Updated January 29, 2021: Friends of Dennis have established an account at Granite State Credit Union to help ensure Dennis’ wife may remain in the family home. If you would like to honor and remember Dennis, you are invited to please make checks payable to “Janet Lewis” and send them to:
Boyd and Lynn Chivers
165 Depot Rd.
Candia, NH 03034.
Gifts received will be deposited into a Granite State Credit Union in an account established in Janet’s name.
New Hampshire has lost a true icon of land management. Dennis Lewis, lifelong Candia resident and extremely well-regarded general contractor, passed away this week. Dennis was a SELT member and one of SELT’s go-to contractors for repairs and improvements on our properties.
“There isn’t a piece of SELT-owned property in Rockingham and Stafford County that required work done that Dennis hasn’t touched,” said Phil Auger, SELT’s former Land Manager. “He was the most dependable, hard-working, honest kind of guy you can ever run into. He was extremely well-respected.”
Dennis’s SELT contributions ran the gamut from excavation, kiosk installation, trail repair, gate installation (Phil: “He would say, if you go through a gate on a SELT property I probably put it there – sometimes twice!”), and stonework.
“When people think of Dennis they think of the most incredible worker you can ever imagine,” Phil says. “He was always smiling, always had a joke, always had time for people.”
One of Dennis’s crowning achievements was the complete rebuild of much of stone structures on the Moses Tucker property at the Tucker and French Family Forest.
“Dennis Lewis was the guy you wanted on your team,” said Parker Schuerman, SELT’s current Land Manager. “He basically was on speed-dial for SELT, since he was so capable at quickly seeing both the problems and the on-the-ground, field-based solutions. When he helped SELT with stewardship and conservation projects, he lined up his love of the outdoors and the natural world with his entrepreneurial spirit. Dennis will be deeply missed.”
Dennis at Burley Farms for SELT’s Annual Winter Bonfire in February 2020. Dennis helped stack the bonfire high with his excavator.