Category: History

The Kennebunkport Historical Society was only a year old and didn’t have a headquarters yet in 1953. Educator, Melville Freeman was the Society’s first Historian. He had not yet written the History of Cape Porpoise, but his 1953 illustrated history-talk schedule makes me feel like a slouch. Freeman was also one of the organizers of...

Cape Porpoise had been informally settled for decades by 1653, under the King of England’s proprietorship of Sir Ferdinando Gorges. After Gorges died, the neighboring colony of Massachusetts Bay began imposing their jurisdiction ever northward. The towns of Kittery and York submitted to Massachusetts in 1651 but the commissioners, wary of continuing upon such a...

Fifty years ago, when the town was applying for the National Register Historic District Designation that we are currently celebrating with 50th Anniversary flags and discs, retired CIA man turned Kennebunkport Historical Society photographer, Stephen Johnson, took a roll of 35-millimeter interior shots of The Olde Grist Mill Restaurant in Kennebunkport. I finally scanned some...

Youth sailing and racing has a long history in the Kennebunks. Even before the Kennebunk River Club was built in 1890, kids were learning to sail and race their sailboats out of the Lobster Boat and Canoe Club near Government Wharf. George H. Walker offered a prize for a series of races in 1904 that...

Hazel Wildes will forever be the Queen of the Kennebunkport Dump Association. Where Ed Mayo conceived the idea to make littering uncool in Kennebunkport Hazel gave the movement everlasting heart. She was awarded the first Miss Dumpy crown in 1966 at the Nonantum and was mentor to every Miss Dumpy that succeeded her. The Annual...

Andrew Sherburne was already a seasoned privateersman at the age of sixteen when he encountered young Capt. Jacob Wildes of Arundel on the streets of Portsmouth, N.H. in the spring of 1781. Capt. Wildes promised Sherburne a full share of prize money to become one of the 35 crew members he needed aboard the Revolutionary...

The Seaveys of Kennebunkport descend from William Seavey who moved to Arundel from Kittery in 1720. Like his father Captain Eli Seavey, our subject today was a ships carpenter in the shipyards for many years but Matthew eventually started building yachts on his own behalf, to operate as tourist excursion vessels. Capt. Matthew B. Seavey’s...

“The observance of “Easter Sunday” in New England except by Roman Catholics and Episcopalians is quite recent. In this village, I do not think there was any particular observance previous to 1870,” wrote Diarist Andrew Walker in the Spring of 1883. By then, homegrown lily displays adorned every pulpit in every church in the Kennebunks...

I’m working on a series of lectures about the history of Kennebunkport. Even though each is about a different part of town I find the research overlapping in interesting ways. The names of some people who lived here before the Europeans temporarily abandoned Cape Porpus in 1689 are still in frequent use today. Turbat’s Creek...

The future of the former Unitarian Church Parsonage at 15 Portland Road in Kennebunk is again in question. I have collected historical information about the house that may be useful to those contemplating its historic value. The Unitarian Society bought a nearly 3-acre lot for a parsonage from Horace Porter in 1833. The house was...