Carrie Jones and Shaun Farrar

Mar 22, 2026

BAR HARBOR—On a sunny March morning in Bar Harbor, the sound of children stacking firewood carried across Hamilton Station—small hands thumping logs into place, learning the old work of staying warm. It looked, at first glance, like something ordinary in Maine. But this wood wasn’t just for winter. It was for neighbors who might not make it through without it.

“Early morning and late night is when you get cold,” Shawn said, standing in the brittle air beside a pile of donated firewood last fall, his furnace broken and winter closing in.

On Mount Desert Island, that kind of cold is familiar. So, increasingly, is the effort to fight it: one log, one neighbor, one small act of kindness at a time.

Getting cold is exactly what the Mount Desert Island region is trying to prevent through a massive volunteer effort called the MDI Community Woodbank.

This March, the kids got involved.

First the Town of Bar Harbor, Malvern-Belmont, Goodwins, Colton Sanborn, and Allie Bodge delivered the MDI Community Woodbank a pile of hardwood logs March 19 at Hamilton Station just off Route 3 in Bar Harbor.

The next day, the entire fourth grade at Conners Emerson School in Bar Harbor bused over to the site. It was the second group of fourth graders who stacked, loaded, and piled wood. Earlier this month, the Tremont Consolidated School fourth graders did the same.

That might sound like business as usual. A lot of Maine kids grow up with wood stoves, stack wood, learn to chop it, see their adults do the same as they heat their homes or camps.

But it’s not business as usual at all. This is about kindness. It’s about volunteering. It’s about empathy and hard work and helping to keep their neighbors warm.

“The wood bank is for people struggling to stay warm in their home through winter. With rising bills like oil, electric, taxes, food, and medicine. Lots of folks are in need of fuel. Firewood is one way that I can help,” Andrew Flanagan told the Bar Harbor Story last year.

Flanagan lives in Bar Harbor and owns Maine Wood Guy. He’s been a lumberjack with Timber Tina over in Trenton. He’s a volunteer firefighter in the town of Mount Desert. He’s a dad, husband, friend, but mostly he’s a guy who sees things and does things about the things he sees, stepping up.

“I started the MDI Community Woodbank after thinking about it for years. And when I saw the Downeast Wood Bank, I knew that I needed to start one on MDI,” he said of the wood bank that covers towns off the island. “They do a great job.”

Linda Lunt, Barbara Baron-Gifford, Natalie Jade Hinckley, and Maria Chad Kessel join Flanagan on the volunteer board.

The need is great and as the wood bank journeys through its first season, those involved hope that they will be able to meet the demand.

They are just about out of seasoned wood. Now they’re collecting, stacking, and drying for next winter.

That’s the point of the Mount Desert Island wood bank, the only one on the island. Neighbors who have wood bring it. Businesses who have extra wood bring it. Neighbors who need it and have a wood-burning stove can take the wood for free to stay warm.

For some households with lower incomes, heating costs can eat up one-third of their annual incomes. Half of Maine homes use wood for heat or to supplement their other forms of heat.

Before Flanagan and his volunteer crew began the MDI Community Wood Bank, the closest wood bank is the Downeast Wood Bank, which serves families in the towns of Blue Hill, Brooklin, Ellsworth, Lamoine, Sedgwick, Surry, and Trenton.

The work of keeping warm in Maine has always been hard, honest labor—cutting, hauling, stacking against the long dark. But on Mount Desert Island, that work is becoming something more: a community promise that no one should have to face the cold alone.

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HOW TO HELP OR GET HELP OR LEARN MORE:

To contact the MDI Community Wood Bank to donate or if you need wood and would like to coordinate a pickup time, email them at mdicommunitywoodbank@gmail.com.

Hardwood donations can be delivered anytime at Hamilton Station, #831 State Rt. 3. in person.

Cash, check or Venmo is also being accepted for monetary donations.

Machias Savings Bank can take donations anonymously, so just head on in and tell them what you’d like to donate to.

More information is also available at the Facebook page, which is here.

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LINKS TO LEARN MORE

Woodbanks.org

MDI Woodbank Facebook page

The woodbank’s website and ways you can help.

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All photos, Shaun Farrar/Bar Harbor Story and are of the volunteers at the wood bank.

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