After sitting vacant for almost a year, the former Route 1 headquarters of Midcoast Conservancy now has new inhabitants.

Boothbay Region Surveyors moved into the space at 290 Route 1 in Edgecomb in early October purchasing the building in March. Midcoast Conservancy moved out of the building in October 2025 and moved all services to its office in Waldoboro.

Owner Nicholas Plumer said his goal with the new space is to consolidate all of his files in one location and also bring the company more visibility.

“My first criteria was to have all of my files in one location,” Plumer said. “It gives us a little more room to spread out. We were kind of all crammed into one floor.”

Plumer has been a professional land surveyor since 2017 and created Boothbay Region Surveyors the same year, buying the records of other surveyors. Over the years, he continued to buy out other surveyors, and he is now the steward of over 20,000 records and files from different land surveys completed by almost 10 other surveyors.

Before moving into the new space on Route 1, Plumer was storing two-thirds of his files at the company’s original office at the Old Town Garage in Boothbay. When landlord died last year, Plumer said the family decided to sell the building so he began searching for a place to move his business. The rest of his files were stored in Bristol in an outbuilding near his home.

The renovation included making one room a “dry plan room,” Plumer said, designed to keep moisture out to preserve the documents within. The room contains 42 filing cabinets full of records.

“I have the records of a lot of people,” Plumer said.

Plumer said he worked out a deal with Midcoast Conservancy. To get a better price, he offered some of his services with the purchase. He referenced the organization’s mission statement and its goal to expand its 16,000 acres of conserved land to 30,000 by 2030.

“So I thought, hey, they might need a surveyor,” Plumer said.

Midcoast Conservancy co-Executive Director of Engagement Stephanie Hanner said the organization is “very pleased” with the arrangement with Plumer and his business. The sale included a combination of cash and surveying services, which Hanner said will allow Midcoast Conservancy to meet some of its surveying needs while also allowing their former building to continue to be “purposeful” to the community.

“It’s a good example of how creative, mutually beneficial arrangements can work well for local organizations and businesses,” Hanner said. “We look forward to continuing to work with our existing surveying partners as well.”

Surveyors are responsible for looking for the boundaries of a property, whether that is a stone wall, stream, or roadway. Plumer said the secondary job within his profession is to help with site development.

While some of the tools are advanced and designed with modern day technology, Plumer said the surveyor’s metal detector has not changed in 40 years.

“The technology that we use is growing a little bit,” Plumer said.

Boothbay Region Surveyors serves customers from the Boothbay region to Rockland to Bangor.

The new location is also next to a substation and Plumer said he hopes the building will not lose power in a storm or outage so he and his team can work consistently throughout the year. He also said the more central location on the main road helps with the commute for his employees.

“Someone’s dreams of moving to the Midcoast of Maine is not going to stop because there’s an ice storm,” Plumer said. “They still have to meet whatever deadline for spring start of construction and they need their survey done in January.”

For more information, call 633-4445 or go to brsmaine.org.

This article appears through a content-sharing agreement with the Lincoln County News.