ALFRED, Maine — The basement of the York County Courthouse is musty and old. Neat file cabinets and supply shelves give the impression of order. But it didn’t used to be this way.
"The boxes were piled high, stuff was everywhere, there was no rhyme or reason," Deputy County Manager Linda Hutchins-Corliss remembered, as she walked through the building’s basement on Tuesday.
In the summer of 2022, Hutchins-Corliss joined her colleague to clean the space. In the process, they made a fascinating discovery: hundreds of documents from the 18th and 19th centuries in boxes labeled "never throw out."
Hutchins-Corliss, herself a student of history, remembers the giddiness of coming across handwritten accounts from the 18th century, forgotten for perhaps decades.
"The material is so fragile," she explained.
Faced with the prospect of parsing through property maps, deeds, and court records, Hutchins-Corliss and her colleagues in county government set about hiring an expert to do the work. They found Paige Lilly.
Lilly is an independent archivist whose fascination with early American history matches her enthusiasm for the task she’s been hired by the county to carry out.
"You can learn a lot about people’s daily lives through these records," Lilly said Tuesday.
She has been busy at work analyzing the findings for insights into the county’s past. Already, Lilly found some gems, including a map proposing a change to the route of a road between South Berwick and Portsmouth, and—perhaps most interesting—a land purchase made in York County by the father of founding father Samuel Adams.
With still many more documents to go through, Lilly has already learned a great deal about the county in its early days.
"[The documents] really show how active the citizens were in their local government," Lilly said.
Now, as the effort to bring these re-discovered records from the bowels of the York County Courthouse to life, the team in charge of this task sees a deeper purpose.
"All of this information is crucial to our democracy because people need to know how the country developed and how the state developed," Lilly said.
As Hutchins-Corliss puts it, "This is your history. If you’re from York County, this is your history."