Amy and Mike Preston have no regrets about buying The Alna Store in 2004. They love the town and the people, and business has been good, Amy Preston said. But the couple has been thinking about selling for a while.

The Prestons recently made the decision to put Alna’s only general store and one of the town’s main gathering spots on the market. A real estate sign on the store lawn on Route 218 gives the news away.

“It’s time to shift gears and pass the reins, hopefully to somebody younger with a lot more energy, who will take it even further than we’ve been able to,” Amy Preston said.

Under the couple’s ownership the store has put on annual Halloween trick-or-trunk events; hosted fundraisers for Hidden Valley Nature Center in Jefferson; and sold goods made or grown in or near Alna.

The store earned a Spirit of America award for its service to the community.

This year, the store, which serves eat-in or takeout, started selling produce from Tom Albee’s farm on Route 218, a short way south of the store. Albee has also volunteered in costume at the Halloween events.

Asked about the Prestons’ plans to sell the store, Albee said: “It’s kind of sad to think about, because they’ve been such a great resource for the community.”

He praised Amy Preston’s volunteer work and said he will miss her at the store. The sale of his produce was a good arrangement for everyone, and was part of a good relationship he has had with the store, Albee said.

The hours that the Prestons and five other employees put in at the store each week equal nearly five full-time schedules, Amy Preston said. She and her husband are hoping that the next owners will keep the staff they have acquired, as they did with the staff in place when they took it over. They also hope the buyer will continue the store’s support of local businesses and community events.

“Absolutely,” Mike Preston said. “The place has become something special and we’d like to see it stay that way.”

So would Margaret Russell of Newcastle, a Wednesday morning regular who was in on Saturday afternoon with her sister Gertrude Pinkham of Boothbay Harbor.

The Prestons are a major reason they come to the store.

“They’re so nice and polite,” Pinkham said.

“I come in special to see Mike,” Russell said, smiling.

“She just wants one of these,” he said, giving Russell a hug.

Russell wasn’t sure she would continue to be a regular if someone else owned the store.

Mike Preston, a microbiologist, is back at work full-time as a research associate at Bigelow Laboratories in Boothbay Harbor. That was part of the reason to part with the store. So was the passage of time. Winters are not getting any easier as the couple gets older, Amy Preston said. Heating and otherwise maintaining a business along with their Alna home means double the chores in winter. “There’s a lot of duplication,” she said.

There are also the couple’s 180 fruit trees and 18 acres of wild blueberries to tend at home.

“We’ve got a lot going on,” Mike Preston said. “And we just need a little less work.”

Their years as the store’s owners have probably been some of the best years of their lives, he said. “I don’t know how many incredible people we’ve met coming through here.”

The couple bought the store 11 years ago this November, from Kim Chapman. The building was once a grain store in the Puddle Dock neighborhood and was hauled by truck from there to its current location, at the fork of Route 218 and Dock Road in the 1940s, town archivist Doreen Conboy said.

Conboy and her husband Joe Barth are among the property’s succession of past owners. It has had incarnations as a convenience store and an antique store, Conboy said. When she and Barth bought it in the late 1970s, it was a shell of a building; they moved it about 75 feet back from the fork and onto a foundation, and restored it in the approximately two years they owned it.

Asked for some historical perspective on the prospect of the store changing hands again, Conboy said: “It’s part of the continuum. I just hope whoever gets it takes as much care with it as (the Prestons) did.” The store has had several good owners, she added. “So I’d like to see that continue.”

When the store sells, the Prestons plan to keep living in Alna and tending their farm. While Mike Preston also has his Bigelow job, his wife is keeping her other post-storekeeper options open.

She likes to cook and bake, so she may sell products made with the farm’s fruit; it also might be fun to take a different job every summer, she said.

It took them quite a while to decide to give up the store, because they have so enjoyed having it, she said.

“It’s really been a blast.”