Roxanne Quimby

ROXANNE QUIMBY, 63, ended up in Maine in the mid-1970s by way of art school in California. As St. Clair tells the story, after the Transamerica tower turned San Francisco into a “real city,” Quimby and her then-boyfriend joined the back-to-the-land movement and bought 20 acres near Dover-Foxcroft. In Maine, about a decade later, Quimby met a reclusive beekeeper named Burt Shavitz, and together they turned beeswax into a boutique soap business. In 1991, Quimby created the recipe for Burt’s Bees lip balm (that’s Shavitz’s face on the packaging) and sales exploded — she soon relocated her corporate headquarters to North Carolina, a move that has never sat well with her critics. By 2007, Quimby had sold the company to Clorox for nearly a billion dollars. Her personal fortune is said to be in the neighborhood of $350 million, making her the third wealthiest person in Maine after L.L. Bean chairman Leon Gorman and author Stephen King. Even before she cashed out, Quimby had been using her money to buy up land, staggeringly large swaths of land, often from struggling lumber companies. The 100,000-plus acres she now owns puts her at number 88 on The Land Report’s annual list of the nation’s largest landowners.