OAKFIELD, Maine — Katahdin Forest Products, the Oakfield-based log home manufacturer, has completed its acquisition of Walpole Woodworkers Mill in Chester to help improve its cedar fencing operations.
The move to acquire the Chester mill follows an incident last September where Katahdin Forest Products lost one of its sawmill buildings in a large fire, which severely affected its fencing production.
“They’ve been producing cedar fencing since the ‘70s,” said David Gordon, the president and CEO of Katahdin Forest Products. “They came up for sale, and obviously I just lost a lot of my production capacity, so it was very fortunate.”
Gordon said the mill will enable 50 percent more production capability for its fencing division, and the new mill will help both fencing and rough lumber capacity for the company’s log homes division.
Katahdin Forest Products has seen an increase in business since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, with real estate sales increasing in the area as people flee crowded cities for more rural areas such as northern Maine. This includes increased business for their fencing division, something Gordon attributes to people spending more time at home.
“It was already in strong demand, and it’s been stronger since the pandemic,” he said. “It’s even stronger because everybody is spending time at home and they’re doing a lot of home projects.”
The company’s fencing division produces a variety of different fences, from the more common picket fence to a post and rail fencing designed to be used around parks. The company also benefits from northern Maine’s abundance of Northern White Cedar trees, considered one of the best types of trees to use in lumber production. The only other places where the trees are commercially available are the northern parts of Michigan and Wisconsin.
