CHARLOTTE – What do balancing the town budget and counting porcupine feet have in common?

At one time, they were each part of Grace Hatton’s job as town treasurer.

Hatton, 84, was honored Sunday for being the longest-serving town official, a job she held for 60 years “and four months.”

During a recent interview, Hatton sat at her kitchen table in Charlotte surrounded by white wooden cupboards and a kitchen table stacked with papers as she reminisced.

Hatton, who will be replaced by town resident Glenna Ferris, was hired on Feb. 1, 1948, after longtime treasurer Alice Ayers died suddenly.

Hatton was married to Selectman Merton Hatton at the time and was 25 years old when the selectmen offered her the job. She said she got it because of her mother. “My mother, Edwina Damon, had been treasurer 13 years prior to Alice,” she said.

When she started, Hatton was paid $75 a year and worked about five hours a week. She will retire at the end of the month after finishing her career working about 12 hours a week and earning $3,500 a year. The cost of operating this tiny community of about 300 located just south of Calais also has gone up over the years. The budget has grown from around $22,000 a year in 1948 to more than $1 million last year.

Over the years, it was Hatton’s job to write all the checks and keep track of the town’s accounts.

“I received a warrant from the selectmen and that would include the school,” she said. At first she did all of the calculating for the town warrant without an adding machine.

Later, she bought her own equipment.

“I don’t have a computer. I did it all with an adding machine,” she said. “And it is mine. The town never furnished me with an adding machine.”

She also used her own typewriter to type the town checks and W-2 forms. “Until they were requesting so many copies [for the W-2 forms], the typewriters won’t copy them … [and] I used carbon paper and that’s gone by the boards,” she said.

In the end, she hand-wrote the W-2 forms. “I do it by pressing down hard by hand,” she said

Sometimes Hatton also had to count porcupine feet.

She doesn’t remember when a bounty was placed on porcupines, but she said she’ll never forget the “stinky” job of verifying the kills. The hunters would kill the porcupines, cut off their feet and bring them to Hatton’s house as proof. The men were paid 50 cents for four feet. “I had to count to see how many feet there were,” she said.

Sometimes the porcupine were short a couple of feet.

If there were three feet left over after her count, Hatton said, she would pay the hunter anyway for the additional porcupine. But if she ended up with two feet left over, “they were the loser,” she said, a twinkle in her eye. “Maybe they kept two feet and next time they’d come back and try [to collect] again on just two feet. That was a scheme,” she said.

The hunters would sometimes collect a few before bringing them to Hatton. “They’d bring them in stinking sometimes,” she said.

Once the feet were counted, her husband would burn the remains in the garage stove.

The Hattons were married on Oct. 11, 1942. He also was from Charlotte, but when they married she was a licensed hairdresser who worked in Eastport and he was a welder in a shipyard in South Portland. They lived near South Portland during World War II, but eventually returned to Charlotte where he worked for the Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge. He died in 2001. Together they had three daughters. She has nine grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

Hatton said she always has enjoyed her job – except of course for the porcupine part. Although she said she would miss the job, right now she is busy studying the history of the town. “I want to know what Charlotte was like in 1948,” she said.

And if the town is smart, maybe someday the Charlotte Historical Society will put together a book based on her research.