Roxanne Quimby is so enraptured by nature, and so devoted to mitigating her environmental footprint, that starting in the mid-1970s she lived for years in a self-built cottage in rural Maine without electricity or running water. For her and her husband and two small children, the outdoors was like “another big room.”
“I don’t think it was a question of happy or not,” she says. “I felt like I was living a mission that was important to me.”
From living off of nothing Ms. Quimby created something, co-founding natural-products brand Burt’s Bees and growing it for more than two decades before selling it to Clorox in 2007 for more than $900 million.
Business success positioned Ms. Quimby to express her love of the outdoors in a new and different way. In August 2016, she donated 87,500 acres of Maine’s North Woods — valued at about $70 million — to the National Park Service. The new Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument was made official by a swipe of President Barack Obama’s pen.
The largest of several gifts of land Ms. Quimby has made from New England to Colorado, it vaulted her into the ranks of distinguished conservationists and philanthropists who battled to make the parks system what it is today.
“A national park is for everybody,” she says. “It’s not just for the multimillionaire who puts a beautiful home on the waterfront. Everybody gets to go in for $20. It is so democratic to me.”
Road Trip
That’s not to say giving away a vast swath of Maine wilderness was easy. The story of one of the country’s newest national monuments, and its donor, is as intriguing as any in private philanthropy.
Ms. Quimby is the grandchild of Siberian Jews who fled Russia in the early 20th century. They landed in Shanghai, where Ms. Quimby’s mother was born. The Chinese communist revolution in the late 1940s made them migrants again, and the family arrived in the United States with nothing.
Ms. Quimby was raised in Massachusetts, where as a small child she fostered a love of art and natural landscapes. She recalls having even then a distinct worldview: Nothing made by human hands could match the beauty of an unadulterated forest, ocean, or river.
Buying tracts of land for conservation was like ‘putting a piece of artwork in a gallery.’
“People do assume that my interest in the environment is based on an understanding of the implications of our carbon load that we’re putting it into,” Ms. Quimby says. “Or the habitat destruction. But it is really a very visual, sensory thing for me.”
After attending college in San Francisco, she and her soon-to-be husband embarked in 1974 on a cross-country road trip, eventually settling into a homesteader’s life in rural Maine. In 1984, Ms. Quimby met a local beekeeper, Burt Shavitz, and they struck up an enterprise, selling beeswax candles at markets and fairs. At first, she says, it was a matter of helping her family get by. (By then her marriage had ended, and she was on her own with the kids.) She came to realize that not only did she love the creativity of making products out of honey, herbs and other natural things, she enjoyed running a business, too.
“I found that business was a very level playing field,” Ms. Quimby says. “You couldn’t be held back because you didn’t have a degree from Harvard. Or you couldn’t be held back if you didn’t have the right clothes. If you made a product people wanted, nothing else really mattered.”
In the following decades she expanded Burt’s Bees, developing a broad range of products that can now be spotted in drugstores nationwide and buying out her business partner.
Buying Spree
By 2000, with Burt’s Bees profitable, Ms. Quimby began to amass land in Maine. It was simultaneously cheap and the most valuable thing she could buy, she explains; there wasn’t any more of it being made. And the withering of the pulp industry in the state meant that corporate landowners like International Paper were unloading large tracts for about $200 an acre — the wholesale price of four cases of Burt’s Bees lip balm.
Buying up tens of thousands of acres was like “putting a piece of artwork in a gallery. You know it is safe there,” she says. “As long as I owned it I knew it would be safe from development or destruction or decay.”
Maine’s Acadia National Park and Baxter State Park were created with help from private donors. With those examples in mind, Ms. Quimby took up another dream project for some environmentalists: preserving a big chunk of the North Woods. Piece by piece, she bought adjacent tracts of land with the goal of handing all of it to the federal government to preserve as wilderness in perpetuity.
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Property rights are serious business in Maine. Residents were unlikely to object to what she did with hers, Ms. Quimby thought. Plus, everyone loves a national park.
She was badly mistaken. For years some Maine residents, business groups, and politicians resisted Ms. Quimby’s plan. They worried about restrictions on hunting, snowmobiling, and other locally cherished outdoor activities. Some had not given up hope that the dying paper industry and its much-needed jobs would return. They regarded the wealthy donor with suspicion.
Local opposition came to a boiling point in 2011 when the plain-speaking Ms. Quimby was quoted in an interview with Forbes citing the region’s economic erosion, aging population, obesity rates, and other unflattering statistics and describing Maine as a “welfare state.” Soon after she was in front of dozens of angry residents trying to offer an apology.
Fresh Start
The issue had officially become a political football, Ms. Quimby realized, and she didn’t have the credibility or the diplomacy to carry the park project forward. She turned the role of public campaigner over to her son, Lucas St. Clair. His pedigree as a native-born son and ardent outdoorsman played better in rural Maine.
Mr. St. Clair immediately hired a public-relations team, a move he says he would recommend to any philanthropist making a major gift that might attract public attention. He also made himself an expert on the history of preservation efforts by philanthropists and others.
The heat of the opposition eased somewhat. But Maine’s congressional delegation remained divided, and the state’s Republican Governor, Paul LePage, was bitterly opposed. In that political climate, there was no chance a GOP-controlled Congress would approve the creation of a national park, which generally carries the highest level of preservation.
So Ms. Quimby and Mr. St. Clair sought to make the land a national monument, which the president can do without congressional approval. In August, her North Woods holdings, far bigger than Acadia National Park, became the 413th unit in the National Park System as the federal agency celebrated its 100th birthday. Ms. Quimby also donated $20 million to help care for the land, and she pledged to raise $20 million more.
“It was like this big pressure valve was released at the end of the month and we could really start focusing on what life after this would be like, for us and our family foundation and our family in general,” Mr. St. Clair says.
The newly designated monument is a mix of wooded mountains and hills, marsh areas, and lakes and ponds. There are views of 5,270-foot Mount Katahdin, Maine’s highest peak, in neighboring Baxter State Park. And there is history: Notables including President Theodore Roosevelt, naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, and ornithologist John James Audubon spent time in the area.
Hiking, camping, fishing, cross-country skiing, and snowshoeing are permitted throughout the national monument, and portions remain open to hunting and snowmobiling.
Mr. St. Clair says he is confident Katahdin Woods and Waters will eventually be designated a national park, citing examples of other national monuments that made that same transition. He continues to lead the family’s philanthropy work related to the donation of the land and is now focused on raising the additional $20 million pledged to support the gift. The Quimby Family Foundation recently purchased a nearby home that he uses to host potential donors and other guests, and Mr. St. Clair is putting together a “friends” organization similar to those affiliated with other national parks that will formally partner with the National Park Service.
More to Come
There is no retirement for the 66-year-old Ms. Quimby. She says she loves developing products and building small businesses, and she continues to travel the country as a merchant. One of her current ventures is a line of gourmet pastas.
In addition to the family’s conservation work, Ms. Quimby says she donates money to arts organizations. The family also supports community health care and other causes in Maine through its foundation.
Ms. Quimby says some of the heartache and personal disappointment that came with completing the North Woods gift lingers. She hopes that someday those raw emotions will diminish, and she expects that the back story of how the national monument came about will eventually be forgotten. Visitors will know only that it is a marvelous place where they can hike and fish.
“I do believe that this is a gift that hopefully will keep on giving over the decades,” she says, “and that as I look back years later, I will be filled with a great deal of gratitude, and I’ll be so happy that it happened, and all of those old white guys that were taking aim at me, they will all be gone.”
