PARIS – The classic tale of a long-forgotten trunk filled with unexpected treasures, left to gather dust in a cluttered attic, has been told again in a new form on Paris Hill.

During the hot spell last month, Wini Mott, who lives on Lincoln Street, decided she did not have the energy to do anything but riffle through some old papers in her house.

“Isn’t that a wonderful old thing,” Mott said Friday, pointing to the leather-and-wood trunk whose lid she had flipped open in July to pull out its contents, mostly packets of yellowed papers.

When she began untying the bundles, she figured she would find receipts and other business documents from the Hubbard House Hotel that her husband’s great-grandfather ran on Paris Hill.

Instead, she discovered town warrants, deeds and even sheriff notices from the 1840s.

“He never threw anything away,” Mott said about Hiram Hubbard, the man who owned the trunk. Hubbard, who lived from 1811 to 1899, ran several businesses in town, built houses on Paris Hill, served in the state Legislature, and also worked as Paris town clerk from 1846 to 1851.

During those years, and from some years prior to his term, Hubbard collected the many town documents that Mott wants to return to the town.

“My thought was these should be out there for people to read,” Mott said.

Copies will be made for the historical societies in Paris.

“We’ll enjoy adding them to our collection, and I think they’ll be extremely interesting,” Cynthia Burmeister, co-president of the Paris Hill Historical Society, said Friday. “Of course things like that are inestimable value to a town’s historical collection of papers.”

For researchers looking to dig into the past, the warrants, hand-written in flowing, cursive script that list the proposed town laws, are particularly evocative.

Mott held up one cafe-au-lait colored warrant from 1846, which unfolded in front of her. “To prevent the sale of spirituous liquors in said town except for medical or mechanical purposes,” she read.

“I don’t know what mechanical purposes are,” she said with a small grin.

Another article on that warrant asked voters to remunerate a doctor for damages he suffered as a consequence of a broken bridge.

A sheriff’s notice from 1849 described an unpaid fee of $42.82, which led police to place a lien on the indebted person’s dwelling.

Mott said her home has been in her late husband’s family since it was built in 1826. Hiram Hubbard’s daughter married a man who owned it, and when Hubbard died, Mott guessed that his daughter moved his trunk to her attic.

Now, Mott is hoping that the papers, which help draw a picture of one decade in Paris, might inspire a historian or writer to create a close-up look at life here 150-odd years ago.

“There was a book written about Norway in the 1840s,” Mott said, referring to the book, “Norway in the Forties,” written by Osgood N. Bradbury and edited by the Rev. Don McAllister in 1986. “It’s funny that these are the papers from Paris in the 1840s.”