Kennebunk Historian William E. Barry did a lot to document our history. I especially appreciate his Historical and Road Map of Kennebunk, ME and Vicinity, that he compiled and drew between 1905 and 1908. It still hangs at the Kennebunk Free Library, thanks to Henry Parsons.

Barry was still in the process of making it in 1906 when it was displayed at the three-year-old Atlantis Hotel at Kennebunk Beach. I have shared the description of the map that appeared that summer in The Wave. The last feature mentioned caught my eye.

“The site of the Acadian Exiles’ house built for them by the town.”

I had read about the house built for “Acadian Exiles” near the intersection of High Street and Harrisecket Road, but I had never read that the family was put ashore at Kennebunk Beach.

Kennebunk was still part of Wells in 1755 when Capt. Daniel Bragdon sailed the refitted sloop Prosperous to Nova Scotia to pick up more than 300 Acadian refugees who had refused to pledge unqualified allegiance to the British Crown. They were to be transported to Massachusetts and Virginia in the same deplorable conditions suffered by transported enslaved people. Of these displaced persons banished from their homes, six were allotted to the Massachusetts town of Wells; “John Mitchell and wife, with two children, Mary and Gregory; and two of Peter White’s children, Margaret and Madlin,” wrote our local historians.

My recent research revealed that John Mitchell and his wife, Anne were known to their loved ones as Jean and Nanette Roy Michaud. Nanette Roy was Metis. I was fascinated to learn that Nanette and I share the same ancestors Jean Roy of St. Malo France and the Indigenous woman he met after arriving in Canada. The Michauds may not have gone directly to Kennebunk as they were registered in Dedham, MA in 1758. Once they got here, sometime before July 17, 1760, they did not stay long. They returned to Canada as soon as they were allowed to in 1763. Peter White or Pierre Lablanc’s daughters, reunited with their Leblanc family, which had been exiled to Berwick before returning to Canada.