Author: Sharon Cummins (Sharon Cummins)

Everyone knows Cape Arundel Inn. Maybe you even remember it as Seacrest. But did you know it was originally built as a summer cottage for the nephew of our 19th U.S. President, Rutherford B. Hayes, after whom Rutherford Hayes Platt was named? Rutherford’s father-in-law, Captain Robert Swanton Smith, who had served in the regular US...

Kennebunkport Commercial Fishermen make good use of what we call Government Wharf these days. Granny Harding’s Wharf is the name it was known by before the United States Government acquired it from Stephen Harding descendant, John Ward and improved it in 1831. Government Wharf has since been further improved. A year before the Kennebunk River...

Most of the vessels built in the early days of the District of Kennebunk were ships, barques, and brigs, carrying square sails across their width. That rigging was appropriate for deep-sea trading voyages. As larger ships were required, shipbuilders at Kennebunk Landing struggled to get their huge vessels down our circuitous little river. The Lock...

People in this part of Maine have suffered from smallpox since Europeans arrived. They brought a decimating epidemic to the Indigenous people of Maine, who had no immunities to it. It killed eighty percent of Maine’s Indigenous population at first contact. Smallpox was brought to Kennebunkport from the West Indies in 1787 in the sick...

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m a coward in a thunderstorm. Imagine my horror when amid a barrage of lightning strikes last Friday night, I heard what sounded like sirens from half a dozen fire engines rushing toward my beloved Kennebunkport village. There was a fire at the Tamaracks property on Maine...

I had so much fun presenting the History of Dock Square slideshow at the Town House School that Thursday evening last month that I’m working on two more evening presentations; Cape Arundel History in July and Artists of the Kennebunks in August. The first artist I’m researching is Peggy Bacon. My major source is a...

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...

The Kennebunkport Historical Society collection is full of intriguing treasures; each with a story of its own. One such treasure that I am drawn to is a finely sculpted two-foot fragment of a green marble statue mounted and labeled with reverence. Boston Author, Margaret Deland, summered at a cottage near the Nonantum Resort she had...

Shipbuilder Clement Littlefield was a very young man when he established The Emmons & Littlefield Shipyard in Kennebunk Lower Village in the 1840s. Biddeford Journal correspondent, Jules Righter made his acquaintance in 1887 on a grassy knoll adjoining Littlefield’s home on Chase Hill Road. “I came here [from Wells] when I was sixteen years old...

In preparation for my Dock Square slideshow coming up at the Townhouse School next Thursday evening, I am sharing part of one of the Dock Square history sources I used for the research. “Dissolving Views” was an article printed in the August 1,1913 issue of the Kennebunkport summer newspaper, Sea Shell. The Editor interviewed older...