The only grocery store in a rural Aroostook County town will be auctioned off next month after its owner defaulted on the store’s mortgages.
The auction for Ashland Food Mart, in the North Maine Woods gateway town of Ashland, is set for 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday, July 28.
Walker Food Services — which purchased the grocery store in 2022 — defaulted on three mortgages obtained through the Northern Maine Development Commission. In a notice of public sale dated June 25, an attorney for the commission wrote that Walker Food Services owes the commission more than $662,000 in principal, interest and other expenses related to the property.
A representative for Walker Food Services did not respond to a request for comment.
The store has been closed for around a month. When a reporter visited on Monday, the main entrance had been padlocked shut. It is the only grocery store in close proximity to a swath of small towns west of Scopan Lake in central Aroostook, including Ashland, Portage Lake, Masardis and Oxbow.
Shoppers are now forced to travel to the next closest grocery stores in Presque Isle, more than 20 miles from the center of Ashland.
The town joins a list of other rural communities in northern Maine that have grappled with the loss of their only grocery store or service station in recent years as high costs and other challenges have burdened the owners of mom-and-pop retailers. Stockholm (population 250) lost its singular grocery store in 2023. Grand Isle (population 366) saw its general store shutter in 2022.
Ashland is a significantly larger community, boasting a population north of 1,200 residents, and sees frequent travelers passing through on the town’s miles of trails or to enter the North Maine Woods. ATV and snowmobile trails snake around and behind the food mart.
The three acre property that contains the grocery store also includes an auxiliary building that was formerly a redemption center. The site was listed for sale last August and its price was lowered to $848,500 earlier this month.
The foreclosure auction will be run by the Portland-based Keenan Auction Company, which has handled a collection of other recent foreclosure auctions for prominent northern Maine properties, among them the Burger Boy Restaurant in Caribou and Rathbun Lumber in Presque Isle.
