MACHIAS – High on the third floor of the Washington County Courthouse, at the top of a steep staircase, is a narrow attic room dominated by a large set of wooden shelves.

The county’s history lives here.

It is tucked inside almost 600 volumes of newspapers dating as far back as 1819.

“It is the largest collection of its kind in the state,” said Valdine Atwood, chairman of the Washington County Courthouse Archives Committee. “Editors of newspapers were to send each issue to the county clerk, and at the end of the year they were supposed to be bound.”

County Clerk Joyce Thompson said she has surveyed every county in the state and that the next largest county newspaper collection is in Lincoln County, which has 40 volumes.

The Washington County collection includes 17 different newspapers, including some early editions of the Kennebec Journal and one year of the Ellsworth American.

The Washington County papers begin with the March 20, 1819, edition of the Eastport Sentinel and Passamaquoddy Advertiser, published in Eastport, District of Maine.

The front page includes a letter to the editor offering a $25 reward for information on the dockside theft of a crate of dishes and an advertisement the Sentinel claimed was originally published in a New York paper:

“Wanted to hire a servant girl, who once condescended to do house work; she shall have a black woman to do the drudgery, and a white girl of fourteen to carry her expresses to her lover,” reads the advertisement. “A coach shall be at her call every afternoon at five ‘o’ clock; twice the week she may attend the theatre.”

Atwood said she receives calls on a weekly basis from people throughout the country looking for information on family members who once lived in Maine, ship registers, and death notices.

She remembers one woman – whose mother had just died – asking for information on the drownings that took place on Gardner Lake during a school picnic in the 1930s.

“She said her mother was one of the children who was saved and had always been strange,” Atwood said. “Her mother would never talk about it and this woman wanted to know what happened because she thought it would help her understand her mother.”

Atwood said she found that when the mother was rescued she was clutching the hands of another child who had drowned.

“You get all kinds of questions,” Atwood said. “I have 10 file drawers full of folders.”

Atwood and her fellow committee members have been working on the newspaper collection since 2000, when the Washington County commissioners appointed the group and charged it with inventorying and preserving the newspapers as well as the 80 boxes of assorted county documents that are stored in the attic’s attic – in the eaves of the courthouse.

Atwood said it took her and her husband, John Atwood, 40 hours to inventory the newspaper collection. An AmeriCorps VISTA worker is going through the boxes of county documents, she said.

The archive committee receives an annual allocation of $5,000 from the Washington County budget and has used most of those funds to build a microfilm collection of the old papers. The first step was to purchase existing microfilms from organizations such as the New Brunswick Archives in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago, she said.

The group is microfilming those papers that have not been filmed. But the process is slow, given budget constraints, Atwood said.

“We examined all different ways to preserve these newspapers, including surveying Harvard and Yale and other institutions,” she said. “Microfilm is supposed to last 500 years.”

Earlier this month, the group took delivery of a microfilm reader-printer, a machine that will allow the public to view the 93 rolls of microfilm the committee has collected or made to date.

“It is very damaging to a newspaper to try to copy it,” Atwood said. “People have been required to hand copy, but they were up here all by themselves.”

The microfilm reader-printer is in the probate office, which means the public doesn’t have to have access to the attic room.

The University of Maine at Machias has been involved in the archive committee since its inception, and the university will store the master copies of the film in the school’s art collection safe, she said.

Once the microfilming is completed, there will be no need for the public to visit the attic room, which Atwood describes as “just a treasure trove.”

“You get to doing research up here and you disappear into the years, ” she said.

The Washington County Courthouse Archives Committee sells microfilm reels of the Machias Republican – at 1,000 pages per reel – for $40. The group also accepts donations and may be contacted c/o Washington County Probate Office, 47 Court St., Machias 04654.