A bunker-style home for doomsday preppers is for sale in Sangerville

SANGERVILLE — Affectionately known as the “Doomstead,” a 16-acre property in Piscataquis County with a bunker, barn, and greenhouse is looking for its next homesteader.

The Doomstead was built by a retired Air Force captain, Will Cobb, and his family more than 40 years ago in Sangerville, a town of around 1,300 near Dover-Foxcroft. Determined to survive the end times, Cobb set about becoming totally self-sufficient. He constructed a bermed home embedded 4 feet into a hill, tended to a garden, planted an orchard, stocked a 0.3-acre pond with brook trout and filled his home with canned goods and supplies.

Current owners Steve DeGoosh and Brooke Isham bought the property in 2014 after Cobb and his wife, Lila, died. DeGoosh and Isham renamed the Doomstead “Lomah,” which stands for “Land of Milk and Honey,” and expanded operations there to fulfill that namesake. They now have a flock of dairy sheep, raise bees and sell oils and soaps made with the milk and honey online. They also added a barn, a chicken coop and a greenhouse where they grow peppers and tomatoes year-round.

For family reasons, the pair have to sell the homestead, and are looking for someone interested in food sovereignty and self-sufficient living to take over their operations. They have privately listed the property at $359,000 for the house and the land.

An adventurous, enterprising sort of person — or a doomsday prepper — would thrive here, DeGoosh said.

​​”You have to be accepting of, you know, power going out. You have to plow the drive to get to the road if you need to in the winter, but it provides a lot of food, a lot of bang for the buck,” DeGoosh said. “That can be very, very rewarding.”

The house itself is a pretty basic 800-square-foot, two-bedroom, one-bathroom structure. Living there would be a lifestyle choice and involve a lot of manual labor, but DeGoosh feels it’s been well worth it.

Though a small family could live on the Doomstead, DeGoosh said it’s probably more suitable as it is now for a couple. There’s plenty of room to build more, though, as 4.5 acres of the property have been cleared.

The Doomstead is available turn-key, DeGoosh said, with farm equipment and generators included. He’d be more than willing to stay on at the property for a while and teach a new owner about how to run things at the homestead.

“I would be so delighted to have somebody acquire this property and take on the project and have some skills and be ready to pick up a few more. And I’d be happy to mentor them a bit to get them up and going, and maybe then take off the training wheels and let them go,” he said.