BY TRAVIS BARRETT

Outdoors Writer

They don't remember much. They just remember that it was hot.

Too hot to sit in a crowded classroom.

Too hot to expect that anyone would come in off the lake.

Too hot to exchange ideas about conserving land in Kennebec County.

Two decades after that first meeting, the Kennebec Land Trust has helped to preserve 40 different places around central Maine totaling more than 3,100 acres of land.

The areas protected run the natural world's gamut -- marshes and bogs, woodlots and grassy fields, shoreline and working farms.

All of it protected from the sprawling development that hasn't slowed since the Kennebec Land Trust, one of Maine's first inland conservation efforts, officially established itself in 1988.

"It all goes back to leadership," said John Lund, the former Maine attorney general and a long-time conservationist in the state. "There were some real cracker-jack people working on (the Kennebec Land Trust) from the beginning. They were visionaries. They saw that something like this would be needed."

The movement to create the Kennebec Land Trust came from a much smaller perspective.

Readfield's Howard Lake saw that a meeting had been called to create a land trust specific to the town of Wayne, so he called on good friend Jym St. Pierre, a noted conservationist.

"Out of the blue, Howard called me up and asked me if I knew anything about this meeting that was going to happen in Wayne," St. Pierre recalled. "I said I didn't and he said, 'Well, can we crash the meeting?' "

Lake and St. Pierre went to the meeting and made an appeal to its attendees to consider starting a land trust with a much broader perspective than a single town. By August, they'd convinced enough people to attend a meeting at Maranacook Community School that the wheels were in motion to create the Kennebec Land Trust.

But there was a small matter of the weather.

"It was a humid summer night in a crowded room," St. Pierre said. "I didn't know if anybody would show up or what would happen. I hoped we'd get a good turnout, but on a hot night inside in the middle of summer when people are on vacation and scattered -- I didn't know. And we didn't have a single focus."

The room was full and St. Pierre presented a "non-slide" show -- asking people to imagine themselves in central Maine locations he was describing.

It worked. Just over two months later -- on Nov. 4, 1988 -- the Kennebec Land Trust turned its official articles of incorporation over to the state.

"People still remind me about my presentation," St. Pierre said.

But the vision that St. Pierre shared is the same vision that has sparked KLT, a strictly volunteer organization for its first 15 years. It now has two part-time employees.

The land trust acquires properties in two ways. Fee properties make the trust the outright land owner, either through donation of the land or through a bargain-basement purchase price. Easement properties are an agreement for the trust to manage lands owned by somebody else. There are restrictions relating almost exclusively to development in both cases.

Most of the 40 Kennebec Land Trust sites are fee properties, and most of those were donated outright to the organization. The land trust pays drastically reduced property taxes -- approximately 10 percent of the standard rate -- on the lands it owns.

"In the early '80s and late '90s, there was a real boon in the economy," KLT President Bob Marvinney said. "The state was really undertaking efforts at planning because there was development happening everywhere. I think people knew that they needed to start thinking about what they wanted for the places that they loved, otherwise they would be lost forever."

The trust soon acquired its first property at Torsey Pond, a small parcel. It took its first giant step in 1990, when it protected Vaughan Woods, with help from the Maine chapter of the Nature Conservancy.

"I don't know that I thought too much about what my expectations were," Lake said. "We knew we could do some good and that was about it. We just tried to invite people we knew had an interest in this sort of thing."

Most infant land trusts in the mid- to late-1980s were based along Maine's coastal communities.

St. Pierre is most proud of the fact that KLT is an inland land trust.

"Maine is one of leading states in terms of number and size and acres protected by conservation land trusts. Most of those are on the coast, of course," St. Pierre said.

"(Ours) was one of first inland land trusts to get going. That's something to be proud of -- right from the beginning, we didn't have (wealth) funding the organization. It's been a really good grassroots success that started and continued the KLT."

Travis Barrett -- 621-5648

tbarrett@centralmaine.com