“Should’ve brought gloves,” she murmured. With Nancy, practicality was always the first layer over hurt.
Rumor beat the facts to the general store. Someone guessed a tech billionaire. Someone else scoffed. A third muttered, “These days they buy anything.” But the truth was stranger. Burnt Jacket Mountain—its trail, its shoreline, its 1,423.7 acres—hadn’t been bought by a person at all. It now belonged to two Delaware companies: Burnt Jacket Holding I, LLC and Burnt Jacket Holding II, LLC.¹¹² No neighbor. No handshake. Just capital letters and an out-of-state address. In a place where people still wave to every passing truck, anonymity felt less like privacy and more like a door slammed softly and permanently shut.
Nancy took it personally. She and Don had maintained the trail for years—clearing brush, repainting blazes, shaping stone steps after storms. Long before anyone knew the owner’s name, she’d salvaged the summit logbooks from the wooden box at the top, afraid construction crews might throw them out. Back home, the books smelled of damp paper and balsam. They overflowed with voices: children scribbling “I hate hiking,” honeymooners marking Perfect Maine Day #2, a careful entry from a man scattering his grandmother’s ashes—she’d climbed the mountain in 1918, and three generations had followed her.
That night, with Don feeding the fire, Nancy ran her hand over the pages. These weren’t just notes. They were evidence that the public had walked this mountain openly and continuously for decades—possibly enough for a prescriptive-easement case.⁹⁶ But the thought didn’t bring relief. It brought a quiet grief that something as simple as walking uphill now required an argument.
Meanwhile, the new owner’s intentions took shape. Permit filings outlined a 4,000-foot driveway curling deep into the peninsula, nearly 12,700 feet of buried electrical lines,⁸⁰ and a secluded residence shielded from all sides. Not a camp. A compound designed to stay unseen.
Steve Yocom at Destination Moosehead Lake tried to stay measured. Burnt Jacket, he said, had long been a “locals’ gem,” a dependable trail used “time and time again.”⁶¹ But even he admitted privately he no longer knew what to tell visitors. The big laminated map behind his desk—its trail network branching across Moosehead like arteries—now had a dead end where Burnt Jacket once offered a quick, friendly climb.
The regional pressure had been building for years. Home prices in Greenville had jumped more than 75 percent in a short span.²⁸³ Lakefront camps that once sold for $350,000 now broke the million-dollar threshold. The people who kept the region alive—teachers, carpenters, lodge workers—were being nudged toward the outskirts of the place they’d sustained. So when an anonymous buyer took an entire peninsula, it didn’t feel like a sale. It felt like a forecast.
On the state’s books, the only “person” who bought Burnt Jacket is a Delaware shell company.
Into that vacuum stepped the rumor: Mark Zuckerberg. It spread because the silence was large enough to accommodate it. The Moosehead Lakeshore Journal traced the Burnt Jacket LLCs to the same Delaware registered agent used by several Zuckerberg-linked entities.⁴³ The reporter didn’t call it evidence—only said it “does little to dismiss” the speculation.¹⁵² For a community used to knowing who built which garage in ’94, the idea of a billionaire hiding behind initials felt less far-fetched than the idea that no one was hiding at all.
Carla Ritchie of the land trust tried to keep the ground from sliding too far.