Part 6 of a 6-part series

There are two words spray painted on the first and only highway overpass in the small, southern Aroostook County township of Benedicta:

“Welcome back.”

Probably a cheering squad’s leftover greeting for a victorious Katahdin High School basketball team, the faded white letters above Interstate 95 have gradually blended into the scenery for the locals who routinely drive this stretch of northbound highway that marks the entrance to Maine’s northernmost county.

But in many ways, the two simple words express the hopes of those remaining in Maine’s four northeastern counties, where the population has declined by thousands

in the past decade, partly because young singles and families have packed their bags and headed south looking for better opportunities.

The losses hurt, but they do not tell the entire story in northern and eastern Maine.

Despite deaths outnumbering births, Hancock County still experienced a 10 percent population jump in the 1990s, fueled by a net gain of more than 1,000 migrants, including many wealthy retirees, in the last half of the decade.

In another bright spot, neighboring Knox and Waldo counties watched 3,700 more people move in than moved out during the last half of the decade as Maryland-based credit card giant MBNA brought thousands of new jobs to the area.

Even places like Fort Fairfield, Milo and Lubec – vestiges of small-town America – are still luring a few idealistic young professionals and retirees alike with the promise of simpler lives, recreational opportunities and great natural beauty.

It has been nearly five years since Bob Hunt drove the stretch of I-95 through Benedicta on his way back to his hometown of Fort Fairfield, about 90 miles to the north.

The 34-year-old physician assistant returned after more than 20 years away, he said, to escape the congestion of southern Maine, where he spent his high school and college years. It wasn’t long after his return from his medical training in Philadelphia, that he headed north.

“This area’s a tough sell for some, but not for me,” said Hunt, who recently bought a 1970s-era, 3 bedroom ranch on 5 acres for $127,000 – a high price in an area where the average home sells for between $65,000 and $80,000. “I’ve been a lot of places but none of them compared.”

Before beginning his shift at The Aroostook Medical Center’s emergency room in Presque Isle, Hunt readily acknowledged that his profession made it possible for him to earn a comfortable living in a part of the country where the median household income of $28,837 is 46 percent below the national average. Annual salaries in Hunt’s field generally start at around $50,000 wherever one works.

“You have to hit the right profession to be up here,” he said of his native county, where his parents, now living in southern Maine, still own a second home.

Health care is definitely the “right profession” in rural Maine where the percentage of the population that is elderly is growing rapidly as younger people move away. For that reason, Maine was the only New England state to rank among the nation’s top 10 in terms of health care job growth between 1996 and 2001, according to a February study by the New England Healthcare Institute.

Attracting and retaining educated workers like Hunt – or anyone for that matter – has been no easy task for Aroostook County, which in 2000 recorded just under 74,000 people left living there, a staggering 30 percent drop from its 1960 high of 106,000.

Part of that population shift can be attributed to the fact that The County, as natives call it, saw about 4,500 more people move out than in from 1995 to 2000, according to the IRS data. When Penobscot, Piscataquis and Washington counties were thrown into the mix the migration gap was 11,200 people. And that didn’t include the fact more people were dying than were being born in the four counties during the past decade, contributing to the overall population decline.

Hunt wasn’t the only one – or the only Hunt for that matter – to buck that out-migration trend.

Family matters

In November, Hunt’s twin brother, Peter, moved back to take a job as a software developer at ATX, a tax software firm with more than 200 employees headquartered in Caribou.

“It’s still early, but so far, so good,” Peter Hunt said of his recent move north after eight years living in eastern Pennsylvania, where he commuted to his job as a senior computer programmer at Ortho-McNeil Pharmaceutical in nearby Raritan, N.J.

Although the Rochester Institute of Technology graduate earned about 20 percent more at the Johnson & Johnson subsidiary, the bigger paychecks couldn’t bring him closer to family, he said.

“That in itself, plus the quality of life, was worth it for me,” he said during an interview at a coffee shop in downtown Caribou.

But he didn’t come home from Pennsylvania just to be closer to his family or to get a bargain on a new house.

He came for a good job.

He found it, he said, at ATX, whose rapid expansion has earned it a place on Inc. magazine’s Top 500 list of the fastest-growing privately owned companies for the past five years.

That growth has allowed the company to attract and retain experienced computer programmers, by paying them the industry average of between $40,000 and $80,000 depending on experience, said ATX chief operating officer Dave Olsen.

It was yet another pair of brothers, Steve and Glynn Willett, who founded ATX in 1992 in Ithaca, N.Y., with five employees, and moved the operation to a vacant J.J. Newberry Co. department store on Caribou’s Sweden Street in 1998.

City officials credit the company with giving the area a needed boost after the 1994 closing of nearby Loring Air Force Base, which decimated both the area’s population and economy.

But why Caribou?

The Silicon Valley is a far cry from the remote Maine city of 8,300 people where, on a recent day, crews lopped off the tops of roadside snowbanks to expose the buried speed limit signs along Route 1.

“One thing we found out in a rural area is you get some really good people and there’s no competitors,” co-founder Steve Willett said from the company’s Florida office, which he opened in 1998 partly to escape the Maine winters. “Our employees are there because they want to be.”

‘It’s cold. We’re not.’

Snow or not, there’s no place Charlie Buzzell would rather be than on his family farm in Milo.

