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| Real Estate & Land |
Land Through the Generations
Daniel Gross
06/01/2004
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THE PINGREES: The Business of Preservation
Families for whom land is the entire business generally have a diffident
attitude toward preservation—which is often code for no economic activity. But
for members of the Pingree family, for whom some 975,000 acres of wild forest
land in Maine represents both the past and the future, preservation has meant
something else entirely.
David Pingree, born in 1795, settled in Salem,
Mass., and worked for his uncle, Thomas Perkins, a well-known trader. Pingree
inherited Perkins’ assets when the latter died in 1830, and, sensing that Salem
was losing ground to larger ports, began to diversify away from shipping. He
formed a bank in 1832, a cotton factory in 1839 and, in 1841, when son David
Jr., was born, he began buying timberland. Maine, which had just become a state
in 1820, had far more moose than people, and was selling off big areas of wooded
land to raise funds. After his father’s death, David Pingree Jr., continued to
acquire large swaths of the vast North Woods, ultimately bringing the total to
about 1 million acres. And for the past century, even as much of New England’s
forest was cleared, first for farming, then for suburbs, the holdings have
remained essentially intact. The land—and the trees that grow on it—has
sustained the family for six generations. Mindful of the area’s appeal to
sportsmen, the Pingrees have also leased property to camps and guides. Today,
Pingree Associates and Seven Island Land Co., which run the holdings on behalf
of some 70 family members, manage the slow and steady business. In testimony
before the Senate Finance Committee in June 2001, Pingree Associates president
Steven Schley, a descendant of David Pingree, estimated that “we have managed to
eke out a 2.5 percent return on our timberland investment over the last 50
years, on average.”
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