Category: History

You have probably heard about the wreck of the 4,000-ton British freighter Wandby at Walker’s Point in March of 1921. In fact, that shipwreck is so famous we now have a Kennebunk restaurant named after it. You may also have seen the iconic photograph of the 121-ton schooner Empress on the rocks nearby at Arundel...

Most of us take a secondary education for granted but before 1890 most Kennebunkport kids didn’t have the option of going to high school. The cost for such a luxury was not covered by local taxes or subsidized by the state. The State of Maine finally offered subsidies for any town that maintained a high...

A high-speed car chase down North Street, during which 5 shots were fired by law enforcement officers, ended on the lawn of South Congregational Church at about 7:30 in the evening of October 25, 1925. Okay, the pursued vehicle was actually traveling at 60 miles an hour, but that was a pretty high speed for...

The world has learned that singing sensation, Jane Morgan passed away in Florida on August 4th at the age of 101 years old. We have all read the Hollywood obituaries. They don’t begin to express the lifelong impact our beloved Jane Morgan had on her Kennebunkport neighbors. I wish to celebrate her as the Kennebunkport...

I’m finishing up the slideshow lecture, Artists of the Kennebunks, which I first started in 2004 in partnership with Kennebunkport artist, Frank W. Handlen. As we usually did when we worked together, I focused on researching historical facts about the artists’ lives while Frank focused on their aesthetic painting styles. I will quote Frank liberally...

The first hotel built at Goose Rocks Beach in 1871 was the Goose Rocks House at the east end of the beach overlooking Beaver Pond Creek. When it burned on August 28, 1910, the Goose Rocks Beach Community had no way to fight the fire. The Beachwood Improvement Society built the first “Beachwood Firehouse” in...

I spend a lot of time around the site of the Olde Grist Mill during kayaking season, especially now that the Kennebunkport Conservation Trust has provided a Yakport kayak launch, making it so much easier for my friends and family to join me on the historic Kennebunk River. I cannot be there without imagining the...

With those views, it might seem like Lord’s Point must have always been the exclusive summer enclave that it is today, but it wasn’t. In the 1770s, there was a salt works there where they extracted salt from sea water. Wells and Kennebunk Historian, E.E. Bourne, 1797-1873 wrote that salt was exceedingly scarce here in...

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...