Eighty-eight shipmasters and mates from Cape Porpoise, Gloucester, and Boston petitioned the United States Government for a mechanical fog bell to be installed at the Goat Island Light Station. They also wanted a spindle at the sometimes-submerged rocky extremity of Goat Island and a tripod marking the other side of the entrance on Folly Island....
Author: Sharon Cummins (Sharon Cummins)
Kings Highway
Kings Highway in the Kennebunks has changed a lot since it was first established in 1653. Massachusetts Commissioners could only get their horse carts as far north as Wells to get submission from the people of the Provence of Maine. After inhabitants of Wells, Cape Porpoise, and Saco submitted, the commissioners ordered that they “make...
Walrus Tusk That Ended Up in Kennebunkport
This Walrus Tusk in our collection was donated to the Kennebunkport Historical Society by the Louis T. Graves Library in 1979 with no known provenance. The markings on it indicate that Commander Robert Peary, who was widely credited in 1909 as being the first to discover the North Pole on a voyage of the S.S....
Worlds Collide on Spring Street
Unlike George Castanza, I love it when my seemingly unrelated worlds collide. Mr. Roy Langenberg, who is currently living in Arizona, but whose family can be traced back to Dr. George F. Merrill in Kennebunkport, recently donated some marvelous paintings to the Kennebunkport Historical Society. One Louis D. Norton woodland scene and a small Abbott...
Early Cape Arundel Development
Real estate speculators from Massachusetts and Kennebunkport purchased more than 700 acres of coastal land from Cape Porpoise to Lord’s Point in 1872. They opened the Ocean Bluff Hotel in 1873 with the intention of subdividing the land around it into closely packed cottage lots. The hotel soon enjoyed healthy patronage, but Kennebunkport’s infrastructure was...