Larry Ross of Canaan wouldn’t necessarily call himself a Charles Lindbergh buff, even if he did once hound his parents until they took him to see the famous “Spirit of St. Louis” airplane hanging at the Smithsonian Institution. Aside from that childhood moment, which came shortly after he was stirred by Jimmy Stewart’s screen portrayal of the legendary aviator, Ross had little more than a passing interest in the world’s first, non-stop solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927.

But when he read a newspaper story two years ago about a rustic little cabin rotting in the woods of New Hampshire, Ross felt that he had stumbled upon an appealingly quirky footnote in American aviation history. The cabin, it turned out, had been built from the same packing crate that Lindbergh had used to ship his fabled airplane back to the United States from Paris 63 years ealier.

Best of all, the article said that the relic was for sale.

“After reading the story I thought it was kind of a goof,” said Ross, 40, who runs a home in St. Albans for adults with developmental disabilities. “So I called the man who owned the crate and asked him if it was for real.”

The owner, a real-estate developer, assured Ross the crate was genuine, and said he had several offers from hopeful buyers around the country to prove it. Ross drove to Contoocook, N.H., and walked a half mile into the woods to see it for himself.

“It struck me as a charming but eccentric piece of Americana when I saw it,” he said. “As for its condition, well, let me put it this way: only a person with vision would even look at it twice.”

For Ross, that was the magic of the faded pine box. Long ago, an obscure 25-year-old mail pilot with vision had used it to house the precious vehicle of his dreams. Ross could never hope to own the “Spirit of St. Louis,” of course, but he did have a chance to own the box that carried it home.

“I went back to Canaan and talked to my wife, and told her I was going to pursue this,” Ross said.

According to the story, Lindbergh celebrated his historic May 21 landing in Paris by barnstorming through England and France for a couple of weeks in a borrowed R.A.F. plane. President Calvin Coolidge, eager to honor the young hero back in the States, ordered that he and his airplane be picked up by ship and sent home.

The airplane’s fuselage was packed in a sturdy tongue-and-groove, English pine crate 27 feet long, 12 feet wide, and 9 feet tall. The wings were stored in a smaller box. The crates were loaded aboard the USS Memphis, the flagship of America’s European fleet, which then steamed to Cherbourg, France, to pick up Lindbergh. On the voyage home, the exhausted young flier became friends with Vice Admiral Guy H. Burrage, the fleet commander.

When Burrage asked for the larger crate, saying he wished to take it to New Hampshire and make it into a summer cottage, Lindbergh was glad to comply in exchange for the admiral’s generous shipboard hospitality. After docking at Alexandria, Va., Lindbergh hopped into his airplane to begin a whirlwind, 48-state goodwill tour. The two crates, which newspapers had begun to call “the historic packing cases,” were loaded onto a railroad car and hauled to Burrage’s summer home in Contoocook.

There, carpenters turned the larger crate inside out and sheathed it with pine as protection against the elements. They added a hipped roof, windows, a door, and a porch that ran the length of its back side.

Burrage, ever mindful of the historical significance of the “Lindbergh shack,” cared for it until his death in 1954. When part of the property was sold in 1962, however, the cottage was moved to a nearby river, where a string of transients and ice-fishermen used it over the years. According to one report, a woman gave birth in the cottage in 1977, just a few days after the 50th anniversary of Lindbergh’s flight. She named the baby girl Amelia, in honor of the famous aviator Amelia Earhart.

Five years ago, when the real-estate developer bought the land on which it sat, the once-pretty little cottage looked more like a run-down chicken coop. Aware of the history under its decaying exterior, he decided to sell the crate two years ago before it rotted completely.

On his second trip to New Hampshire, Ross bought the crate for $3,000. Although the owner said he had been offered more money for it, he liked Ross’ idea of using the crate as a free Lindbergh museum in his backyard in Maine.

Ross and a carpenter friend, Bernie Chadbourne, went down to New Hampshire on weekends to prepare the crate for travel. They tore off the roof, reinforced the interior, jacked it up and hauled it out of the woods with a backhoe.

On moving day, March 23, 1990, the Concord Monitor announced on its front page: “Maine man pays $3,000 for Lindbergh crate.”

