Percival Baxter was born to a wealthy Portland family on November 22, 1876, and lived at a time when open spaces abounded and were seen as something to be conquered rather than conserved.
“He was an eagle flying alone up there because no one shared his vision at that time,” said Connie Baxter Marlow, Percival Baxter’s great-grandniece and author of the book Greatest Mountain, Katahdin’s Wilderness
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At the turn of the century, land in Maine seemed almost endless. When Baxter was seven years old, his father, James Phinney Baxter, took him on a fishing trip to Cupsuptic Lake, a trip that in those days required travel by train, boat, horses, and foot. This experience helped clear the trail for his life’s work: Baxter not only landed an impressive seven-and-a-half-pound square-tail trout, but began a lifelong passion for preserving what were then called Maine’s “wild lands.”
“The early wilderness experiences he shared with his dad and later on in life made him concerned that there was very little public land in Maine—unlike in a lot of states,” says Howard Whitcomb, historian and the author of Percival P. Baxter’s Vision for Baxter State Park—An Annotated Compilation of Original Sources. “He felt that establishing a park at Katahdin was one way to rectify that.”
According to Whitcomb, the first time Baxter saw Mt. Katahdin was in the summer of 1903, at the age of 26. By then, Percival Baxter had graduated from Bowdoin College and Harvard Law School, and was managing his father’s reelection campaign as mayor of Portland. (The elder Baxter had made a fortune in the canning industry, and entered politics upon his retirement.)
While Percival would soon achieve his own political success, it would not prove to be his passion. The young man was so smitten by Katahdin’s majestic presence that summer he made it his life’s mission to preserve the land around what he called “the greatest monument to nature that exists east of the Mississippi River.”
Baxter’s ideas were also molded by other conservationists; Whitcomb and other historians note influences such as John Muir (the founder of the Sierra Club), Aldo Leopold (founder of the Wilderness Society), and of course, Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau had recounted his 1846 ascent up the south side of Katahdin in his classic, The Maine Woods. Thoreau would later call for the creation of national parks, nearly 20 years before the world’s first such sanctuary, Yellowstone National Park.
“Baxter read Thoreau,” says John W. Neff, cofounder of the Friends of Baxter State Park, a nonprofit citizens group, and the author of Katahdin—An Historic Journey. Baxter was also inspired, Neff says, by the pioneering conservation work of President Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt had climbed Mt. Katahdin in 1879, before he was president, and reportedly caught 60 trout at Katahdin Lake. “There is a record of [Baxter and Roosevelt] meeting in Portland during a campaign stop,” Neff says. “All this is happening when Baxter is beginning to form his belief about preserving this huge wilderness area.”
Percival Baxter was also beginning to get into politics. Elected to the state legislature while still in his 20s, he served three terms in the Maine House, then two in the Senate, where he was elected senate president. When Governor Parkhurst died in office soon after his election, Baxter automatically succeeded him as governor, and was elected for a second term in 1922. Throughout his time as both a legislator and governor, Baxter proposed plans for the state to acquire Mt. Katahdin and surrounding lands, but his bills were voted down, largely due to intense pressure from Maine’s timber industry.
“When he left the governorship, he decided that he would have to do it himself with his own personal fortune,” Neff says. “Baxter’s vision was absolutely enormous, and I think the concept of what he achieved was unique in the world—to buy land with his own funds. It’s Baxter’s magnificent obsession.”
At the time Baxter left office, much of the land around Katahdin was owned by Great Northern Paper. When the company’s leadership changed in the late 1920s, Baxter convinced GNP to sell him 6,000 acres, including the major part of Mt. Katahdin, for $25,000. Baxter turned the 1930 purchase—governed by a trust specifying that the lands were to remain in their “natural wild state”—over to the people of Maine in 1931; the Maine Legislature named it Baxter State Park.
A lifelong bachelor, Percival Baxter would make 28 more gifts, acquiring more than 200,000 acres over 32 years of patient negotiating, often buying productive timberland and trading it for the largely rock-covered, burned-out lands surrounding Mt. Katahdin. With each purchase and subsequent gifting to the state, he restated the ground rules that the land was to remain forever wild.
Buzz Caverly, the park’s former director who retired last year, is a living link to Baxter’s vision and a legend in his own right. Caverly stepped down after more than 46 years of service at the park—24 years as its director. “I originally wanted to keep working until I had 50 years of service,” said Caverly, who at 67 has the energy of someone 30 years younger.
“Gov. John Baldacci has honored me by naming me his cochair to the Katahdin Lake Campaign, and I’ve been leading trips to Katahdin Lake for people who are interested and taking them to the lake, hiking or flying in with them, visiting the camps and various interesting points, and then hiking back out with them.”
When Caverly started at the park in 1960, Helon Taylor was at the helm, another icon in the park’s history. “When I worked under Helon Taylor, it was a wonderful time. There were only seven employees and Taylor was the only year-round employee. The park was different back then, since Governor Baxter was alive, and if there were any controversies, he would tell the park himself how he would like them handled.” Caverly was also invited to Baxter’s home early in his career. “He spent about an hour with me telling me about his early trips to the park and putting together his puzzle,” Caverly says, “which was buying pieces of the park, one piece at a time.”
“We saw Baxter twice a year, during the years that he visited the park.” He made his last trip to the park in 1967, at the age of 91.
When Caverly turned the reins over to the current park director, Jensen Bissell, in December 2005, he did so knowing that Bissell, too, would remain focused on honoring Baxter’s legacy. “That is not only his [Bissell’s] goal, but his responsibility,” says Caverly, “to carry on the vision, to work within the deeds of the trust, and to preserve and protect the natural resources of the park to the best of his ability.”
Bissell is also a longtime park veteran, hired by Caverly over 20 years ago to work in the Scientific Forest Management Area (SMFA) as a forester. The 29,537-acre area, which comprises 14% of the park at its north end, is home to one of the lesser-known parts of Percival Baxter’s vision. “The governor had traveled throughout his life to different places in the world,” Bissell says, “and he wanted a place for exemplary forestry as part of the park.” The Scientific Forest Management Area, which is also open to hunting and trapping, is where “we try to provide a continuing crop of wood to be harvested” in accordance with Baxter’s trust.
When the announcement came that Bissell was chosen as the new park director out of 70 applicants, the room, filled with park employees and relatives of Percival Baxter, rose to a standing ovation. As soon as Bissell’s new job began, however, it became complicated by the possible extension of the park through the purchase of the land around and including Katahdin Lake (see sidebar, page 29).
If Baxter were still alive, he would not have been daunted by such complications. And neither, apparently, is Bissell. “There are always going to be challenges ahead of us, such as Katahdin Lake,” he says. “We have a great staff. We have a clear mission. I have a great job.” The new keeper of the Baxter vision adds a job benefit that the former governor would have undoubtedly agreed with: “And the natural setting of the park is really a joy to be in.”