“We were fortunate. We could have gone anywhere,” said the retired U.S. Department of

Education associate commissioner while making coffee in the remodeled kitchen in his family’s homestead on the Billington Road. “My ties here were just too strong.”

Strong, indeed.

Buzzell’s great-grandfather purchased the 100-acre farm in Piscataquis County shortly after the Civil War. Buzzell’s father was born in a room upstairs.

Now, after a childhood in Connecticut and a career in Washington, D.C., this marks Buzzell’s seventh year on the farm, where he spent his summers during childhood playing – and working – in the 1800s-era red-shingled barn that still stands today with the help of steel cables holding the old timbers together.

On a February day, Buzzell strolled amid the falling snow to his new metal-sided barn. Built in August, it was a cooperative effort involving family, friends and neighbors.

It was the people of Milo – “A Friendly Town,” declares a massive sign on a downtown hardware store – that cemented Buzzell’s decision to leave his longtime home in Vienna, Va., and head north. Even the tiny community’s dwindling population, caused by layoffs at Dexter Shoe Co. and the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad didn’t dissuade him.

“If we talked 40 times in 25 years, I would be surprised,” Buzzell said of his former neighbors, both CIA employees, in the upscale Washington, D.C., suburb. “Here, we have a barn raising.”

As for missing the cultural amenities of the nation’s capital, Buzzell’s wife, Dolores, said periodic returns to the city more than suffice.

“We beat it back here as fast as we can,” said the affable and adventurous spouse of 51 years, who received an ATV on her 70th birthday. “We get our fix and we want to go back home.”

Family is a constant theme in the Buzzell’s decision to retire to Milo. After all, on the farm next door lives the couple’s 35-year-old daughter, Susan Keith, who moved to the area with her husband, a retired policeman, last year.

“How do you describe looking out the window and seeing your daughter coming across the field on her way over for coffee?” Charlie Buzzell asked while sitting down for pie made with apples from his daughter’s farm. “There’s nothing like it.”

While he didn’t have to convince his daughter of the area’s draws, convincing his former colleagues from Washington, D.C., was a different story.

“There was this shock,” he said of the reaction from his board of directors at the American Vocational Association, where he served as chief executive officer for several years after his retirement from federal government. “There’s this reputation that it’s for self-reliant, woods-type people, and it’s bitter cold.

“I tell them, ‘It’s cold. We’re not,'” he said.

Down East draw

Maine’s rocky Down East coast, on average, isn’t quite as cold or snowy as Piscataquis or Aroostook counties.

Even if it were, the weather would do little to prevent Marty Saccone and Helen Longest-Saccone from publishing Nature Photographer – a quarterly magazine with a press run of 23,000 copies – from a bedroom-turned-office in their Lubec home.

Twice during a recent morning, boxy UPS and FedEx trucks lumbered up the long driveway to pick up and drop off that day’s correspondence, which consisted of, among other things, a new laptop computer for the magazine’s Web site designer based about 350 miles away in Manchester, N.H.

“It’s always been kind of a joke for us that all these nature magazines were based in New York City,” said Longest-Saccone, 58, who before the couple’s November move, ran the magazine for six years from Quincy, Mass.

“Here it’s just more relaxing,” said Marty Saccone, 59. “And we can still do everything we need to do.”

One thing they need to do is communicate with the rest of the magazine’s staff, which includes a proofreader in Riviera Beach, Fla., a partner in Houma, La., advertising sales staff in New York and California, as well as assistant editors and field contributors scattered throughout the country.

The only difference between publishing in Quincy, Mass., and in Lubec, Saccone said, is that they face a morning – rather than an 11 p.m. – deadline for shipping packages.

That minor inconvenience is more than offset by the couple’s love of their new home, which cost about $145,000 – far less than the average home around Boston. It’s located on the outskirts of town, a good distance from the shore.

“I’m leaving here feet first,” Longest-Saccone said.

Now or never

Lubec’s struggling main drag once bustled with workers from the town’s former sardine packing plants and other commercial concerns. Now it features little more than a lawyer’s office, a hardware store, a pharmacy and a candy shop.

On the edge of downtown sits one of the Saccones’ favorite spots, Murphy’s Village Restaurant, where on this day regulars bantered with the establishment’s two waitresses about the goings-on in town, the poorest town in Washington County and one of the poorest in the state.

“Well, aren’t you fussy today?” one good-natured waitress quipped when a customer asked for homemade chocolate milk rather than the plastic bottle of Hershey’s she placed on the table.

Such small-town familiarity was one of the selling points for Saccone and his wife, who looked for property all along the Maine shoreline, but found they were unable to afford a home on the more populated southern coast.

The Saccones do have one regret about their move to Washington County: They waited too long.

“We always say he was 30 years smarter than us,” Longest-Saccone said of the couple’s newfound friend Basil Woodward, who long ago moved from Brockton, Mass., to the area that his family has called home for generations.

The observation drew a smile from Woodward, 69,who shares his family name with a point of land on Lubec’s eastern shore.

“They don’t do that the day after you move in,” he said.

Back in Aroostook County, Peter Hunt said he, too, heard the clock ticking.

“It was always in the back of my mind that if I stayed any longer, I would never leave,” he said of his former home in Pennsylvania. “The plan was always to come back.”

Perhaps no one is happier Hunt decided to move north than his twin brother, whose affection for The County has grown with each passing year, despite some initial reservations about the remoteness of the area.

“There’s enough here for me,” said Bob Hunt. “I’m not going anywhere.”