“The story had an incredulous tone to it, as if they couldn’t understand why anyone would spend money on something like that,” Ross said. “I wasn’t surprised though. It really looked terrible. But the locals came around to see it. Lots of people knew about the crate. It was local folklore.”

Ross and his friend used their temporary celebrity to involve everyone they could find in the “Lindbergh Crate Restoration Project.” With the newspaper article in hand, they convinced a local granite company to donate an 8-foot-tall block of stone as a monument. Then they went to a tombstone engraver, who agreed to carve an inscription on the stone for free. It read: “Lindbergh crate. Contoocook, N.H., 1927, moved to Canaan, Maine, 1990,” and included etched maps of both states.

A Bangor trucking outfit volunteered to haul the stone to St. Albans, where another trucker picked it up and took it to Ross’ home in Canaan. When the crate was finally loaded onto a special flatbed truck, which a friend had driven down from Maine, a local woman walked up to Ross and stared at the departing relic.

“You know, you really need an American flag flying on the back,” she said.

Ross explained that he had probably used up most of his favors in New Hampshire. The woman drove away and came back a little while later with a flag to drape over the crate for its journey.

“That kind of thing happened all the time,” Ross said. “It was incredible. Everyone wanted to help out. It was a real community effort in New Hampshire and Maine.”

After the truck had crossed the bridge into Maine, a song called “Living in the USA” came on the radio. The announcer dedicated the song to Ross and his strange quest. Ross turned to Chadbourne and beamed a satisfied smile.

“Bernie,” he said. “We did it. We got the `Spirit of St. Louis’ crate to Maine.”

A man at the toll booth apparently didn’t share the noble vision. He just stared at the big ugly box, with the rock-wool insulation flapping around it like a fright wig, and told Ross that it looked like the biggest outhouse he had ever seen.

The Lindbergh crate was placed behind Ross’ house, on a slab of donated cement, surrounded by donated gravel, under a donated roof. The porch was restored, the door and windows repaired, the wood painted. Ross then began hunting around for information about the crate. From the U.S. Navy archives he got pictures of it being loaded onto the ship in France. Through ads in Navy magazines, he got letters from three officers who were aboard the USS Memphis that day.

Other people wrote to share their recollections of Lindbergh’s flight: four said they were at LeBourget Airfield in Paris when the “Spirit of St. Louis” touched down. A man in San Diego wrote to say he had worked on the airplane. A carpenter in New Hampshire said he had worked on the crate.

A man in Connecticut called Ross one night to share a special memory: As a youngster in Oklahoma, he figured he would grow up to become a cowboy, like everyone else. But when he heard the news about Lindy’s spectacular flight, the boy cut out his hero’s picture from the paper, hung it over his bed, and resolved to become a pilot instead.

The man did fly for many years, first in the military and later as a pilot for Pan Am. On an evening flight in the late 1960s, he heard that Charles Lindbergh, then chairman of Pan Am’s board of directors, was traveling incognito in the plane’s economy section. The man invited Lindbergh to the cockpit. For the rest of the night, the pilot flew across the Atlantic beside his boyhood hero, the Lone Eagle himself, the man who had changed his life.

All of those memories — letters, documents, newspaper clippings, photos and phone calls — have steadily filled the pages of Ross’ scrapbooks. Together they make up a popular record of early flight, and the closest thing to a history that the old crate will ever have.

On May 21, Ross will celebrate the 65th anniversary of Lindbergh’s flight by inviting a few elementary schoolchildren to visit the restored cottage. He simply wants them to walk through the place and browse through the scrapbooks and let their imaginations run free. Ross knows that some of the children, and the visitors who come after, will see nothing more than an old wooden box. But others will look deeper and see it as a “repository of memories,” an eccentric momento that links more than 60 years of American history.

“When I stop and think about it,” Ross said, “it has been one of the most valuable things I’ve done in my life. I think about the people it’s exposed me to and the enthusiasm it has generated. The crate has been a conduit for so many good things to happen, and it makes sense the way Lindbergh’s flight made sense. You get an idea, find the people who can help, and then make it happen.”