When word spread through the North Woods town of Greenville that a McDonald’s was coming to town, there were purists who swore they’d move to Northeast Carry if the golden arches ever rose above Moosehead Lake.
 
But Gary Eckmann figured Greenville was a natural place for his ninth McDonald’s restaurant. It was 1994, and the town was booming with tourists and sport fishermen in the summer, hunters in the fall, and snowmobilers in the winter. But late last year the smallest full-service McDonald’s restaurant in New England — and the one with probably the best view in the country — closed permanently. “
 
We thought it was an excellent location,” Eckmann says of the site on Indian Hill overlooking Moosehead Lake and Greenville. “It just didn’t work out. There wasn’t enough business for us to stay open.” The sweeping panorama of the island-studded lake surrounded by mountains and green forest never quite meshed with the neon lights and plastic booths of the typical McDonald’s.
 
The Greenville area already has plenty of decent local eateries serving the home-style comfort food that both locals and tourists seem to favor. Indeed, some visitors and residents alike considered the golden arches an affront to North Woods authenticity. When the restaurant was first announced, more than four hundred residents signed a petition opposing it. And visitors who came in search of a wilderness experience apparently agreed that a Big Mac and fries aren’t woods fare.
 
Eckmann, who owns eight other McDonald’s in Bangor, Brewer, and Dover-Foxcroft, goes out of his way to praise Greenville and its people. “Everything is a risk when you’re in business,” Eckmann says philosophically, “even something like a McDonald’s that looks like a sure thing.”
 
In fact, Maine has the unusual national distinction of seeing two McDonald’s restaurants fail for lack of business. One in Van Buren closed in the 1980s. Eckmann says the Greenville building will remain.
 
“I hope someone else will be in there doing some kind of business soon,” he says. He doubts it will ever be reopened as a Mickey D’s.
 
In Greenville, apparently, life is too slow for fast food.
 
(Published February 1999)