$360-Million Bequest Will Benefit Foundation in Maine

By Maria Di Mento

Harold Alfond, the founder of the Dexter Shoe Company who died in November, has bequeathed approximately $360-million — his entire life savings — to the Harold Alfond Foundation, in Portland, Me. He established the foundation in 1950.

The foundation has not yet received the money because Mr. Alfond’s estate hasn’t been settled. Once the estate is settled, however, the bequest will push the foundation’s assets up to more than $500-million, according to a press release from the organization. The foundation currently holds $140-million in assets.

Gregory W. Powell, the foundation’s chairman, said that because the bequest will make the foundation so much bigger, officials there have decided not to support any new projects for the next two years while they plan how to manage the money and where to direct it.

“We already had a large number of ongoing projects before Mr. Alfond died, and he made numerous commitments to organizations in central Maine during the last six months of his life,” Mr. Powell said in a written statement. “So between current and new projects, new trustees, and planning for the future of the foundation as it grows in size, there is no shortage of work for us.”

$500 College Stipends

Several grant-making efforts already under way will benefit from the bequest.

One of those, the Harold Alfond College Challenge, will receive some of the money to provide college scholarship grants of $500 to every child born in Maine beginning in January 2009.

Before he died, Mr. Alfond pledged to make grants to several institutions, including a $5-million grant to the Boys & Girls Club and the YMCA at the Alfond Youth Center, in Waterville, Me.; $3-million to Colby College, also in Waterville, for a sports stadium; $2.7-million for new artificial turf and to renovate the locker rooms at the Kents Hill School, in Maine; $1.5-million to the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, in Boothbay, for a children’s garden; and $250,000 to the University of Maine, in Orono, for its football program. Some of the bequest money will also be used to finance those grants.

Mr. Alfond followed his father into the shoe-manufacturing business, and he earned his first fortune in 1944 when he sold his Norrwock Shoe Company for $1.1-million. He started the Dexter Shoe Company in 1958, and sold it to Berkshire Hathaway for $433-million worth of Berkshire Hathaway stock, in 1993. Through that deal, Mr. Alfond and his family became the second-largest shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway at that time.