BELFAST – Stately, old sugar maples stand like 100-foot-tall sentries over the headstones of Grove Cemetery, lending an aura of peacefulness to this burial ground located just off a busy Belfast commercial strip.

But 10 years ago this month, the rows of trees that gave Grove Cemetery its name looked far from serene.

“They were so broken that it was tough to even look at them,” Nancy Caudle-Johnson, with Camden-based Johnson Treekeepers LLC, said recently while standing just inside the cemetery gates.

Like countless trees throughout Maine that January, Grove Cemetery’s maples were bending and breaking under the weight of a thick armor of ice. Limbs from ice-encapsulated trees all over the state eventually gave in to the stress, often taking power lines with them as they crashed to the ground.

The great Ice Storm of ’98 and the havoc it created are seared into the memories of the people who lived through it. The storm’s legacy also can be read in distorted, stunted and deceased trees throughout the nation’s most heavily forested state.

But while the immediate effects of the ice storm were severe in many places, and some areas suffered serious long-term effects, tree experts said Maine’s forests largely weathered the historic ice storm relatively well.

That’s because trees have a remarkable ability to recover, according to Bill Ostrofsky, forest pathologist for the Maine Forest Service.

“It was absolutely catastrophic from a weather standpoint; there is no doubt about that,” said Ostrofsky, who has tracked the storm damage with both the Maine Forest Service and the University of Maine. “But on an individual tree basis, we pretty well expected that most of the trees would survive.”

That’s not to say the Ice Storm of ’98 had no long-term effects on trees and the substantial Maine industries that depend on them, Ostrofsky and others said.

The trees that snapped in two, split down the middle at a fork or lost most of their leaf-bearing canopies were obvious casualties. Many of those were harvested during the first few years as landowners began the slow process of salvaging what they could before nature had its way with the victims.

Hardwoods such as oaks, maples, ash and birch were among the hardest hit.

Bruce Probert remembers how it sounded like a war waging outside his Searsport home back in January 1998 as the crack of snapping branches echoed like rifle reports. Probert estimated that 75 to 80 percent of the trees on his 175-acre property were hardwoods, so the damage was significant.

“For two to three years, it was primarily salvage work,” said Probert, who harvested trees part time to supplement his income.

But the number of trees that fell into that category was relatively low, according to Maine Forest Service figures.

In 1998, approximately 6.8 million cords of wood were harvested in the state, down from 7 million in 1997. And the number of cords harvested actually dropped to 6.1 million the year after the ice storm.

More subtle effects are becoming evident a decade later, however, when landowners begin harvesting trees that were damaged but survived. Broken limbs or an injured trunk are pathways for decay, allowing moisture and pests easier access to the tree’s main stem.

How trees weathered the elements after injury – and whether they were helped along by strategic human pruning – can make the difference between a landowner selling a tree by the board foot or the cord.

“If it’s just discolored, it may still be suitable for construction,” Ostrofsky said. “But if there is any decay … it may not be good for anything other than firewood.”

Some of the more dire predictions related to tree and forest health never materialized.

Immediately after the storm, there was considerable fear that the beaten and battered trees that survived would be more susceptible to insects as the trees diverted energy to rebuilding their crowns.

Millions of weakened trees increased the prospects of a widespread infestation from such pests as the sugar maple borer or bronze birch borer.

That never happened, said state entomologist Dave Struble.

Likewise, Maine’s maple syrup industry – the nation’s second-largest after Vermont – was not as gravely affected as many feared. A swath of sugar maple farms in central Maine were hard hit by the storm. But many injured maples growing in good soil seem to have recovered, said Kathy Hopkins, who works with maple producers on behalf of the University of Maine Cooperative Extension.

“There were a few places where the damage was so great that they had to cease their maple production,” Hopkins said. “There weren’t many of those.”

The massive ice storm created a boom for arborists in the state and other tree-care professionals as towns and homeowners spent millions of dollars attempting to save beloved ornamental and landscaping trees.

Back in Belfast, crews with Treekeepers LLC spent an entire year climbing and hand-pruning the massive sugar maples that grow in Grove Cemetery. None had to be removed. The company also had a contract to prune trees in downtown Belfast.

With the help of snowshoes, the company’s senior arborist, Douglas N. Johnson, stood on top of several feet of snow piled up below one of the massive maples recently. Located not far from the main cemetery gates, this tree was in such bad shape after the storm that Johnson debated taking it down.

Ten years later, the tree is tall and healthy, if a bit misshapen, as it stands guard over those resting below, just as it has since the late 1800s.

To folks like Douglas and Nancy Johnson, such specimens are a testament to the enduring strength and beauty of a tree.

“It was really a success,” Douglas Johnson said. “It’s amazing how well they’ve done, given their age.”