Vanessa Harnois says fell in love with Maine’s northwestern woods during a series of childhood hunting and camping trips.
Years later, when she was offered a chance to work at Passamaquoddy Maple, a maple product store in the Somerset County town of Moose River, she jumped at the chance. Even though she came from northern Washington County, she had to adjust to life in a town so remote.
When Harnois’ daughter broke her ankle, it required repeated three-hour round trips to a doctor’s office in Skowhegan. But even simpler tasks often mean planning for that long trip south.
“We are quite a ways from Walmart,” she said.
Moose River, which is north of Jackman on U.S. Route 201 and lies closer to Quebec City than Portland, may be Maine’s most isolated frontier town. It ranked second in the Bangor Daily News’ Rural Maine Index, an analysis of more than 400 towns with more than 180 people that factored in distances from stores, population density and commuting patterns.
It stands out in large part due to the distance to a major grocery store. While there is a small grocery store in Jackman, the closest Walmart is in Skowhegan. The closest large grocery store is a Hannaford-supplied one in Greenville, which is a remote drive more than 40 miles west.
Only Eustis, in Franklin County, is further from the closest major store. To Harnois, limited services have been worthwhile for the exposure to nature. Plus, she found locals were more welcoming than she’d expected.
“If you like the outdoors, you like hunting, you like fishing and you like hiking, just exploring Maine woods, you are usually 15, 20 minutes away from something awesome,” she said.
New Jersey native Kevin Anderson moved to Moose River over a decade ago and runs Intimidators Speed Machine Automotive Repair, an auto shop in town. Unlike Harnois, he said he finds the remoteness of the town is reflected in a somewhat less-than-welcoming attitude among his neighbors to the many out-of-staters who came during the pandemic.
The flip side of living in such a rural place is the advantage of leaving crowded cities behind. Moose River and the Jackman area have lots of lodges and other businesses catering to a four-season outdoors tourism population.
“It’s just a relaxed style of living,” Anderson said. “You know, it’s a true vacation when you go there, that’s the best way to put it.”
Rhonda McNally was born on her family’s Moose River farm, which she now owns with her husband. Her family recently shut down a meat shop based on the farm for lack of local customers. She says the Moose River’s declining year-round population — dropping from a peak of more than 250 residents in 1970 to an estimated 186 in 2024 — has led to service cuts.
Both Anderson and McNally noted the lack of medical care in the area, aside from the clinic in Jackman. The nearest X-ray machine is about an hour away in Greenville. She said the most impactful service shortage for her business was the lack of veterinary medicine.
The advent of telemedicine had improved the situation for a while, but she says increasingly she finds vets unwilling to care for her cows, pigs, goats, and chickens, without seeing them in person. But she also can’t find a vet willing to make the journey to Moose River.
Still, she says her love of the outdoors makes up for the difficulty of maintaining her fifth-generation family farm.
“It’s definitely a unique way of life, and it’s not one that everybody appreciates, because we are so far from things,” she said. “And some people say to us, ‘There’s nothing there.’ And our response is often, ‘Exactly, that’s why we like it.’”
Daniel O’Connor is a Report for America corps member who covers rural government as part of the partnership between the Bangor Daily News and The Maine Monitor, with additional support from BDN and Monitor readers.