Town blacksmiths played important roles in early Kennebunkport village life. Some shoed horses and oxen, some specialized in making ship irons, others made household tools and fixtures. The carriage maker in town also needed specific smithing skills.

There were plenty of blacksmiths working in Kennebunkport Village. Three of them are indicated on the 1872 map of Kennebunkport right at the junction of North St, Maine Street and Temple Street; Mr. Hall, Mr. Tripp, and one unnamed blacksmith shop that would come to house the Robert P. Benson horse shoeing business starting in 1884. Robert’s son Ernest joined him in the business ten years later. They worked together shoeing horses until Robert’s death in 1919. Ernest carried on at the same location until the Masonic Lodge was under construction, at which point he moved to a smaller shop on Oak Street.

Their ancestors had settled in Arundel around 1750. The Benson family lived, among many locations, at what is known as the Adams Farm on North Street. It still looks pretty much as it did in the Benson days but for a dormer here, a shed there and some extra porch real estate across the front of the house.

Ernest’s grandson, Cecil Benson remembered his grandfather well. “I consider myself very fortunate to have been able to watch him work at the forge and shape horseshoes on the anvil. Occasionally, when his day was done, he would let me use the fire left in the forge – to do a little black smithing on my own!!”

Captain Cecil Benson served on 30 merchant vessels during his maritime career. In the mid-1990s he inherited his grandfather’s complete blacksmithing tool set from his father. He donated the tools to KHS and built a functional replica of the Benson Blacksmith Shop at the Kennebunkport Historical Society’s North Street Campus in 2005. “I consider this task to be not only a heritage, but also a legacy,” Cecil said. “Perhaps a farrier could be brought in from time to time to shape a shoe and maybe even shoe a horse!”