It took Alna's acting archivist Doreen Conboy a while to get around to looking at the papers tightly stuffed into two brown, paper bags.

The bags from the Boothbay Region Historical Society came with a note stating that if Alna wasn't interested in the items, maybe Newcastle would be.

When she did start pulling out the papers, they turned out to be a treasure trove of letters, receipts, ledgers and even grocery lists from the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Together, they provide a “fascinating paper trail” about life along the Sheepscot River, Conboy said. The life they document is that of second-generation scow operator Capt. Joe Jones, born in Alna in 1866.

Conboy told Jones’ story to about 30 people at a July 27 talk at the Village School, built in the 1870s.

Jones most likely attended that school, because he was raised nearby, she said.

Jones left school at 14 to work for his father, and by his early 20s had become captain of a scow he and his father built for $1,500, called the North Star. Scows were barge-like, flat-bottomed cargo boats not considered as seaworthy as keel boats. They were useful in the “safe waters of the immediate coast,” Conboy said. The North Star was 56 feet long, 18 feet wide and fewer than four feet deep.

Wood, bricks, hay, produce and even cattle were among the ship's loads. Daniel Sortwell once wrote to Jones to request a delivery of sand to a swimming beach on White's Island off Wiscasset. Jones got the sand from Pemaquid.

When Jones and his wife moved from Alna to Sheepscot after their first year of marriage, they walked across river ice to get there.

Some of Jones' items that his family kept over the years show the changing technology taking hold in the early 20th century. There was a business card for an “ice man,” Harry P. Bissitt of Wiscasset, and a paper showing Jones had bought a refrigerator for $18 from W.W. Keene and Son of Damariscotta.

In 1931, Jones applied to Central Maine Power for electricity at his Sheepscot home, according to the family's records.

Some of Jones' grandchildren and great-grandchildren, including ones who knew him from their childhoods until his death in 1959, attended Conboy's talk. J. Kenneth Lincoln of South Newcastle grew up in Wiscasset, and used to go visit Jones in Sheepscot. “He was a very quiet and a really nice man,” Lincoln said of his great-grandfather.

Emmy Lincoln Kappler gave the Boothbay Region Historical Society all the papers that eventually went to Alna. It wouldn't have felt right for her to “get rid of them” after the family had saved them for so long, she said.

Conboy, a member of the Committee for Alna History, is glad the family never discarded the items that will now be part of the town's archives. “I was most grateful that someone thought they should be saved,” she said.

A steam engine that once powered the North Star is on display at the Boothbay Railway Village.