NORWAY – A 91-year-old Norway resident has added a little history to the story of an abandoned mail truck that may have been used here decades ago.

After seeing an article and pictures of Bridgton resident Ray Leavitt’s 1929 Model A mail truck in Monday’s Sun Journal, Dot Watson said she recognized it immediately.

“Sure as I’m sitting here I know it was the same mail truck,” she said.

Watson lived in the town’s oldest wood-frame house on Ashton Road by the head of Lake Pennesseewassee after marrying her late husband Herb Watson in 1941. She said the mail truck sat off a dirt road in a field across the street from their home for many years.

Her neighbor “Arbie Durrell dragged it there. It sat there for years,” she said. “It was nothing but rust. There was nothing on it. There weren’t any tires or if there were they were all rusted. It sat on wheels.”

While it’s unclear how Durrell got the truck, Watson said it became a playground for her five grandchildren and a neighborhood friend.

The kids had a grand time in it,” she said. “They probably drove many miles in it without any floor or anything.”

One day two men came to the field to look at the truck. Within a few days it was gone, she said.

While it’s not ceratin who the men were, it is probable that it was Dennis Sanborn of Oxford and his father, Lawrence, who according to a 1981 interview with the Sun Journal, recovered the abandoned truck from the woods near Lake Pennesseewassee to restore it.

They overhauled the mail truck, building a new wood body, cutting, fitting and dovetailing it to its original state. The truck was given a dark olive paint, the U.S. Postal Service color at that time.

From there the truck went to Ray Leavitt who owned it for about 15 years and now has it up for sale.

I”m quite sure that was the mail truck that sat in a little field by my house on Ashton Road for many years,” Watson said.

ldixon@sunjournal.com