Land Conservation and Historic Preservation

WHILE THE FARM grew and prospered, the Smiths took time to pursue other passions—the preservation of farmland and open space, environmental protection, and public access to the ocean. The farm and campground were furthering all of these goals. But beyond Wolfe’s Neck, they had saved Popham Beach from development, buying about 200 acres quietly in the early 1960s and holding them for the state until it could appropriate the funds to buy them at the Smiths’ cost for a state park. The state appropriated the money and opened the park in 1968; the appreciation in land value was the Smiths’ gift to the state.

The Smiths would follow that in 1969 with the gift of about 250 acres of woods to the state of Maine for Wolfe’s Neck Woods State Park. It opened in 1973 within the bounds of the farm, with 1.6 miles of frontage on Casco Bay and the Harraseeket River, and an endowment for educational programming unique in the state park system. Also in 1969, Mr. Smith created Landguard Trust, Inc., a nonprofit organization to promote the use of conservation easements, a new strategy to preserve valued environments and open space. Mrs. Smith at the time was an active member of the national governing board of the Nature Conservancy, serving there from 1964 to 1977. She had earlier been an incorporator and board member of the Maine chapter of the Conservancy in the 1950s, and that board frequently met at the Smith house. Rachael Carson, future author of the groundbreaking Silent Spring, was a cofounder and fellow board member, and was a speaker at one of those meetings at the Smith house. The entire farm, the campground, and the state park are protected in perpetuity today by conservation easements given by the Smiths to the state and the American Farmland Trust.

The Smiths were early also to the historic preservation movement. In Freeport they gave the land for Mast Landing Sanctuary, 145 acres of land rich in human and natural history, to the Maine Audubon Society, and the historic Pettengill House and its 140-acre farm to the Freeport Historical Society.

In August 1975, Mr. Smith died suddenly of a heart attack, a great shock to all. John Cole, editor of the Maine Times , wrote, “No person in the last 30 years has been as sensitive to Maine’s needs, as creative about finding solutions to its problems or more generous with his energies and wherewithal than Sam Smith. Not since Governor Percy Baxter—the parent of Baxter State Park and wise land-use policies—has any Maine individual left a legacy like Sam Smith’s.” Cole went on to say Smith was determined to have his gifts go unheralded, thus his passing went without public tribute. “In his soul, Sam Smith held a reverence for the natural integrity of the state he loved. He could hear the poetry of the land and the sea.”