There’s an old New Year’s Eve custom in Italy where homeowners and apartment dwellers take old items they don’t need or want anymore and throw them out the window into the street. I heard about the custom and didn’t believe it until I spent a New Year’s Eve in Rome during my crazy college days, when I saw it with my own eyes.

As you might expect, this year-end activity has caused more than a few injuries to innocent pedestrians and the practice is not encouraged by government officials. But dangerous customs are most often the hardest to do away with and so – dangerous or not – this zany one continues.

While keeping the windows here at Storyteller Central closed as I write, I do intend to throw out of a few old emails that arrived during the past year but, for reasons that will soon be clear, never got any further than my in box.

For example, a while back, Chet from Newport wrote: “John, my buddies and I were sitting around my kitchen the other night talking about one thing or another and Dave, one of my buddies, asked if anyone knew where Maine’s first limestone quarry was dug. I said I thought, because of its name, it must have been in Limestone, but Arthur said he thought the first quarry was in Rockport. Peter then piped up and insisted the first quarry was dug in Rockland.

Rather than argue further about it I decided to email you for the answer and we all agreed we’d go by whatever you say. So, John, assuming one of us must be right, I ask: Was Maine’s first limestone quarry in Limestone, Rockport or Rockland?”

Chet, I’m too polite to ask what you and your buddies were using as your beverage of choice that night, as you sat around discussing such “weighty”’ issues, but I hope your buddies had a designated driver for the ride home.

That aside, I can tell you without even checking that you and your buddies were all wrong about the location of Maine’s first limestone quarry. Close, but no cigar.

As you know, Chet, I’m not just an erudite columnist. I also host a radio talk show in Portland, and like most talk show hosts, my head has to be filled with some of the most useless information known to exist in the minds of men and women, which helps fill up all those hours we have to fill on the air.

Anyway, somewhere in the mountain of useless facts I have on file in my head is the answer to your limestone quarry question.

They started digging in Maine’s first limestone quarry in Thomaston in 1733 – almost 100 years before we even became a state. Once they got their fill of limestone from the quarry, they decided to build a prison over it.

On another topic, sometime last spring Ethan from Westbrook wrote: “John, I read your column every week and find it most enjoyable. The other day we were talking about American presidents and local place names and I said I assumed that either the town of Lincoln, Lincoln County or Lincolnville was named after our 16th president. My friend insists that none of those places was named for the Great Emancipator. Is that true? I find it hard to believe.”

Yes, Ethan, it is true. There are no towns, cities, counties or even endangered species in Maine named for Honest Abe.

The town of Lincoln is named for Enoch Lincoln, our sixth governor; Lincolnville is named for American Revolutionary War Gen. Benjamin Lincoln, an incorporator of the town; and Lincoln County was named for Thomas Pownal, a colonial governor of Massachusetts, who came from Lincoln, England.

Go figure.

But since most people have never heard of those three obscure guys, you’re free to say that one of those places is named for the famed author of the Gettysburg Address. Just don’t tell your friend.

John McDonald is the author of five books on Maine, including “John McDonald’s Maine Trivia: A User’s Guide to Useless Information.” Contact him at mainestoryteller@yahoo.com.