About Dean L. Fisher

Dean L. Fisher died in Rockport, Maine in 2000.  He founded Fisher Engineering which became one of the leading U.S. manufacturers of snow and ice removal equipment.

Dean Fisher built the company from the ground up, starting off sharing a building in Rockland, Maine with the Farrar-Brown Co. in 1948.  Four years later, he moved his operation to a barn at his home where he constructed plows for large commercial trucks.

Born in Kansas, Fisher earned degrees in civil engineering and mechanical engineering from Kansas State College of Engineering and Agriculture, which is now Kansas State University, and the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, respectively.

During his commission in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Fisher worked with a Seabees construction battalion and served as second in command of a Seabee warehouse complex at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Fisher designed the first snow plows for Willys Jeeps.

His intent was to build snowplows in Boston, but after visiting Maine, he fell in love with the area and moved to Rockport.

He designed and built a deeply concave 6-foot plow blade of sturdy steel.  The plow could be angled manually and raised and lowered by a lift arm moved by a hydraulic ram.

As the business began to grow, Fisher returned the operation to Rockland.  The firm employs more than 160 people at the Rockland site.

Dean Fisher’s success resulted in the creation of the Fisher Charitable Foundation following his death.