Loggers Voice Spring 2017

Photography by Kyle Haley
R
ANGELEY - M&H Logging and Construction
was started in 1981 by cousins David “Joe”
Haley, and Scott Millbury after they decided to
combine their two smaller operations – Joe was
logging with a cable skidder at the time and Scott had a
Ford wheeler with a crane.
From that small beginning a company emerged
that has adapted over more than 30 years to handle
everything from logging, to residential and commercial site
work, to road construction, to septic system installation.
The cousins continue to own and manage the
company together, with Joe mainly handling the logging
side and Scott running the garage and overseeing most the
construction. At one time the logging arm of the company
– J&S Logging – had its own employees,
but these days everyone is an M&H
employee and a worker who may be
logging in the winters will generally be
working construction in the summers.
A third cousin, Ken Haley, is
general manager for the company, and he
has seen it grow a lot from what it was in
1981.
“In the wintertime, we have about
18 employees, and in the summertime, we
get up to around 24 to 26 depending on what we have for
work,” Ken said.
Growth started in 1986 when Joe and Scott bought
the Paul Bolduc Logging Company which added six
skidders to their fleet. By the late 1980s they had added an
excavator, bucket loader, and bulldozer, as well as new
tractor-trailers to keep up with the increased wood output.
In the early 1990s M&H expanded again, adding a
Rottne cut-to-length system with processor and forwarder –
one of the first Maine companies to get into cut-to-length
logging. After four years with the larger SMV processor,
M&H purchased a smaller Rottne thinning system, a
Rottne 2000. Around this same time, M&H also had hand
crews operating that consisted of around eight to ten
Canadian and American loggers.
During this period of expansion, M&H began
operating in central and southern Maine in addition to its
traditional base in the Western Mountains, and maintained
an office in Gorham. The company undertook major road
construction projects including stretches of state highways
on U.S. Route 2 in Dixfield, Route 27 in Coburn Gore, and
the Route 3 connector to I-95 Exit 113 in Augusta.
By the mid-2000s, M&H had scaled back to
working in the Western Mountains where there was plenty
of work at the time. It was also at this
time that the company’s last hand crew
disappeared as M&H bought its first
feller buncher. From there, M&H
operated both a mechanical crew and the
smaller Rottne 2000 thinning processors
up until 2014, when the job that the
processors were working on over the past
decade had finally come to an end, and
with the downturn of the pulp market
reducing the need for them. The
processors each had well over 12,000 hours on them and
the forwarder well over 25,000 hours when they were
traded.
Today, M&H operates a 2011 753J feller buncher,
two 648G-III grapple skidders, and a John Deere 200
ProPac Delimber. The company also runs two Hood cranes
to load with and has five tractor-trailers as well as a 50/48
Morbark chipper in which serves both the logging side of
the business as well as the construction side of the
business.
M&H Continued on Page 7
4 Professional Logging Contractors of Maine Loggers Serving Loggers Since 1995