One day last week, six of us descended on the Jackie Young Watts Open Air Museum with buckets and brooms, rags and paint brushes, intent on doing some spring cleaning. Don’t know where the J.Y.W.O.A.M. is located? Look just across from the Library in the Center, to the open-fronted sheds labeled “Life on the Bay” and “Rural Economy.”

Dust, pollen and leaves freely blow in and out among the items on display which include two small boats, barrels, a sleigh, ice cutting tools, axles from the Coleman City to Ducktrap railroad, a summer kitchen kerosene stove, cider press, kraut cutter, horse-drawn plow, hay rake, and homemade harrow to name a few.

The other morning the boats were hauled outside of the smaller shed and hosed down, while the leaves were swept up, all in preparation for painting the back wall. It had been determined that a white interior might brighten things up a bit, as our 21st-Century eyes are tuned to neon bright color, brilliant lights, movement and flash. These utilitarian 19th- and early 20th-Century items make for a less than lively display, at least when seen from a distance.

Jane Hardy, a Lincolnville Historical Society board member, had found a kind of paint that could be watered down to resemble whitewash, so several of us took up paintbrushes and tackled the rough-sawn boards that make up the interior of the marine shed. Jokes about Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence and drawing in all the neighborhood to join him circulated among the painters as we labored to cover the darkened boards.

The larger shed, the one that holds the agricultural and household items, was deemed too hard to paint without removing everything, a prospect no one was up for. Instead, we wiped down all the things, even cleaning off the bird poop that some of the farm implements had arrived with. After all, storage in an old barn has its hazards, barn swallows being one of them. We’ll be researching some form of LED solar-powered lighting for the Rural Economy shed; if anyone has ideas on how we might accomplish this, let me know.

Collecting, displaying, housing artifacts from the past is a big part of what any historical society does. Visitors of a certain age to our Schoolhouse Museum and to the O.A.M. love seeing the items they grew up with, things they remember from Grandma’s house or Grandpa’s barn while younger ones puzzle over what possible use they could have been.

The intricacy of a mechanically operated thing versus an electronic or computerized one can be intriguing. Just to see how a common device, like a sewing machine for instance, evolved is fascinating, or how paper, glass, and tin have been replaced by plastic in most packaging.

I’ve been involved, along with Connie Parker, Peggy Bochkay, Jackie Watts, Al Mathieson, Joan Ratliff, Alton Parker, Sandy Delano, Harbour Mitchell, and some I’m probably forgetting, with the care, storage, and cataloguing of the LHS’ collection of this stuff for the past 25 years or so.

We have a lot. Boxes and drawers and cabinets full of textiles, utensils, tools, old books. Most of it is catalogued, which means it has a provenance, a history of its own. We know who gave it to us, who used it, where they lived. It needs to come out and be seen, to be worked into displays in interesting ways, to show how people lived here in Lincolnville in the not so distant past.

Honestly, it’s not my favorite part.

Can I entice someone to step inside our museum(s), someone who is excited by old stuff, someone to take charge of what we have?

And we have photos, thousands of them. I have an idea (remember the word vision?) that the best of them – I’m thinking hundreds of them – should be scanned and so preserved, perhaps printed into a book, who knows?

Can I entice someone to take on the photos?

We need more. We need an intelligent, coherent, well-maintained website, one that will display all that we have, tell our story as a town. And as a correlation we need an up-to-date Facebook page with events and lively discussion, a place to put people from Lincolnville, both here and far away, in touch with one another.

Can I entice someone to take on our online presence?

As I said, I’ve been more or less in charge of the LHS for 25 years. That includes all of the above: the artifacts, the photos, newsletters, website. Never in my earlier years could I have imagined I’d be thought of as the historian of a small Maine town. I grew up in a Chicago suburb, for goodness sake. None of what I know about Lincolnville was I born with, bred to.

A lot has changed in my life in the past couple of years. The time has come for me to step back some from the LHS.

If I could do it, start from scratch so to speak, so can someone else. Taking over any one of the above areas can be completely engrossing, rewarding. I’m not going anywhere and will happily help new people get involved. I just don’t want to run it any more.

Give me a bundle of old letters tied up with string, or a leather-bound tattered little journal and I’m gone for hours. Somebody’s actual words, almost as if they’re speaking from decades – a century – ago written in their own hand – that’s what history is to me. I’d love to spend the next years reading, transcribing, and writing about those bundles and tattered diaries.

After a year of fund-raising ($14,000!) with the help of their advisor Mr. Edes, the eighth grade class had their three-day trip to Quebec last week, along with chaperones – parent Jason Peasley, and teachers Mrs. Stevick and Mrs. Lewis.

June 8 the annual Lincolnville School Carnival will be held 5-7 p.m. at the school. Hot dogs and cotton candy for sale, or bring your own picnic; there’ll be a bounce house, pony rides, a raffle and more.

Thanks to all for a successful plant and book sale on Memorial Day.

Tuesday, June 5 at 4 p.m. is the monthly Knitting Workshop for knitters both beginning and those wanting to learn more. Encouraging and patient experienced knitters will be on hand to help.

Wednesday, June 6 at 7 p.m. Hank Lunn will present “Foes to Friends” which has been re-scheduled from last winter. Hank will talk about “what it was like having German soldiers working on his family farm in Aroostook County…. When in 1944 the U.S. Army Air Base in Houlton became the site of a POW internment camp for captured German soldiers.”

A friend stopped to show me a video of a recent visitor to Sleepy Hollow, a yearling moose crossing Beach Road just below our house. Quite a surprise as I haven’t seen a moose in years.