No bids submitted for former Moosehead plant

DOVER-FOXCROFT – No one submitted a bid Saturday for the purchase of the vacant Moosehead Manufacturing Co. plant.

An auction was held to sell the 85,000-square-foot building overlooking the Piscataquis River along with the building’s contents, which consisted of about 200 to 300 lots of furniture, small tools, office equipment and woodworking parts.

While about 100 people attended the auction and cleaned out the contents, the building had no takers.

“No one put down the deposit to bid,” John Wentworth, part owner of the property, said Wednesday.

“Under the circumstances of the financial situation nowadays, it’s not unexpected from my perspective,” Wentworth said of the lack of interest in the building. “I was hoping some of these developers who had shown interest [earlier] would have at least stepped up to the plate.” He suggested that the developers perhaps were having a hard time securing finances.

The longtime furniture company went out of business and closed its operations at its plants in Monson and Dover-Foxcroft last year because it became too difficult to compete with cheap foreign imports.

The Monson plant was later purchased by a group headed by Joshua Tardy of Newport, and the company is making furniture under the name of Moosehead Furniture.

The owners decided to put the Dover-Foxcroft building, which is valued by the town at about $500,000, on the auction block.

Wentworth said the board of directors of the former Moosehead Manufacturing Co. will meet in a couple of weeks to decide what to do next with the property. Representatives on the board include the Wentworth-Durham family and professionals in the community, he said.

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