DEAR SUN SPOTS: You are such a wonderful resource that if you have a slow time, I jump at the chance!

I have only gotten dead ends in researching a post office that was in my home from 1900 to 1912. The postmaster was Clement Stetson, also president of both the Greene Grange and the Maine State Grange. Our home had descended in the Stetson family since it was built in 1791.

Here’s the quandary: The name of the post office, judging from the postmark and government records, was Alta, not to be confused with other Maine post offices with similar names such as Alton. I have two pieces of mail postmarked “Alta,” indicating that C. Stetson also sold insurance and likely ran a small store of some kind.

Postal records confirm what information I have uncovered, but here’s the puzzle: There was no town named Alta, just this post office in Greene. There was another post office at the same time several miles away named the Greene Post Office.

I wonder if anyone knows anything more about this post office, Stetson or Alta. Thank you, anyone, for any help. — Lew via email

ANSWER: Sun Spots would have no answer at all for this query if not for Doug Hodgkin of the Androscoggin Historical Society and a professor emeritus at Bates College. Doug did some research and came up with the following.

“First I looked in Stanley B. Atwood’s ‘The Length and Breadth of Maine.’ For ‘Alta’ I only found ‘discontinued P.O. in Greene.’ This is a book that contains all the place names in Maine, both historic and as of the publication date of 1946. Therefore, there was no town or any other place such as a brook or a hill by the name of ‘Alta’ other than this post office.

“However, I cannot explain why that post office was named that. We do have confirmation that Clement Stetson was the postmaster there from his biography in ‘Mower’s History of Greene.’ However, I did not find anything else in that history about that post office. The history does say that all post offices were closed in 1902 when RFD was instituted, except for the one at the Center Village.

“Clement Skolfield Stetson was indeed a community leader, according to the biography in Walter Lindley Mower’s ‘Sesquicentennial History of the Town of Greene.’ I have scanned and attached pages 343 to 345, which include his photograph.”

Sun Spots cannot reproduce those pages here for copyright and space reasons, but she has forwarded them to Lew. In those pages it says that he attended school at Kents Hill and Monmouth Academy, taught school in Indiana and graduated from law school in Peoria, Ill.

He returned home to care for his aging parents, married a Winthrop woman and had one adopted daughter. He was a well-known and respected citizen, according to those pages.

Other readers looking to trace relatives in Greene might want to look into Mower’s book.

DEAR SUN SPOTS: I am looking for an article on John D. Schmidt that was published in your newspaper. He was believed to have been a spy for the United States during World War 11. John was born in Germany on Nov. 2, 1910, and died on Oct. 19, 1960, in Vermont. He once lived in Berlin, N.H. — Faithful Reader via email

ANSWER: During the era you cite, there was no Sun Journal. Instead there was the Daily Sun and the Evening Journal, which later merged.

Google put the archives for those papers online, and anyone can access them.

The Daily Sun is at http://tinyurl.com/334ehgd. The Evening Journal is athttp://tinyurl.com/2v2uu7x.

However, they are not complete, and the search function is rather hit or miss. You will have better luck if you have a date to help narrow the search. Fortunately, 1960 was not so long ago. There may be readers who remember something that may help.

When Sun Spots did a Google search, she found two things: The German version of John is usually Johann. Also, in the Captain America comic book series one of his archenemies is the Red Skull, a Nazi spy whose real name is Johann Schmidt. 

Wikipedia’s list of famous Johann Schmidts does not include any real person that fits your parameters, but Wikipedia is not infallible.

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