Plans to build world’s tallest flagpole dividing tiny town
COLUMBIA FALLS, MAINE » Lobster boat engines rumble to life in quiet coves. Lumberjacks trudge deep into the woods. Farmers tend expanses of wild blueberries. Maine’s Down East region is where the sunlight first kisses a U.S. state’s soil each day, where the vast wilderness and ocean meet.
Which makes it a striking backdrop to one family’s bold vision for the region: a flagpole jutting upward from the woodlands toward spacious skies — the tallest one ever, reaching higher than the Empire State Building.
And atop it? A massive American flag bigger than a football field, visible from miles away on a clear day.
To promoters, the $1 billion project, funded in part by donations, would unite people of all political stripes and remind them of shared values in an era of national polarization.
Here’s how Morrill Worcester, founder of Worcester Wreath, tells it: “We want to bring Americans together, remind them of the centuries of sacrifice made to protect our freedom, and unite a divided America.”
So far, the project — called the Flagpole of Freedom Park — has done precisely the opposite.
In Columbia Falls, population 485, the place closest to the patch of land where the pole would rise, the debate has laid bare community and cultural flashpoints.
Does the quiet area want the visitors it would bring? Would the massive undertaking scar the landscape? How do you balance development and environmentalism? How do traditional industries fare alongside service-economy jobs?
And perhaps most significant of all: How does an American town demonstrate its love of country in an era when even the Stars and Stripes themselves have been politicized?
Very big plans
The flagpole alone is an audacious proposal.
It would be 1,461 feet, surpassing the Empire State Building, with elevators bringing people to observation decks where they could see clear to Canada.
Frets one resident: “It’s like putting the Eiffel Tower in the Maine wilderness.”
But that isn’t all. Morrill Worcester envisions a village with living history museums telling the country’s story through veterans’ eyes.
There would be a 4,000seat auditorium, restaurants and monument walls with the name of every deceased veteran dating to the Revolution.
That’s about 24 million names. Slick presentations showed what amounted to a patriotic theme park, replete with gondolas to ferry visitors around.
In Columbia Falls, many were stunned by the scale.
It would require paving over woods for parking spaces and construction of housing for hundreds, maybe thousands of workers, potentially transforming this oasis into a sprawl of souvenir shops, fast-food restaurants and malls.
From overhead, the landscape here remains a sprawling green canopy.
Below are dozens of streams, ponds and lakes brimming with trout and historic runs of Atlantic salmon. Deer, moose, black bears, beaver and fisher cats wander the forest floor. Interspersed with the woods are wild blueberry barrens.
“This is the last wilderness on the East Coast,” says Marie Emerson, whose husband, Dell, is a beloved native son, a longtime blueberry farmer and university research farm manager.
She says it’s that rugged coast and pristine wilderness that make this corner of the world special, and a large development could destroy woodlands and wild blueberry barrens that have been here 10,000 years, with Native Americans being the first stewards. She asks: “Do you want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg?”
Tourists already come
Yet not all is gold. Tourists flock here in the summer to escape cities, pollution and noise, and to enjoy clean air and dark starry skies.
But behind the beauty lies a region where many are struggling.
Logging, blueberry picking and lobstering don’t always provide year-round employment; resourceful residents supplement incomes by digging for clams or collecting balsam tips for wreath-making. The region vies for the state’s highest jobless and poverty rates. The county’s residents are among the state’s oldest, and it is dealing with rampant abuse of opioids.
There’s a joke people tell around here. It goes something like this: We may send lobsters, blueberries and wreaths to the world, but our biggest export is young people looking for work.
Visionary’s background
Worcester’s unique-toAmerica story of pride, patriotism and hubris begins at Arlington National Cemetery and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where sacrifices represented by headstones left an impression when he was a boy.
He never forgot, even as he built his wreath-making company.
In 1992, he began providing thousands of balsam wreaths to adorn headstones at Arlington. That continued quietly for years until photos showing the cemetery wreaths against a backdrop of snow went viral.
The annual effort became so big that its nonprofit spinoff, Wreaths Across America, run by his wife, now provides more than 1 million wreaths to military cemeteries and gravesites.
It has made this corner of the world synonymous with patriotic fervor.
Motorists entering Columbia Falls encounter flags and phrases of the Pledge of Allegiance spaced along U.S. 1. A welcome proclaims, “Columbia Falls, Home to Wreaths Across America.”
Few question the family’s motives. But as the wreath program grew, some became skeptical. To them, it looked like Worcester had hitched his cart to a sacred cow: the nation’s veterans.