Marya Buchholz.

How she came to this

Marya grew up in Bismarck, North Dakota, the daughter of a wheat-and-cattle family that had electrified its barn three generations before her. She studied environmental science at UND and went into seasonal work with the National Park Service, starting in 2002. Her first season was at Theodore Roosevelt National Park; her last NPS posting, in 2008, was at Grand Portage National Monument, where she was the interpretive ranger for the Heritage Center.

The pivot to electrical work came in the winter of 2008–09. She'd moved to Hardwick to be closer to a partner who taught at Sterling College; the seasonal-NPS schedule didn't pay; the local electrician had retired the previous year. She apprenticed with the next-county-over electrician (Pellerin Senior, Joseph's father, retired 2014) for four years, took the Vermont journeyman exam in 2012, and the master exam in early 2014. The cooperative was founded eight months later.

What she does at the shop

• Most J-01 service-upgrade quotes come through her — twelve years of doing the load-calc walk-throughs, and she's faster than anyone else.
• She runs the field log: every entry on this site has been read by her before publication, and she writes the trickier ones.
• She's the cooperative's outside-relations face: utility coordination with GMP, WEC, and VEC; relationships with the dairy suppliers; the annual visit to UVM Extension for any new agricultural-electrical guidance.
• She's on the 2026 after-hours rotation. If you call (802) 472-3140 at 2 a.m. this year, you're calling Marya.

What she likes

The job she'll talk about for fifteen minutes if you ask is the 2018 install at a Greensboro tie-stall where the existing GEC turned out to be threaded into a 1936 hand-forged iron well casing. Removing the original bond would have cracked the casing; preserving it required threading a new GEC through a parallel path that met the spirit of NEC 250 if not the letter, and arguing it through with the inspector. The inspector signed off; the well casing is still in the ground; the bond reading is 4.2 Ω.

The almanac entries on sap-run power quality and January cold-load were both drafted by her. The October inspections piece came out of a 2019 conversation she had with the head of the VECA training committee.

Outside the shop

Marya is on the board of the Center for an Agricultural Economy; the cooperative does the CAE Yellow Barn's electrical at-cost as part of her board service, and she's the volunteer the Center calls when the freezer trips a breaker. She is the parent of two children, currently 11 and 8, both of whom have been to enough job sites to have strong opinions about which sugarhouses smell best.

She reads, in roughly this order: NEC code revisions; The Wire (the trade magazine, not the show); Orion Magazine; cookbooks. She makes coffee at the shop with a Chemex and a kettle, and complains when the apprentices use the drip pot.

Licensure

VT Master Electrician

EM-04217 · since March 2014

VT Class S

since 2018

NFPA / LPI

NFPA 780 LPI Listed Installer · since 2019

OSHA

30-hour Construction · current

NPS

former interpretive ranger, GRPO 2007–2008