Category: History

All I want for Christmas is reassurance that treasures preserved by the Kennebunkport Historical Society will be accessible to your children’s, children when they are ready for them. My weekly goal here is to keep sharing our history but I will have dropped the ball if our historical treasures indefinitely remain vulnerable to fire and...

Already a best-selling author, newlywed Newton Booth Tarkington first visited Kennebunkport in 1903. His arrival at The Old Fort Inn was proudly announced in Kennebunkport’s summer newspaper. He spent that whole season here recovering from a serious case of Typhoid Fever and falling in love with the town in which he would summer for the...

The British burned “The People’s House” in Washington D. C. on August 24, 1814, in retribution for the American attack on York (Toronto), which during the War of 1812, was the capital of the British colony in Canada. The White House was still under reconstruction and uninhabitable when Captain James Monroe became the 5th President...

I have received a number of queries about what was happening here during the Revolutionary War since the Ken Burns documentary dropped. Apparently, I am not alone in my obsession with this fascinating series. Here is how we fit in. Episode 2 News of the first shots fired at Lexington and Concord reached Arundel April...

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....

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....

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...

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 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...

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...