Neighbors

Bill Donnell at his clapboard mill in Sedgwick’s “industrial area.”

Many residents refer to it as the town’s industrial area.

Others in town are unaware of its existence, but the pine clapboards produced at Donnell’s Clapboard Mill off the Old County Road since 1981 have earned a reputation for being the finest traditional clapboards produced in the world.

Whether the mill is known or not, it seems that everyone in town has at least heard of its proprietor, Bill Donnell.

Donnell has served on the town’s Budget Committee for longer than he can remember. He is a member of the Historical Society and has moderated many town meetings.

According to a 1990 issue of New England Farmer, Donnell makes the only radially sawn, 8-foot clapboards in the world. The magazine referred to his business as the “best known little sawmill in North America.”

Fine Homebuilding and Old-House Journal have called his products “the Gucci of Clapboards.” They’ve been used to restore such national treasures as the Nathaniel Hawthorne Manse in Massachusetts and Trinity Church in Providence, R.I.

At 72, Donnell continues to work his sawmill and tend to the 75-acre farm he and his former wife bought in 1977.

He started the clapboard mill four years later when his wife wanted clapboards on the house, which was built in the late 1700s. He told her what passed for clapboards at the time were of little value and then set about to collect the 18th and 19th century tools and equipment that he would use to make clapboards.

The business took off; the house project did not. Donnell said friends partially completed the siding project just two years ago.

Time means next to nothing to Donnell.

“I pay no attention to time,” he said, drawing on a small pipe, one of several he makes from apple branches and other woods on his property. “Time is man’s conceit.”

He does have a battery-powered clock, inherited from his mother.

“So, I can appear responsible and be where I say I’m going to be. Other than that, I pay little attention,” he said.

Indeed, he depends on weather, not time, for drying the logs, even for receiving the logs from foresters.

“I depend upon acts of God, with no legal advice involved,” he said.

He charges the same for his clapboards today as he did 18 years ago.“I’m a one-man war against inflation,” he said.

The air-dried clapboards he fashions from eastern white pine are the longest-lasting things one can use to side a house, Donnell said. “The only thing that will outlast it is granite, and that hangs hard.”

The youngest of several planners he uses was made in 1880. Visitors often ask him where he can get parts for the antiques he uses in the mill. He laughs.

“They didn’t worry about that,” he said. “If it didn’t last five generations, someone would be banging on the door, complaining.”

Donnell was born in Bath and graduated from Chester High School in Pennsylvania in 1949. His father had gone there after World War II to work. In 1949, Donnell entered the University of Maine.

True to his relationship with “time,” he graduated 12 years later.