Carmel resident Delmont E. Hartt bought a truck in 1947 and took to hauling gravel and pulpwood in Maine. Forty-five years later, his family-owned business hauls freight up and down the East Coast and occasionally as far as California.

In the mid-1950s, Hartt started hauling potatoes from Aroostook County to markets outside Maine. In 1969, he leased his equipment to Midwest Coast Transport, a trucking firm based in Sioux Falls, S.D.

Then, in 1980, Hartt again ventured into his own business by establishing Delmont E. Hartt Inc., a company whose trailers soon appeared all over Maine highways. Hartt ended his affiliation with Midwest Coast Transport in 1982 and never looked back.

Today, Hartt Transportation Systems Inc. employs about 100 people and maintains a fleet that includes 42 company-owned tractors, 20 tractors belonging to owner-operators, 125 trailer vans, and 35 flatbeds. Delmont Hartt remains the corporate president.

According to his son, Vice President Michael Hartt, the company relocated to the Bomarc Industrial Park in Bangor in September 1980. Hartt Transportation leases a large, two-story building from Northern Products Log Homes, for which the trucking firm also hauls log-cabin kits “all over the country,” Hartt said.

“We haul general commodities; that’s our specialty,” he pointed out. From Maine, Hartt drivers take paper products, baled wood pulp, building materials, and lumber to markets “primarily east of the Mississippi, especially along the Northeast Corridor,” Hartt said.

Return loads bring more paper products, food items, store merchandise, beer, wine, soda, some steel (“culverts in the spring,” Hartt said), and additional building materials (sheetrock and gypsum) into Maine.

“We haul for a diverse clientele,” Hartt said. “The goal is to create a broad customer base, to haul many commodities and not just specialize in one or two.

“Business has been good the last year; we’ve worked hard and done well,” he stated. “In the recession, it’s been feast one day, famine the next, so we’ve learned to work hard and excel. We can attribute our success to the people we have. They give a 110-percent effort.”

Other members of the Hartt family are employed by the company. Michael Hartt’s two sisters, Deborah DesRoberts and Judy Hartt, work as the rate-billing clerk and claims supervisor, respectively. Their brother, Bill Hartt, serves as the operations manager, and their mother, Sheila Hartt, handles accounts payable.

“Yes, it’s very much a family-owned and -run business,” Michael Hartt smiled. “We believe that makes a big difference. We offer that personal touch; every time you call us, you could be talking with someone who’s a Hartt. That means a lot to our customers, knowing they’re dealing with someone who’s part of the family.”