Lincoln woman finds trouble moving trailer Contractor leaves home in road

LINCOLN – The trailer that Marlene Severance paid to have hauled from Howland to her new home at 360 Half Township Road was left about 50 yards short of its destination on Friday.

She was not pleased.

“I feel like I’ve got ‘sucker’ written across my forehead,” Severance said. She pointed to her head. “Do you see ‘sucker’ written here?”

Apparently despairing of ever getting the trailer through the somewhat narrow driveway opening to her newly built trailer pad, the trailer hauler took half of the $500 he was owed, wrote a receipt and left the 73-foot-long, 14-foot-wide trailer in the middle of Half Township Road.

“We didn’t even know he was going to unhook it,” Severance said. “He stood there talking to us, telling us everything was going to be fine, but then he just left.”

The trailer almost blocked traffic on the road, but perhaps realizing that Severance was in a fix not of her own doing, police who responded Friday afternoon to a call regarding the trailer opted to take no enforcement action, Lincoln dispatchers said.

The unpaved road is not very heavily traveled. Deep into thick woods, it turns south off Lee Road, or Route 2, near Caribou Pond and languorously circles Mattakeunk Pond to the east before reconnecting with Route 2 near the Lee line.

Severance called a friend, Ron Porter of Burlington, who came with a truck that they used to get the trailer off the road, said Severance’s friend Juanita Sullivan of Lincoln. But late Friday afternoon, it was proving to be difficult to get the trailer onto its new cement pad, she said.

“It looks like it’s going to be a late night,” Sullivan said.

They put the trailer on its pad, however, at 6 p.m.

Severance and her husband, who declined to be interviewed, wanted to live off Half Township for its peace and quiet, but the hauler’s disappearance just continues the bad luck the Severances have had since they moved from Augusta and moved in with the Sullivans in June, Sullivan said.

“These guys have run into more problems than Carter’s got liver pills,” Sullivan said.

Declaring “this job is costing me money,” the trailer contractor who built the trailer’s cement pad and installed its septic system left the job before he finished covering and re-seeding the ground over the septic system, Severance said.

That desertion occurred after the contractor asked for another $2,000 to finish his work.

Severance was surprised the trailer hauler defected. She and her husband had cut down a tree and laid logs in a road drainage ditch to help the hauler get the trailer onto her property. She blames laziness for her problems.

“These people just don’t want to work for it,” she said, “unless they get a lot of money.”