Wendy Pieh stands in the rocky field on her property in Bremen on Wednesday, April 23 as North American cashmere goats enjoying a fresh salt lick in the background. For about the same amount of time she’s been a cashmere farmer, Pieh has been involved in Maine state and local politics. In her youth, she helped lead and develop Outward Bound Schools around North America and Africa. (Johnathan Riley photo)
Leadership looks different on everyone. For Wendy Pieh, the Bremen Select Board chair, cashmere farmer, and former Canada Outward Bound Wilderness School program director, that look involves a lot of trust and community building.
“My whole thing as I’ve been growing up is the importance of working together, community, and taking care of each other,” she said.
Pieh, of Bremen, was born in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where her father, Bob Pieh, was a professor in physical education and counseling at Antioch College.
During her early formative years in the Midwest, Pieh said the family didn’t have a lot of money. They lived on a farm the college rented for them that had chickens, lambs, and sheep. Eventually, the family decided to board horses on the property for extra income, and Pieh took the opportunity to learn how to ride.
By the time Pieh turned 10, her father took a job in Pelham, Ala. as the physical education teacher at Indian Springs School. When Pieh arrived in the small town just outside of Birmingham, Ala., she said the division between African Americans and white Americans was “stark,” and was her first encounter with social injustice.
“Nothing was integrated, everything was “Blacks were this,” “whites were that,” but my best friend growing up in Ohio was Black,” she said. “It didn’t really mean anything in particular to me, what color you were but when I got down there and saw the way that people were discriminated against, I couldn’t quite believe it and that started me thinking about making a difference somehow.”
Pieh’s family only lasted six years in that environment before they moved to Ely, Minn., where her father started an Outward Bound school in Minnesota in 1964. According to the organization’s website, Outward Bound is a nonprofit offering outdoor education programs designed to foster personal growth, leadership skills, and resilience through challenging experiences in nature. The wilderness based curriculum is built around the ideas of utilizing teamwork, problem-solving, and stepping outside of a comfort zone.
At that time, Pieh said she received a scholarship to attend the Colorado Rocky Mountain School, which was also based in experiential learning.
“I arrived with a wooden pair of skis, not knowing how to even put them on,” Pieh said, laughing. “But I was so glad to get out of Alabama.”
Pieh’s oldest brother, Jerry Pieh, married and moved to Massachusetts with his wife, Lucy, a woman Pieh said she looked up to. After graduating high school, Wendy Pieh attended Wheaton College in North Hampton, Mass. in part because she felt it was something her brother’s wife would do.
“I wanted to be like her,” she said. “She was really pretty and always well dressed, so I got some ideas that I wanted to go to college somewhere near there and applied to a school called Wheaton College, which was a girls school and I lasted one year.”
The brevity of Pieh’s tenure at Wheaton College was informed by a number of reasons, one of which was her desire to know what it was like to be blind.
Coming from an experiential learning background, Pieh wanted to be blindfolded and led around the campus for five days to learn about the hardships of the blind community, but the request caused concern among the school’s administrators.
“That caused real trouble,” she said. “I was hauled into the dean’s office and I said I want to know what it’s like and that’s the only way I can learn. My dad actually came to the school and said he wanted me to be able to do it. It was really important for me to try and understand people.”
Pieh left Wheaton and returned to Minnesota to work for the Outward Bound program in its the kitchen. However, Pieh wanted there to be an Outward Bound program for women, which there wasn’t at the time, so her father helped put together a program in Minnesota where Pieh worked her way up to being an instructor.
“That was really good for me,” she said. “I think I got up to a level of something like a course director there, and I liked it a lot. But I’ve always been so independent, and I can drive management a little crazy.”
After spending time working with her father in Minnesota, Pieh attended Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., an experiential learning college, where she earned a bachelor’s degree. In keeping with its mission, the college didn’t offer majors for their undergraduate degrees, according to Pieh, so she graduated with the equivalent of a liberal arts degree.
