by Ellen Harvey, Harness Racing Communications

Freehold, NJ — Thomas Dillon, of Anson, Maine, who owns dozens of Standardbreds, many with his son, Scott, sold two prized assets this month.

The 3-year-old trotting filly, Current Chip, owned by Thomas Dillon with partner Walter Hight, finished two undefeated seasons in her native Maine last month and was sold for $30,000 on Nov. 12 at the Standardbred Horse Sale in Harrisburg to William Weaver.

The Dillons helped preserve nearly 4,800 acres along the Appalachian Trail in New Hampshire.

Just ten days earlier, on Nov. 2, the Dillons, who are in the logging business, helped preserve nearly 4,800 acres along the Appalachian Trail in New Hampshire. The Dillons sold the land, some of it too rugged even for logging, to the National Park Service, who used $2.48 million in funds from the Forest Legacy Program for the purchase.

The 4,800 acres consist of eight miles of the Appalachian Trail in the Mahoosuc Mountain Range east of Berlin, New Hampshire. Most of the land is above 2,500 feet of elevation from Bald Cap Mountain to Mount Carlo; it also contains many streams that flow in to the Adroscoggin River.

Dillon’s logging land cuts across northern New England.

“We’re primarily in Maine and New Hampshire and some over in Vermont. Any kind of tree that grows, we cut,” says Dillon. “Anything we cut, we sell. For all imaginable purposes. I don’t actually do the milling of it, the making of the lumber. We sell the round wood or the logs or the pulp wood (for paper) whatever it might be. That means it goes to sawmills to be created into lumber or veneer or something like that. We also sell to wood pellet mills.”

The acreage sold for preservation is just a portion of the Dillons’ logging land.

“The 4,800 acres the trail part is on is located on the easterly boundary of the property I own. I own 22,000 acres there, this is just a portion of that 22,000 acres,” he says.

Dillon has been an active outdoorsman in that region and knows it well.

“I’m actually from Anson, Maine, 100 miles east of Berlin, New Hampshire,” he says. “I spent my whole life in the woods, in one form or another, hunting, fishing and of course I worked in the woods myself. I have walked many, many tracts of property in my business. I started out as a lumberjack.”

Dillon’s son, Scott, is also very active as a horse owner and his interests lie more at the track, says his father.

“I brought him up at the racetrack,” laughed Dillon. “I remember once, I said to his mother, ‘We have to expose him to a little of what the real world is out there.’ He says, ‘Dad, I’m afraid to run a chain saw.’ So he became a handicapper at a very young age. I’ve got pictures, photos as he’s growing up through the different win photos and different places we’ve been — he was always there at the head of the horse.”

Dillon is pleased with the business decision to sell land that will bring great joy to nature lovers and tourism to the region for generations to come.

“I am in business to sell trees and sell land, so I was happy to sell but it was good to sell it to a market as I did. We all win that way, correct?”