By Daniel Hartill,Staff Writer

POLAND – Jody McMorrow squeezed between the stacks of boxes and the piles of furniture before settling on the frayed faces of century-old dolls.

“I knew then this was a real, real special find,” the auctioneer said of his first peek inside the third-floor attic in Harpswell.

Today, the contents of those boxes and piles of furniture fill McMorrow’s Poland auction house, where he plans to sell his “once-in-a-lifetime” find, the collected bric-a-brac of one of Harpswell’s most prominent families, the Dunnings.

“I realized these folks never threw out a thing, not one thing,” McMorrow said.

He found artifacts of decades spent on wooden ships and a signed note from Civil War hero Joshua Chamberlain. He also found letters home chronicling the California Gold Rush and the exploits of a bandit named Three-Fingered Jack.

In preparation for the auction – scheduled for Friday and Saturday, Jan. 20 and 21 – prospective buyers have requested private tours of the collection.

And some people have already left absentee bids.

What’s it all worth? The buyers will decide.

“All I can say is that once I saw everything, I tripled my estimate,” McMorrow said.

The 55-year-old auctioneer motioned around the auction house, from the careful stacks of yellow paper that filled several tables to the wooden furniture that spread to an adjoining room.

“There’s just so much,” he said. “You never really know what people will think.”

The Dunning heirs hired McMorrow in November, following the death of Clem Dunning. He lived in the oldest house in Harpswell.

The family had been a big deal there for generations.

In the second half of the 19th century, they owned a store and ships that traveled the world. In the following 50 years, they were fixtures in Harpswell, involved in the town’s governance and in a variety of social groups from the Oddfellows to the Grange.

“They were pretty important people in their day,” said Kate McBrien, director and curator of the Pejepscot Historical Society. Possessions from the family have been turning up in collections for years, she said.

Her organization may be among those bidding on the objects next weekend, she said.

After all, the breadth of items is unusually wide.

The heirs had rarely been in the home and knew little of its contents, McMorrow said.

The auctioneer threw away lots of items, many damaged by mice or old age. He slowly began to sort out the mass of remaining articles – from jewelry to nautical items to Victorian furniture. Meanwhile, he hired someone to pore over the heaps of papers.

Every find became a discovery.

The letters date back to the 1830s and move forward for the next 100 years. They include love letters, claims and deeds and leather-bound logs.

Of course, there’s the 1853 letter from Benjamin Dunning to his wife, Abby, in Harpswell. In it, Dunning describes seeing a group of bandits led by Three-Fingered Jack.

It’s a handle that a simple Internet search finds again and again: from a Jamaican highwayman to an Oregon mountain to a real-life bandit named Manuel Garcia who died in California the same year Dunning wrote his letter.

“Read through these papers and you’d a have a great mini-series,” McMorrow said. “They went to California twice and used the money to help buy a ship.”

McMorrow hasn’t read through everything. There simply wasn’t time.

“I’ve been sorting through this every day for the past six weeks,” he said Thursday

In some cases, he plans to sell letters that haven’t been opened in more than 50 years, still bundled in twine by their recipients.

“Who knows what someone else might find,” McMorrow said.