BOSTON - Great swaths of the Maine woods with a combined land area bigger than Rhode Island would be protected forever from development under a $28 million plan announced Wednesday and thought to encompass more territory than any other such deal. 

       Gov. Angus King of Maine said in Augusta that the plan would include more than 2,000 miles of shoreline on streams and rivers, more than 85 lakes or ponds, and nesting areas for bald eagles and peregrine falcons. 

       "This is probably the biggest day for Maine out-of-doors since Gov. Baxter first saw Mount Katahdin," King said, referring to the 1920's governor, Percival Baxter, who personally bought and donated Baxter State Park, a widely beloved wilderness area crowned by Mount Katahdin in northern Maine. 

       Under the agreement, a family of longtime Maine landowners, the Pingrees, would provide a conservation easement on the land by selling the development rights on 754,673 acres to a private non-profit group, the New England Forestry Foundation.  The family can continue limited industrial logging and the public will still have recreational access, although there are no plans to transform the land into a park. 

       The 55-year-old foundation, which promotes sustainable forestry, is still raising the money for the purchase, and has two years to amass it. 

       King, who announced the agreement, said it was probably the largest conservation easement deal on private forest land. 

       On a roll of recent victories in their efforts to preserve Northeastern forest land, environmentalists praised the Pingree agreement as a significant stop toward saving more of the Northern Forest, the 26 million acres of woods from Maine to New York. 

       It's the soul-satisfying sound of another big piece of the Northern Forest puzzle clicking into place," said Bob Perschel, chairman of the Northern Forest Alliance, a coaliton of 35 groups. 

       The deal came at a moment of exceptionally hot debate over what Maine should do about its 17 million acres of woods.