Ford Reiche addresses historic preservation on and offshore
By Julia Bayly
WHAT COULD POSSIBLY be of interest to a woodpecker that it would fly 10 miles out into Casco Bay to one of the state’s loneliest lighthouses to investigate?
A somewhat esoteric question, but only one of hundreds posed by Ford Reiche ’76 as he undertook one of the more logistically challenging historic restoration projects in the state — the complete makeover of the lighthouse at Halfway Rock, located 10 miles from Portland in Casco Bay.
Reiche would be the first to say historic preservation is one of his passions. At the same time, he freely admits you need to be just a bit nuts to undertake the projects.
Then again, no one can say Reiche has ever shied away from a challenge or hard work.
At UMaine he was a member of the Honors College, be longed to Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity, and earned a varsity letter on the university’s sailing team.
He graduated with the Class of ’76 as a political science major and earned a law degree from the University of Maine School of Law in 1979.
The next year he turned his attention to starting his own business — Safe Handling, Inc. — based in Auburn. The logistics and transportation company moved chemicals used in the paper industry and ethanol.
By the time Reiche sold Safe Handling to interests in Utah in 2009, it had grown into an $18 million company.
Through it all — classes at UMaine, graduate work at the law school, and developing a successful business, thoughts of historic preservation were never far from his mind. In fact, you could say he was born to it.
“I grew up in a 1797 home in Falmouth,” Reiche said. “So I have been around historic preservation work informally and formally my whole life.”
Reiche also credits his commitment to historic preservation to some beloved faculty at UMaine.
“I was reflecting on the work, and that passion really began when I was at Orono,” he said.
Those professors were Robert Albion, a former historian for the United States Navy who taught maritime history, and historian-folklorist Sandy Ives.
“Those two people really ignited my passion for something,” he said. “That had never happened before.”
He said he’s restored about a dozen buildings over the last 50 years.
“At first my wife and I did it to trade up in our homes or to make a buck here and there,” he said. “Gradually, I learned about preservation [and] since selling my business 15 years ago, the restoration work has been mostly non-profit.”
Even during his years with Safe Handling, he was reconditioning old buildings. He counts among the first, a small rail- road station from the tiny Oxford County town of Gilead (population 195 at the last census).
It was built in 1851 and is the oldest station this side of the Mississippi. Despite its half century of neglect, Reiche saw nothing but potential and successfully got it placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Before completing any restoration on the building, he first moved it to Auburn, where it served as his business office for 20 years. After that, he moved it back to Gilead, completely restored it, and donated it to the local historical society.
Thus began what has become his work as a non-profit for the last two decades — seeking out and restoring some of Maine’s most historically significant buildings.
It’s hard and, at times, dirty work. It’s also wrapped in federal red tape because everything he does has to be submitted to and approved by the National Register of Historic Places.
Five of his projects are buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Then came the lighthouse.
Preserving a lighthouse
Halfway Rock Light Station is considered one of the country’s iconic lighthouses. It sits in the middle of Casco Bay — halfway between the two points of land that create the bay itself. Built in 1871, it had sat on a chunk of rock abandoned by the federal government for 40 years, pounded by waves, wind, rain, and snow.
“It had been boarded up for decades,” Reiche said. “Someone had to do it.”
So when the federal government listed the lighthouse as an asset to be disposed of — as in sold off — in 2014, he decided to join the bidding during the online auction — after six potential buyers took one look at it and refused to buy it outright.
It took six months of bidding and re-bidding and at the end it was down to Reiche and the billionaire chairman of the board at Polaroid. In the end, Reiche’s nonprofit won with a bid of $293,000 and were the proud owners of a derelict building 10 miles offshore.
Well, almost.
Turned out the town clerks back in the 1800s were not as detail oriented as those of today. Somehow the deed contained the small print that the rock on which the lighthouse stood was owned not by Maine, but by Massachusetts.
Luckily, Reiche was able to work with the National Park Service at the federal level to get the deed switched to Maine so he could complete the purchase.
The restoration plans called for bringing the lighthouse back to its 1950 condition. Reiche said they picked that decade because there was a feature about Halfway Rock that appeared in Parade Magazine in 1942.
“It had some really detailed interior and exterior photos,” he said. “That gave me all the clues I needed to do an accurate restoration.”
First on the agenda was making the building weather tight — there were holes in the roof, missing windows, and openings that had been letting in the elements for decades.
“Preservation work is really one task after another,” Reiche said. “But it’s more than spiffing up an old building — it has to all be historically accurate.”
And in this case, all materials, tools, and labor had to be brought in by boat and docked on a small piece of land notorious for ripping apart boats for over a century.
In fact, Reiche lost seven boats and seven motors during the restoration project.
If all that was not enough, while he was working on the project, he was being filmed for a television documentary.
“Just as I was starting the restoration, someone at the Discovery Channel called me about doing a documentary of that process,” he said. “I didn’t want any publicity because restoring an offshore lighthouse is a pretty nutty thing to do.”
