The families who built Cape Arundel cottages were often connected to each other through the women in the family. Such was the case with the Nesmith sisters, for whom St. Ann’s Rectory was originally constructed and their sister, Mrs. Greenhalge, whose cottage stood atop Grandview Avenue.

Isabel, Mary, and Julia were three of the daughters of wealthy industrialist and textile manufacturer John Nesmith of Lowell, MA who served as Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts during the Civil War. Isabel married Frederic T Greenhalge in 1872, when Cape Arundel was mostly rocky farmland. Frederic was born in England but had moved to Lowell, Massachusetts as a child. He served as Mayor of Lowell, Congressman, and from 1893 until his death in 1896, he was the Governor of Massachusetts.

In 1887, Boston and Kennebunkport Architect Henry Paston Clark designed a cottage for the Greenhalges. Frederic and his wife were naturally interested when that same year their architect began supervising the construction of a stone Episcopal Church he designed for the summer residents of Cape Arundel. Frederic Greenhalge, a Unitarian, even wrote hymn lyrics for St. Ann’s that the church distributed amongst the parishioners.

While St. Ann’s was still under construction, Mrs. Greenhalge’s sisters, Mary and Julia Nesmith purchased the lot next to the church from Kennebunkport Seashore Company. Historian Joyce Butler wrote that they spent their first night at The Pebbles, as they called it, on July 24, 1891. “The half-timbered shingle-style house stood at the edge of the ocean above the Fox Rocks, the rocky shore where foxes came looking for dead fish to eat and were in turn shot by the farmers whose henhouses they raided.” The sisters had all gone home to Lowell before the coal schooner Empress went aground on Fox Rocks on October 28, 1891.

For the rest of the history of Kennebunk Point, St. Ann’s and the rectory, join us inside the beautiful stone church on July 9th or August 13th at 5pm.