The following is a report from the Midcoast Villager.
Camping was always a family affair for Anthony Fraser when he was growing up in the late 1960s and early ’70s.
“We’d all get together at least one weekend a month and we’d go camp down on Sears Island,” he said — everyone being his parents, his dad’s seven siblings and all their kids joining in, too. But as Anthony entered adulthood, his camping trips lessened. He graduated from Maine Maritime Academy and embarked on a career that would include being a merchant marine, mechanic and builder of boats and homes. Once he had a family of his own, however, he took them camping, too, first in tents and later a 26-foot travel trailer. Finding the trailer “such a project to get ready to go on a weekend,” he dreamed of someday building a more streamlined RV of his own design, perhaps inspired by a tiny teardrop trailer he had seen in Popular Mechanics.
Today, Anthony is realizing that dream with Coachworks, the RV manufacturing company he founded in Stockton Springs in 2021. Like the camping experiences that inspired it, the company is a family affair: Anthony’s son Connor, a trained mechanic and Maine Army National Guardsman, assists with design and construction, while Anthony’s wife, Dorothy, a CFO for a nonprofit, handles finances, and Anthony’s oldest son Quin oversees the website and communications while working full-time elsewhere.
Anthony began building the company’s first prototype in 2019 after retiring from 20 years of building houses. “[The design] was bits and pieces of ones I had seen,” he explained. “I wanted to build one to see how it was. And Connor started working with me on it.” They settled on a design they call a squaredrop: an angular take on the classic teardrop shape. It’s a very efficient design, providing secure and sheltered sleeping quarters for two adults within a footprint not much larger than the mattress they sleep on, allowing for a compact, lightweight and relatively inexpensive RV that even a smaller car can tow and stow just about anywhere. “You don’t have to go to a campground with this,” Anthony said. “You can park just about anywhere, pull off to the side of the road somewhere and camp.”
Click here to read the full report by John Blodgett at the Midcoast Villager.
