places, it might have been a no-brainer: Of course a private landowner would keep the public off his or her land. But in northern Maine, where hunters, hikers, snowmobilers and other outdoor enthusiasts have long enjoyed near-unrestricted access to vast forests, the request came across as unneighborly.
“The people at Moosehead will hardly trust somebody if they come to town doing good,” said Steve Yocom, a freelance photographer who worked at the tourism center at the time. “But if you come to town and take something from them right off the bat? Good luck.”
At Greenville’s newspaper, The Moosehead Lakeshore Journal, the two people on staff — Heidi St. Jean and her daughter, Emily Patrick — threw themselves into an investigation of the construction ramping up atop the mountain. Outlined in permits, its scale was notable: a 3,750 square foot home with garages, patios, decks, parking lots and a driveway that would stretch for nearly a mile.
But the name of the owner proved elusive. The parcel — 1,400 acres of undeveloped forest with two miles of lakefront — had been purchased for $8 million in 2022 by a limited liability company that shielded the buyer’s identity.
Even the man who had sold the mountain — Hank McPherson, a retired logging magnate who had kept its trails open to the public — said he wasn’t sure who the buyer was. “I didn’t get into it,” he said in an interview. “It was handled by lawyers. And to be honest, I didn’t really care.”
Soon enough, though, a woman who used to work in Greenville’s town office said she had the answer and posted it on Facebook: The new owner of the mountain was Mark Zuckerberg.
The billionaire founder of Facebook had spent time in the Maine woods before. In 2017, for their fifth wedding anniversary, Mr. Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, had traveled not to Aspen or Cabo, but to Bangor and Millinocket, Maine, where they hiked on the Appalachian Trail and met with workers who had lost their jobs when local paper mills shut down.
“When I asked people if they would leave to pursue a better career opportunity elsewhere, not a single person said they would,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook about the trip.
He would not have been the first high-profile land buyer drawn to Moosehead Lake, nor the first to keep his purchase quiet. The lake, whose southern point is 250 miles north of Boston, tends to attract V.I.P.s seeking privacy, said Luke Muzzy, director of the Moosehead Historical Society.
Their interest can be flattering. But secrecy can also spark anxiety.
“Whenever people have secrets,” he said, “you want to know why.”
Mr. Zuckerberg’s wealth, estimated at just over $200 billion, puts him in an extreme and alien-seeming category. The median household income in Greenville hovers around $60,000.
And his spotty track record as a neighbor doesn’t help.
In Palo Alto, Calif., where Mr. Zuckerberg has purchased 11 properties in a single leafy neighborhood, some neighbors say the heavy security measures and constant construction feel like an “occupation.” In Hawaii, where he has quietly become one of the state’s top landowners, his construction of an enormous compound has worried locals whose ancestral burial grounds lie on his estate.
Such spectacle would feel out of place in northern Maine, which is known for simple pleasures: rustic hunting camps, unchanged for centuries; starry skies unmarred by light pollution; moose sightings by the lake in the morning stillness.
“In some of those dense fir and spruce woods there is hardly room for the smoke to go up,” Henry David Thoreau wrote of the region’s forests. “The trees are a standing night, and every fir and spruce which you fell is a plume plucked from night’s raven wing.”
There was little risk of overdevelopment destroying that wild beauty at Moosehead Lake, Mr. Muzzy said, or the outdoor recreation that drives the local economy. Timber companies continue to grant generous access to their land. More than half a million acres, stretching north to Mount Katahdin, have been permanently protected. With a few exceptions, “what’s green stays green,” Mr. Muzzy said.
Yet beyond the lake, there was growing trepidation. Most land was privately owned, and not conserved, making changes in ownership and access a certainty over the long term. This year, Maine’s Legislature voted to convene a working group dedicated to preserving public access.
For some residents, the closure of the hiking trails on Burnt Jacket Mountain resonated as a symbol of the broader threat.
“These weren’t the only trails — they weren’t in the top 10 trails,” said Lew-Ellyn Hughes, a manager at the Greenville tourism center whose family roots in the region go back 200 years. “That’s not why people are sad. It’s people from away coming in and shutting things down. It’s the contrast between haves and have-nots — especially when the have-nots can’t find a place to live.”
Property taxes have more than doubled this year for some residents of northern Maine, driven by record-setting prices for waterfront properties. Many of their homes are in rural territory beyond the reach of municipal government and services.
At the one-room airport in Greenville, where $1 snacks from a mini refrigerator are sold on an honor system, the only person in sight one day this fall was a private plane pilot striding across the tarmac.
“The clients I fly are always rich,” he said, “and sometimes rich and famous.”
He would say no more.
Mr. Zuckerberg had become a kind of symbol for the forces North Woods residents could not control. But was he really the mountain’s new owner? Calls from a reporter to his representatives last month yielded a long-awaited answer.
“Mark and Priscilla do not own any property in Maine, including the Burnt Jacket property,” a spokesman for the family said.
The denial would not convince everyone. Nor did it ease hurt feelings as the mystery endured.
One day this fall, on the wooded shore where he and his wife, Nancy Thorne, built their small home decades ago, Mr. Campbell, the retired teacher, stood on a carpet of soft moss, pointing out the mountain’s gentle slope across the water.
He described how his favorite trail on Burnt Jacket meandered over granite ledges fringed with lichen, and then back into the trees, birches bright against the oaks. “It’s like losing an old friend,” he said.
The way Mr. Muzzy, the historian, sees it, access to the trails had been “a privilege, not a right.”
That did not make it easier to let them go.
“We don’t own these million-dollar homes,” Ms. St. Jean, the newspaper editor, said. “But our lives are changed by them.”
Jenna Russell is the lead reporter covering New England for The Times. She is based near Boston.
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