By Sonja Heyck-Merlin
A new community garden initiative in Van Buren, Maine, cultivates not just food but also relationships. In a town where residents rarely gathered, fresh vegetables and beehives now bring people together. Luke Dyer, Van Buren’s town manager, and others involved in community revitalization call it placemaking: creating public spaces to grow and deepen connections between people.
Van Buren, with a population of about 1,600, is located in northernmost Aroostook County along the St. John River. By the time Dyer became the town manager, in mid-2022, 50% of the downtown buildings were owned by Van Buren due to tax acquisition. The one annual community event held downtown was a raucous Main Street Party, which, as a former police sergeant of 16 years, Dyer did not look forward to. “I’m not a religious or praying man, but I think that was the weekend I prayed the most every year. Like, ‘Please rain, please, please rain,’” Dyer says.
The town was in desperate need of a change. Dyer remembers his early conversations with Van Buren’s elected town council as frank appeals to shake things up a bit. He recalls saying, “We’re going to try some different things because we’ve been taking left turns for 25 years, and I’m not a mathematician, but I know when you take so many left turns, you end up right where you were. So, let’s try some right turns. We’ve got to make some decisions based on what we can do to make the town a better place to live.”
With a supportive town council, three years into Dyer’s management role and many late-night internet searches later, the town now uses placemaking as its central tenet in community planning and decision making. And, Van Buren’s community garden showcases how the town is utilizing placemaking strategies to reinvent its downtown.
In May of 2008, two years after Dyer became the police sergeant, Van Buren and much of northern Aroostook County experienced a 100-year weather event in which the St. John River flooded. It’s commonly joked that the river is a mile wide and an inch deep except during spring run-off. In May of 2008, however, melting snow and rain raised the river more than 30 feet, causing widespread damage. Parts of Van Buren were submerged, and the town’s border station to Saint-Leonard, New Brunswick, Canada was destroyed.
During the rebuilding of the station, the roads were changed, diverting the flow of cross-border traffic out of Van Buren’s town center. “It devastated the downtown. You can literally take an old picture and, with a magic marker, just check off businesses. That’s when we started tax acquiring a lot of these properties,” Dyer says.
Dyer knew that the idea of a large employer moving into town, bringing employment and economic growth, and breathing life into Main Street, was unlikely. He began digging for resources. Anne Ball, program director at the Maine Downtown Center, told Dyer about the Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design (CIRD), a program of the National Endowment for the Arts. Dyer immediately recognized this as a life-changing opportunity for Van Buren.
When communities apply for a CIRD grant, they submit a design problem in need of a solution. The problem was clear in Dyer’s mind: How to reimagine Van Buren’s struggling downtown? In 2023, Van Buren was awarded a grant, one of only 17 communities selected across the United States. As part of the award, CIRD assembled an expert multidisciplinary team to help identify what a community could use and benefit from during redevelopment. (CIRD funding was recently cut by the Trump administration, but Van Buren had already utilized its funding.)
Around the same time, Van Buren also began working with the Maine Department of Transportation’s Village Partnership Initiative, a state program that assists towns in revitalizing their village centers and downtown areas through streetscape and sidewalk improvements. A landscape architect from Aceto Kimball Landscape Architecture pointed out some empty greenspace in Van Buren’s downtown.
“Now I call them the missing teeth in town,” Dyer says. One of the missing teeth was a 3.1-acre cul-de-sac on Grant Street. The property is bordered by Violette Stream, a tributary of the St. John River that also flooded in 2008, destroying the three houses sited there.
The CIRD team and landscape architect thought the cul-de-sac would make a perfect place for a park. Dyer, however, had been told by the previous town administration that when the property was handed to the town by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) the new deed contained strict development restrictions. But when Dyer read the deed, it was clear that although no permanent structures on foundations could be built, it could still be a park.
With visions of redeveloping this lot on his mind, Dyer took a trip to visit his daughter in Putney, Vermont, an artsy, vibrant town that, according to Dyer, has long taken placemaking seriously. His daughter was eager to show him her community garden plot in downtown Putney. When Dyer witnessed the vibe at the garden — an onsite farmers’ market, live music and theater, crafters, and his 32-year-old daughter interacting with the elderly population who made up the bulk of the 40 garden-plots users — he saw possibilities of what could happen at Van Buren’s Grant Street cul-de-sac. But first, they needed to build a park and a community garden.
To fund the garden’s development and construction, he applied for and was awarded a $44,000 Maine Community Resilience Program (CRP) grant through the Governor’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future (GOPIF). The grant will be matched by the town and through private donations.
There was already a small community garden effort in Van Buren — a few raised beds at an apartment building — but Dyer envisioned using the CRP funds to accomplish something grander and more multifaceted.
“We want to create an avenue for people to commune. We want to bring the community together to help ease elderly loneliness. We want to teach people about food sustainability, so they can grow some of their own food. We have a lot of food insecurity here,” Dyer says. He also hopes that the corrugated metal 8-by-4-foot raised beds will help prevent erosion on the banks of Violette Stream. They were designed by landscape engineers to capture stormwater runoff.
