Shipbuilder Nathaniel Lord Thompson rebuilt the grist mill at the Mousam River Bridge in 1869 when maritime prospects were dim. Around the same time, he built a 2 ½ -story dwelling diagonally across the bridge, perhaps for workforce housing. Gilpatric wrote that the building was a gatehouse over the dam flume, and it did have access to the flume through a trap door in the floor. Diarist Andrew Walker wrote contemporaneously of it, “As a matter of course the accommodations are not fit for a family used to the luxuries in life.” One side of the downstairs became the cigar and tobacco store of Charles Sawyer managed and later owned by William Stanley. The other side of the first floor housed a meat market and then the barbershop of William Russell. There was an apartment upstairs. A spring flood washed into the first floor and carried the building furnace down the old flume on the evening of March 19, 1936. This gave the occupants of the building time to vacate before the structure tipped back into the Mousam River at 2am the next morning.

Larrabee & Furbish built a store in Union Square Kennebunkport on the Kennebunk River that sold stoves and tinware in 1833. Otis Buzzell bought the building in 1879 along with all the stock from the previous owners. Buzzell sold the store and his surplus stock of stoves to George Carll in 1887. Carll continued the same business but added to it the sale of furnaces and general hardware. Alfred Myron Wells ran the business by 1900 until his death in February 1942. He was not around to see his Union Square shop finally buckle on September 11, 1942, under the weight of all the excess stove and furnace stock stored upstairs in the ancient building.

William Nedeau took down what remained of the Kennebunkport store and the Strand Theatre next door to make way for Nedeau & Thompson’s Quonset hut in 1945. It stood there for the next 30 years.

What do you remember about any of these buildings?