Wendy Pieh, chair of the Bremen Select Board, pets a couple of the North American cashmere goats on her and her husband’s property in Bremen on Wednesday, April 23. For about the same amount of time she’s been a cashmere farmer, Pieh has been involved in Maine state and local politics. (Johnathan Riley photo)
After graduating, Pieh followed her father to Canada, where they founded the Canadian Outward Bound Wilderness School. Pieh served as the program director for the school’s first four years, from 1976-1980.
Much of Pieh’s work involved teaching the instructors who would then lead others on expeditions through the wilderness. She said she emphasized the importance of building consensus and fairness in her classrooms and then in her students.
“Our decisions had to be consensus. If we’re going to be a community, it’s got to be consensus, and that’s what I was pushing, and I was making us be a community,” she said.
The leadership style focused on getting ahead never appealed to Pieh, she said. Instead, she was drawn to the quiet lessons of leadership she learned from the wilderness and eastern philosophers such as Lao Tzu, who emphasized humility, noninterference, and trust in effective leaders.
“I led by following as much as I could, you know, and bringing people together,” she said.
After leaving the Canadian Outward Bound Wilderness School, Pieh went to Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., where she earned her master’s in organization development.
While at an award ceremony where her father was being honored for his work with Outward Bound, she was asked to be the director of the program in the mountainous south African nation of Lesotho to help run programs that’d bridge the cultural divide apartheid – policies aimed at racial segregation against the non-white inhabitants of South Africa – had caused.
“They realized that apartheid was going to be over, and they needed people to learn to work together,” she said. “But in Lesotho, everything was fine, so they had an Outward Bound school there. And so they would send people … to help them learn to work together.”
Pieh said yes and during the initial team-bonding trip up Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, the continent’s highest peak, she met her future husband, Peter Goth, who was the doctor for the group.
After a year in her position in Lesotho, she returned to the United States to live with Goth in Maine, where he was heading the Wilderness Medical Association, an organization he founded.
The couple lived in Arrowsic before moving to Bremen in the early 1990s.
In 1996, Pieh began a career as a Maine politician after receiving a call from Chris Hall, of Bristol, the chair of the Maine Democratic Party at the time. She ran in 1996 to represent House District 56, which at the time was comprised of Bremen, Bristol, Damariscotta, Monhegan, and South Bristol, ultimately unseating incumbent Chester Rice, of South Bristol.
“I didn’t have a clue, yeah, I would have told you I was an anarchist, I didn’t think that organized politics worked,” she said. “(Members of the Democratic Party) were all excited to have me running, and I don’t know what it was about me, except I was open minded and interested and liked people.”
She won reelection in 1998 for another two-year term. Pieh threw her hat in the ring again in 2006 and served another two terms. In 2023, she ran in a special election to represent House District 45, which consists of Bremen, Friendship, Louds Island, Waldoboro, and Washington, but was ultimately defeated by Abden Simmons, of Waldoboro.
During her time in the Legislature, Pieh was a member of the Committee on Marine Resources for two of those terms, a member of the Committee on Health and Human Services for one, and House chair of the Committee on Agriculture, Conservation, and Forestry for two.
Pieh also ran successfully for a seat on the Bremen Select Board in 2004 and by 2005 she was chair, a position she’s held since.
“I believe in community. That’s my biggest thing is to help community happen. Also I have a good sense of humor, which helps,” she said, laughing. “I’m Democrat, but not partisan … I think it’s often in our differences we find really good answers.”
Amidst her political career, Pieh and Goth started Springtide Farm in 1997 on their Bremen property. They had been inspired after going to the Common Ground Fair in Union, where they saw a woman walking around with “magnificent cashmere goat,” Pieh said.
“So we got excited about that and we so built a barn and put some fencing up so we could have them there,” she said. “We went up (to a cashmere goat farm) to get two and came home with 11.”
The farm, which is still active today, produces cashmere, a fiber harvested from North American cashmere goats. At its height, the farm had 10 horses and 60 goats. Now, its home to 24 goats and Annie Taylor, a horse named after the first person who survived going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
“I love animals anyway,” she said. “But goats are so independent, and they just want you to pet them, at least our goats, and they tell me every day how high to jump.”
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