But after Discovery sweetened the offer with a $40,000 donation and at the urging of his wife, Reiche finally agreed. And soon found himself working against the clock.
The Discovery filming crew would show up every couple of months to film his progress. According to Reiche, they wanted to see a lot of progress compared to their previous visit.
“It did end up being great fun,” he said. “It was 14 days of shooting spread over a longer time, and I knew they had a completion date in mind.”
It took 22 people working full time onsite over a long summer, but the restoration work was completed within that deadline.
“It’s good I had that deadline,” Reiche said. “Otherwise, I would probably still be pooping away at it.”
Recognition and awards
According to Bob Trapani, Jr., executive director of the American Lighthouse Foundation, Reiche is being modest.
“Ford is just indomitable and relentless,” Trapani said. “I have never met a person with more determination or ‘can-do’ attitude.”
Those qualities are especially important when working miles out to sea on a 19th century lighthouse like Halfway Rock Light Station.
“Here is this offshore beacon and this person who’s able to accomplish this project both with high level logistics and a time limit,” he remarked.
Reiche documented the work on the lighthouse, in addition to a comprehensive history of the structure, in his book Halfway Rock Light Station, published in 2018.
Both the book and his restoration work have earned Reiche awards from maritime historical organizations.
Not surprisingly, Reiche is quite humble when it comes to the recognitions.
“I did end up winning a few awards,” he said. “But competition is somewhat limited in the world of lighthouse preservation.”
While he often shies away from publicity and promoting his own work, others are more than happy to recognize his efforts in both business and historic preservation.
In 2008 and in 2009 for his business successes he was named Maine Small Business Leader of the Year by the Small Business Administration and Maine Large Business Leader of the Year by Maine Biz, respectively.
Most recently, he was honored by the Maine Historical Society with its 2024 Neal B. Allen Award for making an outstanding contribution to Maine history. He was also presented the 2024 Distinguished Service Award by the National Maritime Historical Society.
Trapani is not one bit surprised Reiche has earned the awards and that his accomplishments go far beyond any accolades.
“These are structures that are some of the most unique in our nation — and that is not an overstatement,” Trapani said. “Lighthouses were built for the purpose of saving lives and it does not matter your depth of knowledge — when you are looking at a lighthouse, you know you are looking at something special.” Reiche learned a lot of restoration work early on when he could not afford to hire contractors.
“Some restoration work can be pretty exacting, and some of it is just plain nasty — it’s like anything else, though, you can really learn something deeply when you start at the ground floor,” he said. “I still do some of the work myself, but I also know the handful of skilled contractors who will do these projects. It requires artisans with a particular commitment to doing things the long way, and sometimes in remote places under trying conditions.”
Halfway Rock Light Station, he added, offered all of the above.
Confronting future challenges
Reiche is quite pleased with how the lighthouse turned out, but he’s worried for its future. And for the future of many of the historical buildings along Maine’s coast.
“The Gulf of Maine is warming up faster than anywhere else on the planet,” he said. “Those warming waters are causing sea levels to rise.”
The back-to-back coastal storms a year ago caused major damage to lighthouses in Maine. Reiche knows this because when the towns and historical societies could not get out to inspect their properties, he took it upon himself to charter a helicopter and document the damage.
Those storms, he said, were bad but what made them worse were the high tides and storm surges resulting from those rising sea levels.
It’s created something of a balancing act.
“When you are working with buildings on the National Register, you can’t modify them at all,” Reiche said. “But to save them and make them safe from what’s happening with climate change, we have to, or we are going to lose them.”
Reiche has no intention of slowing down on his preservation work. Most recently he’s turned his eyes and talents skyward with the Maine Steeples Fund. The non-profit was established to support local efforts to restore church steeples of historic, cultural, and community significance in small cities and towns in Maine.
“In 2025 I intend to inventory every historic church in Maine and there are more than 2,000 of them — some gone and some still here,” he said. “In most of these small towns there are churches, and those steeples are the tallest [structures] in the town.”
He’s also looking forward to working on more lighthouses in Maine.
That’s a very good thing, according to Trapani.
“In the world of lighthouses it has always been governments and nonprofits responsible for them,” he said. “But in recent years private owners came into play [and] in some cases no one else came forward but someone like Ford is blazing a trail that shows lighthouse preservation is sustainable.”
“Do I ever have second thoughts when I take on a project?” Reiche said. “Absolutely, sometimes that second thought is, ‘Why the heck didn’t I have a first thought before I got into this‘ [but] like they say, ‘Experience is the sum of all your past mistakes.’”
Oh, and as for that woodpecker at Halfway Rock?
Turns out the lighthouse is a popular resting spot for a whole host of shore-birds as they migrate through the area. Their routes take them right over Casco Bay and the lighthouse is now a beacon for them, just like it was for the ships so many years ago.