The 2025 growing season marks the garden’s first year in production. Currently, there are 20 raised beds (two each for 10 gardeners) separated by tidy gravel pathways. There is plenty of space to add beds as demand increases.
Melody York was one of the first people to claim her spot by going to the town office and paying the yearly fee. For 30 dollars, York gets a raised bed, seeds, access to tools, and a section in one of the two 12-by-32-foot Amish-built greenhouses. The other greenhouse will be used to grow shade tree saplings that will eventually be planted downtown.
York, who moved to Van Buren six years ago when her husband took a job as the pastor at the Gateway Baptist Church, had attempted to grow a garden in her backyard, but the soil quality was poor, and she was concerned about contaminants after learning that there had been a junkyard nearby. Since she only lives a few blocks from the Grant Street garden, it’s convenient for her and her family to walk there. York, who recently agreed to take on more of a leadership role, hopes to use the gardens as a launchpad for multiple initiatives.
“I would love to see not just, ‘Oh, here’s a tomato that you just grew,’ but teaching people, especially through the square-foot gardening method, that you can get so much food out of a small space. And teaching families that you can grow a lot of your own food, but you can also preserve it for the winter,” York says.
She also hopes to sell some surplus produce alongside the coffee drinks and baked goods she makes for the Van Buren farmers’ market. The market, located under a pavilion on Main Street, started three years ago, but they’ve struggled to find vegetable vendors.
York’s husband, who has 18 years of beekeeping experience, is also spending more time at the community garden in his role of volunteer beekeeper. Four hives, along with beekeeping equipment, were purchased with a Maine Bee Wellness grant. Dyer hopes that the bees might eventually produce enough honey to sell. “I’m always looking at ways to drive revenue without the taxpayers of the town having to fork out more money. It only makes it easier to sell other projects to the town,” Dyer says.
Dyer recognized that the success of the community garden would depend on more hands and energy, so he was happy when the Maine Service Fellows reached out to see if Van Buren might want to bring on a fellow. A program of Volunteer Maine, Maine Service Fellows helps place recent college graduates in rural underserved communities to address critical needs, such as food security in Van Buren’s case.
Coming all the way from Kansas City, Kansas, Ray Kasckow recently moved into an apartment on Main Street for an 11-month stint as the town’s Resilience Fellow. Kasckow, who has experience in the nonprofit sector and recently graduated with a master’s degree in historic preservation, found Dyer’s enthusiasm and ideas infectious and fell in love with the town during their visit.
“There’s so much potential especially with the community garden and the farmers’ market and how it can contribute to food security. The project is so needed, and I’m excited to help however I can,” Kasckow says.
Kasckow has many ideas about how to use the garden and food to build community — hosting monthly public dinners; collaborating with the local food pantry; storytelling, cooking, and food preservation workshops; and developing a community cookbook. Another thought is to collaborate with the Acadian Village in Van Buren, a cultural heritage site owned and operated by Notre Héritage Vivant/Our Living Heritage, that honors the Acadians who settled in the St. John Valley during the mid-18th century. And they would love to figure out how to further celebrate the venerated Aroostook County potato.
Kasckow is eager to hit the ground running but understands that change and relationship-building take time, and says they’re willing to do whatever it takes to build trust with their new community: snowmobiling, attending church services, meeting with the town council, and trying to see how many Van Buren contacts they can add to their smartphone.
Dyer and Kasckow know that community development works best when the community, rather than municipal employees or an elected town council, works together to decide what the community needs. And in 2023, Dyer received a $10,000 Community Heart & Soul seed grant to help ensure that the people of Van Buren are the voices behind the change.
Community Heart & Soul, founded by the owner of The Vermont Country Store, guides towns, as well as small cities with populations under 30,000, in charting a course that recognizes and honors the unique character of the town and the emotional connections of the people who live there. At its core, the grant is about placemaking, and Van Buren’s efforts are now spearheaded by their newly formed revitalization association, which has been awarded three awards in the past two years. Any resident is welcome to bring their ideas to the association, and the efforts have spawned multiple new community initiatives: a summer concert series, a spring sledding party, an Easter pancake breakfast, and a Christmas in July celebration. At all of these events, there’s a table where the public can share their ideas for future community development.
While Van Buren may never again be the town it was in the 1950s — when it had a population of 6,000 and was known informally as the “Christmas Town” because of its many small shops — Dyer believes that by employing placemaking and pushing the town in a different direction, Van Buren can develop a new, unique vibe. In playing the long game, he dreams of invoking Putney, Vermont’s style — an amalgamation of the arts, gardens, community gathering spaces, and local businesses.
“You can’t expect to have a community if you don’t create an avenue for people to commune,” Dyer says. “Three years ago, you couldn’t find five people in the same room together in Van Buren. A lot of the success of what’s happening is that people that aren’t typically connected with each other are now being brought together. And it’s making a difference.”
Sonja Heyck-Merlin is a regular feature writer for The MOF&G. She and her family own and operate an organic farm in Charleston, Maine.
This article was originally published in the fall 2025 issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener.