Throwback Thursday

Some of the most architecturally significant federal buildings still standing in the Kennebunks were designed by Thomas Eaton. The 1984 Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Maine says, “Thomas Eaton’s life remains one of the least documented of his contemporaries; neither the date of his birth nor the date or place of his death is certain. He is believed to be the son of Joseph Eaton of Wells.” Given the plethora of genealogical evidence digitally available in 2025, I thought it was time to give it another go. Thomas Eaton was born in North Yarmouth, Maine to Josiah Eaton and Miriam...

GUEST THROWBACK THURSDAY by Laura Benson Parsons Sargeant Robert Joseph Benson, the youngest of ten children born to Ernest and Mary (Murch) Benson of Kennebunkport served as a Ball Turret Gunner on a B-24 in the 380th Flying Circus Heavy Bombardment group of the Air Force. He enlisted in January,1943 at the age of 19. His squadron was based in Australia and flew missions over the Southwest Pacific. The Benson family received word that Bob was missing in action in May 1945. On June 20, they were notified that he had been killed in action on May 18 when his...

Fisherman Bejamin S. Wakefield, father of George W. Wakefield, our longest serving Goat Island Lighthouse keeper, crashed his own funeral. Captain Ben of Cape Porpoise was fishing with Josiah Hutchins off Wood Island on May 4, 1891. A fierce gust of westerly wind knocked over his schooner, M.Y.O.B.(Mind Your Own Business). She quickly filled with water and sank. Capt. Dan and Charles Golthwaite, watching from the Pool, saw the men clinging to the foremast, the only part of Ben’s schooner still above the surface. The Golthwaites set off in their dory to rescue the fishermen. Meanwhile, Ben had let go...

Paddling by Stage Island and its former appendage, Little Stage or Fort Island, one would never guess it’s enormous historical significance. I’m not talking about Its use by European fishermen as a place to dry their fish long before Plymouth Rock was glorified, nor grazing sheep there in the 1800s, or even harvesting gold from the sea there. Stage Island was the site of another incident in 1689 that entirely depopulated Kennebunkport for more than a decade. A very unpopular Royal Governor, Sir Edmund Andros came through here in 1688 setting up forts along the coast of Maine to protect...

The Kennebunkport Historical Society has in its photo collection an album of cyanotype prints taken by summer visitor, Henry B. Wood, mounted on ruled newsprint and later unceremoniously captioned. Cyanotype prints were most popular with amateur photographers in the 1890s because their processing didn’t require a lot of chemicals or equipment. I always get excited when I see them. They often show parts of town that professional photographers typically ignore. When I first saw the album years ago, one of the images in it intrigued me. Its captioned, “After cyclone; the wharf minus its roof.” and then in another hand,...

I spend a lot of time kayaking our waterways. I’m not alone out there but I hardly ever see canoes these days. There was a time, during Cape Arundel’s heyday, when owning a birch bark canoe made by Louis Francis was something to brag about. Canoes were status symbols and social conduits. On occasion, they even facilitated romance. Long before Europeans arrived on our shores, indigenous people were building dugout canoes here. Cape Porpoise Archaeological Alliance excavated one from Stage Harbor flats in 2019 that was carbon dated to between 1276 and 1393 A.D. It is the oldest dugout canoe...

Artist Abbott Graves purchased and renovated the old Kennebunk Customs House on Maine street in Kennebunkport to donate it to the town as a Public Library in 1920. Above one of the fireplaces, he painted a mural depicting explorer Martin Pring’s ships ‘Speedwell’ and ‘Discoverer’ sailing the vast Atlantic on their way to being the first Europeans to explore the Kennebunk River in 1603. But, to say Pring “discovered” the Kennebunks is to disregard the Indigenous people who had first populated it some 12,000 years earlier. Pring wasn’t even the first white man to come to the Kennebunks. According to...

The 784-ton Ship Anna F. Schmidt was launched on August 25, 1854, from the D&S Ward Shipyard in Kennebunkport. Little did her owner, Capt. Charles Williams, know that day that her demise would make international news and American Civil War history. Captain Henry B. Twombly of Pearl Street Kennebunkport was her master by the time she sailed from Boston on January 13, 1863, bound around Cape Horn with cargo for San Francisco. Just two days out, in a heavy gale from the northeast, the ship started leaking badly. When one of her two pumps gave out Capt. Twombly made for...

Local Catholics attend Mass in Kennebunk these days, but in 1902, Martha Walker, great grandmother of President George H. W. Bush and great, great, grandmother of President George W. Bush, was the driving force to build a Kennebunkport Catholic Church. You may recall the Irish fisherman Thomas Casey who, as one the few Catholics in Kennebunkport after the Civil War, hosted Sunday Mass in his home just outside Arundel Square. When Martha Walker and her husband David Davis Walker started summering at Cape Arundel in the 1880s, they supported the building of St. Ann’s Episcopal Church, but Martha continued to...

Two of my favorite places to wander offshore at the Kennebunks are Strawberry Island at Kennebunk Beach and Vaughn’s Island at Cape Porpoise. Both are now held in trust; Strawberry Island by the Kennebunk Land Trust and Vaughn’s Island by the Kennebunkport Conservation Trust. Both islands were also once privately owned by Arthur Guy Carlton Libby and his much younger wife Elsie Klingman Libby of Libby’s Colonial Tea Room of Wells, fame. Seth Warren, who had had a house on Vaughn’s Island for many years, sold the island to a development company in 1888 for $3,000. Plan 3 -22 was...

You have probably heard about the wreck of the 4,000-ton British freighter Wandby at Walker’s Point in March of 1921. In fact, that shipwreck is so famous we now have a Kennebunk restaurant named after it. You may also have seen the iconic photograph of the 121-ton schooner Empress on the rocks nearby at Arundel Point when the tower of St. Ann’s was still under construction in October of 1891. However, you may not be aware that two of the oldest Maine two-masted coasting schooners still afloat were pummeled by heavy seas at those two Cape Arundel locations within a...

Most of us take a secondary education for granted but before 1890 most Kennebunkport kids didn’t have the option of going to high school. The cost for such a luxury was not covered by local taxes or subsidized by the state. The State of Maine finally offered subsidies for any town that maintained a high school. In 1889, Kennebunkport voted to build a new village school on the burned-out Spring Hotel lot on Elm Street. The first floor of the new school would accommodate grammar and primary students. Upstairs, for the first and only time in the town’s history, Kennebunk...