Author: Sharon Cummins (Sharon Cummins)

I’ve heard a lot about Forefathers Inn since I moved to Kennebunkport in Y2K but some of the facts about its ultimate fate are still fuzzy for me. Maybe you can help. Tea houses were all the rage in the Kennebunks, especially during Prohibition. Forefathers Spring House, later known for serving up a different kind...

The Kennebunkport Methodist Parish needed a place to hold services in the river village of Kennebunkport. Oliver Bourne made his lot on Maine Street next to the Custom House available for this purpose. The modest one-story Methodist Chapel was dedicated in April of 1835. In 1862, the one-story structure was raised up. The first floor...

Mark Swett of the Westbrook Historical Society contacted me at the archives several weeks ago. He found some very interesting Kennebunkport Hutchins letters mixed in with a donation Westbrook Historical Society received that had been stored away for many years in someone’s attic. “Some of the letters between members of the Moses Hutchins family [who...

The Wards are one of those Kennebunkport families that keep popping up in my local history research. Nathaniel Ward moved here from Salem, Massachusetts in 1789. He married ferryman Shephen Harding’s daughter. When Lydia Harding Ward died, part of her father’s property near the mouth of the Kennebunk River was sold by the Ward Family...

A yellow stagecoach on sleigh runners turned up in Barnstead, NH recently after having been stored away in a trailer there for decades. The gentleman upon whose property it had been abandoned contacted me at the Kennebunkport Historical Society to inquire about it since Kennebunkport was lettered above the doors on both sides of the...

There is a monument at the Cape Porpoise Pier honoring soldiers and sailors who served in the American Revolution and a plaque in Cape Porpoise Square honoring veterans of WWII, Korean, and Vietnam conflicts. WWI Veterans were honored upon their return to Kennebunkport in 1919. An all-encompassing Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Eagle perches proud in...

Kudos to L. Blake Baldwin of Video Creations in Kennebunk for converting this 16mm film from our collection. It was produced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture after the Maine Fire of October 1947 to warn folks to prevent forest fires, “It happened in Maine so don’t let it happen to you.” Keep an eye...

“I was awakened from a sound sleep and saw this figure of a Quaker lady surrounded by a gray haze. She glided by the foot of the bed and went out the door,” recalled musical star Jane Morgan’s good friend Muriel Pierce to a reporter in the mid-1960s. The newspaper man and his photographer had...

Did you ever wonder why Spring Street in Kennebunkport is so named? It was the way to the freshwater spring that stood along Mast Cove between The Village Baptist Church and the White Columned Nott House. Its location is clearly indicated on both the 1856 map and the 1872 map of Kennebunkport. That spring was...

World War II veterans Wesley Boynton and Morse Haithwaite performed in the Kennebunks for the first time in 1946 when their friend Robert Currier invited them to appear at his Kennebunkport Playhouse. Their performance was so well received that they returned several times that season to perform at the Olympian Club on Temple St. Starting...