Category: History

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...

Here it is May 1, 2025. May Day has meant different things to different people in our nation’s history. What does it mean to you this year? Is it the opening of water recreation season? I’m usually out kayaking by now, but boating weather is taking its own sweet time getting here this year. Is...

The United State was at war with Japan, Germany, and Italy by mid-December of 1941. Feelings of patriotism and vulnerability surged in the Kennebunks. A few years ago, I wrote a piece about Location 155 Plane Spotting Tower erected at Cape Porpoise under the direction of The Portland Harbor Defense Board. Another tower was built...

Displaced Persons (DPs) from Ukraine, Estonia, and Poland were offered refuge at Kennebunkport’s Freedom Farm after World War II thanks to the generosity of one Arundel Road farmer. Ethar Milliken had read about the plight of Eastern European refugees and decided to donate one of the two farms he owned to the United Baptist Convention...

As most of you know, School Street was so named long before Consolidated School was built. There was a little yellow brick schoolhouse on School Street from 1820-1868. It sat at 6 School Street, where the red dormered gambrel cape now stands. The District # 4 schoolhouse shows up on the 1856 map but was...

The barque Laurens was launched from the Kennebunk River shipyard of Robert Smith Jr. on January 31, 1838, almost exactly one year before the famous revolt of 53 Africans onboard La Amistad. At first, Kennebunks men sailed the Laurens across the Atlantic carrying mostly cotton and tobacco, but she started whaling in the early 1840s....

The first railroad company to run tracks through Kennebunk was the Portsmouth, Saco and Portland Line. The company opened a depot in West Kennebunk in August of 1842. It was the only depot in the Kennebunks for 30 years. Competitor, Boston & Maine Railroad Company, leased rights to run their trains on this line until...

Do you remember the Langsford House in Cape Porpoise? Were you there when the two upper stories of the yellow hotel building were demolished in March of 1964? Ferdinando Huff first ran an inn on that lot in 1682. The town was twice abandoned during King William’s War and Queen Ann’s War. Thomas Huff returned...

One is never too old or too young to be a History Hero. Without the documentation done by young William Harrison Larkin, Jr., at Goose Rocks Beach in the late 1800s we might never have known the location of the buried shipwrecks at Goose Rocks Beach. Two wrecks lie between The Point and Shore Goose...