Ever since Peter Baldwin came to the Midcoast in 1972, he’s built a livelihood from wood.
He crafted porch posts, windmill blades, oars for Outward Bound and took on various woodworking jobs in construction. In 1984, wanting to build something new, he recalled his 1950s boyhood in New York’s Hudson Valley.
“My uncle had an apple orchard, and my folks had a farm market,” he said. “I used to see the ladders in the barnyard and out and around. I would play on them.”
So he made some of his own apple ladders, starting with the pointed-top style, its rails tapering to a spike designed to rest in the crotch of a branch.
His first production run numbered 50 ladders, and despite their dimensions being a bit off from what farmers preferred, he sold them. After making some design adjustments, he sold even more the following year, and Baldwin Apple Ladders took root.
When he started, there were two manufacturers of wooden orchard ladders in New York and one in Maryland. Today, as far as he knows, he is the only one left on the East Coast.
“So we have a good continuing demand for them,” he said. “I feel some responsibility to keep doing it as long as I can comfortably do it.”
Today his ladders are sold through a dealer network that stretches from New England to North Carolina and as far west as Michigan, and directly from his shop in Brooks. Maine buyers have included Sewall Organic Orchard in Lincolnville, Cooper Farms in West Paris and the Maine Heritage Orchard in Unity.
Light and strong, apple ladders are easier to balance and place in a tree than a conventional ladder. Baldwin makes three types: the tripod stepladder, the open-top and the pointed-top. Their primary use is for picking apples, though orchardists also use them for pruning and thinning.
“We’re dealing with farmers that routinely buy five or 10 ladders a season just to cull out their old ladders and get new ones,” Baldwin said. “Commercially, they’ll last about 10 years.”
Baldwin began building ladders from spruce, sourcing two-by-sixes from a mill in Ashland and cutting each plank diagonally to create a single rail. As he developed his market in New York, the demand for longer ladders grew, but spruce in those lengths was scarce. A state forest utilization officer provided him with a study showing a potential alternative wood source.
“The big-tooth aspen in particular was similar to the mechanical properties that were important in spruce,” Baldwin said, referring to the tree better known in Maine as popple. Both are relatively light woods that are easy to work with.
However, Baldwin was wary of popple’s reputation for rotting. Then a farmer brought him a well-used popple ladder.
“He said, ‘Well, my father had one; we’ve used it for years.’ This gentleman was in his 60s already, so that meant it had been around a while.” Baldwin converted from spruce in the late 1980s, sourcing his popple logs from near Lincoln.
Each Baldwin Apple Ladder is air-dried and treated for moisture and UV protection, and the company logo is burned into each rail with a branding iron. The hinge design is also characteristic, but Baldwin has never sought to patent it.
“If somebody wants to follow my design, it’s a testament to the value of it,” he said. “And I don’t want to make all the ladders in the world.”
In May 2012, a fire destroyed Baldwin’s original facility, a converted dairy barn, consuming inventory, custom machinery and tools accumulated over a lifetime.
By chance, one sample of each of the three types of ladders he makes had been kept outside and survived the blaze. He used them as patterns to rebuild, doing so in an old chicken barn on the same property, aided by community donations of about $13,000 and support from the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association. By 2015, Baldwin had converted the business into a worker-owned LLC.
Baldwin’s biggest seller was once the 18-foot ladder, followed by the 20-footer. Now, he said, “we’ve got a stack of 20s that have been sitting there for four years.” The reason is the increasing use of dwarf trees grown on wires like grapes.
“They don’t even need any ladders,” he said. Today, the 16-footer leads sales, followed by the 14-footer. Sales have averaged about a thousand ladders annually, though last year only 400 were sold.
“I don’t know if it was an anomaly,” Baldwin said. “I hope so.”
Aluminum orchard ladders have come to dominate the market, with manufacturers concentrated on the West Coast, but Baldwin still prefers wood. Wooden ladders are more resilient, neither as cold nor as slippery on a frosty morning — and unlike aluminum, they don’t conduct electricity.
Baldwin has heard of pickers electrocuted on the job when their ladders touch power lines.
“They call them lightning rods,” he said. There is also the manner of how the two materials are produced. “It’s a very energy-intensive process to mine and produce the aluminum,” he said. “Wood is renewable.”
Chuck Seger, one of Baldwin’s handful of employees, finds the use of wood just as appealing.
“It’s kind of satisfying to take a tree and make a nice ladder out of it,” he said.
Baldwin used to deliver ladders himself, pulling into farms and farm markets with a trailer full of them. The experience, he said, felt like he was bringing ladders to his uncle or his family. “It was just sort of in my blood, in a sense.”
This story appears through a media partnership with Midcoast Villager.