Get Hunter Carbee talking about the trees within walking distance of his Greenfield home and it will begin a trip down memory lane.
It was 1947 when his grandfather Roland “Pop” Carbee started Carbee Tree Farm in Greenfield, a vision to set up his family with a business that would bring generation upon generation of families to the land he purchased off an out-of-the-way, back road now more than eight decades ago.
Carbee said they started reclaiming the plantations in 1988 and took over the operation of the farm in 2014 upon his father Sheldon’s passing. He plants a couple hundred trees a year. Not all of them survive to grow upwards of eight to 10 foot – to become that perfect centerpiece for the family holiday. There’s a lot that goes into caring for each and every tree, the fertilizing, pruning, weed control and mowing, but for Carbee it’s become therapy and keeps him connected to the land.
“People think you just throw them in the ground and let them grow,” he said. “It’s a lot of work, but it’s peaceful, fun, to see them grow.”
It’s almost as if Pop envisioned his grandson would grow up to be a man among the trees.
Carbee grew up not far from his grandparents’ land, living there in high school with his grandmother Anne. He was in the first class to go all four years at ConVal High School, graduating in 1974.
He had no idea what he wanted to do, but he liked English and creative writing and decided to go to UNH. He’d hitchhike home on the weekends to work at the ski area, and never really took to college.
“I hated it. It didn’t fit,” Carbee said. One weekend he told his dad he was done and the response was simple.
“He said if you’re going to live here you need to get a job,” he said.
So he got one at Monadnock Forest Products, a sawmill in Jaffrey. He loved the smell of the cut lumber and soon realized he was meant to be out in the woods, cutting down the trees that would be brought to the sawmill.
“I went backward,” Carbee said. “I followed it back to the stump.”
He got a job with Dick Foot in Francestown and it was the beginning of what has been a long career connecting with forests around the state. Recently, Carbee was named the New Hampshire Outstanding Forester of the Year for 2021 by the Granite State Division of the Society of American Foresters.
“I look at some of the names and I’m quite taken aback,” he said. “It’s a high honor.”
Carbee credits Foot, who was one of the recipients on the list, with teaching him how to handle himself in the woods.
“He pretty much taught me how to run a chainsaw,” Carbee said. “It’s an art to run one of those things. A real science to cutting down a tree.”
There was something exhilarating about the work, cutting through a tree four or five feet in diameter at the stump.
“It was just such a cool feeling,” Carbee said. “Everybody at some point in their life should drop a tree.”
Back in the old days, there was no real thought to carefully selecting what trees to cut. But when Carbee got into it, it was around the time when consulting foresters were becoming more prevalent, teaching the art of cutting to promote regeneration.
“People realized you get to go back every 10 to 15 years,” he said.
He loved the work, but after 10 years there was this pull for an adventure.
“I wanted to see the world – or at least the country,” he said. He got a job in Nebraska and then embarked on a trip – hitchhiking no less – from Colorado to California with a guy from Jaffrey he met in a Colorado bar. From there he boarded a plane for Hawaii and “by the time I got off that plane I had $35 in my pocket.”
He waited tables in a diner and hung sheetrock for six months before returning to Nebraska. Then he missed New Hampshire. Upon his return, he got back into the logging business and worked at the ski area making snow at night.
On May 9, 1987, Carbee learned the hard way just how dangerous his line of work was. It was the first day on a job at Mount Kearsarge and Carbee arrived early to put in some extra hours. There was only one problem: his ax and wedge were at another job site.
“I thought I could get away without them and it was a near-fatal mistake,” he said. He was attempting to drop a white birch tree, but its branches were intertwined with that of a beech tree. When he cut that one nothing happened. So he began to cut other smaller trees away to help.
A gust of wind caused the trees to become loose and both trees went down.
“I never saw the birch tree coming,” Carbee said, and it landed right on top of him. “Why I’m alive I don’t know. I never had such agonizing pain in my life.” His leg was turned sideways, but thankfully the other members of the crew arrived and drove him from Sutton to Concord Hospital in the back of his pickup truck.
“If I had been further out, I could have died,” Carbee said because of the internal bleeding. He also had a fractured pelvis and dislocated spine. He spent a few days in the ICU, requiring six units of blood, and seven weeks total in the hospital. “Somehow I made it.”
That fall he applied to UNH forestry school to work toward a future in forestry consulting.
“All of a sudden it all fell into place,” he said. “And it’s a lot easier to spraypaint a tree then cut it down with a chainsaw.”
Upon his graduation in 1992, Carbee embarked on a long career consulting loggers on the fine art of cutting for maximum return, while keeping an eye on the future.
“I learned the science of it and put it to work,” he said. “There’s an art to doing it.”
He got into leading training workshops through the New Hampshire Timberland Owners Association and always made sure to share the story of his accident to offer perspective of just how important safe practices are.
When his parents Sheldon and Beverly took over the property, Carbee helped out a lot and after they both passed, he became the third generation to officially call it home, which he shares with his longtime partner Marcia. Carbee also has three grown children: Justin, Alison and Chad.
His grandfather bought the 60-acre property just a few years post the Great Depression, using money he had saved up from fighting in World War I. The 1790s home was in bad shape, but Pop saw something in both the property and the town that Carbee said probably had 300 residents at the time.
The family has a long history in town; his grandmother Anne held the Boston Post Cane and his parents ran Carbees Corner, a general store, gift and coffee shop right downtown. They also made items in the woodshop that were sold through a mail-order catalog, known as Greenfield Industries.
“They did quite a bit of business,” Carbee said. “It was the Amazon of the day.”
By a stream behind the house, there’s an old foundation for what once housed a sawmill and back then, they weren’t as selective and deliberate with what trees they chose to cut.
“They weren’t weeding the garden,” Carbee said. “So it’s amazing the resiliency of our forests.” Nice oak and pine came back and over the years he’s used his expertise to maintain the property’s forests, even cutting to gain a view of Crotched Mountain.
The activity around the property is captivating. There’s nesting woodcock that perform their evening aerial displays in the springtime. They have bluebirds and cedar waxwings and towhees, along with many deer and young fawns.
He enjoys gardening the property, growing things like corn, squash, beans, tomatoes and potatoes.
“There’s a little bit of self-sufficiency there,” Carbee said.
Even when he went to UNH, hitchhiked across the country and spent many years living in Bristol, Carbee knew he’d be back in Greenfield at some point. It’s where his roots were and always have been.