Category: History

Henry Heckman of Lower Village built The Nonantum in 1884 with 26 guest rooms and a staff of 10. His business was so successful that he had doubled its size by 1894. Architect Henry Paston Clark designed a Georgian Revival façade for the main building during the expansion and a wide front Piazza was added...

What became The Shawmut Inn at Turbats Creek was originally developed in the 1890s as a summer home for William H. Rankin, a Waltham, MA Textile Mill Man. William’s daughters later added new buildings and started operating it as an inn in 1913. The daughters, Mary Rankin Mathews and Sarah Rankin Summersby were Proprietors when...

Ephraim Wildes built the farmhouse we now call the The Clock Farm in 1773 near Goose Rocks Beach on land his father Jacob conveyed to him in 1768. Ephraim Wildes soon saw active service in the Revolutionary War. He and his wife Temperance Downing raised a large family there. A descendant, John Wildes, sold the...

Local capitalists devised a plan to deliver tourists closer to seaside businesses of the Kennebunks in 1881 by building a 4 1/2 mile railroad branch along Kennebunk Beaches. A lot in Lower Village owned by Shipbuilder, David Clark was purchased for the Kennebunkport Station. Joseph Day of Kennebunk won the contract to build a 48...

Captain James Fairfield married Lois Walker on 12 November 1807. She was the daughter of Daniel Walker of the Cup and Saucer House on Maine Street featured here a couple of weeks ago. You may remember that the couple built The Captain Fairfield house c.1813 on land that Daniel Walker had gifted to his daughter...

The house at 26 Maine St was built by boatbuilder and Sea Captain Nathaniel Ward Jr. in 1812. Nathaniel Ward Jr.’s eldest son, Charles, who inherited the house from his father, became the second American Consul to Zanzibar in 1846. Not the most diplomatic of diplomats, his explosive relationship with the Sultan Seyyid Said nearly...

Kittery shipwright John Walker, no relation to the Walkers of Walker’s Point, purchased a 20-acre lot of land in Arundel in 1740. His 21-year-old son Gideon was at that time apprenticed with a tanner in Rowley, Massachusetts. John Walker left his son the Arundel lot when he died in 1743. Gideon Walker built a home...

Cape Porpoise residents had a front row seat to watch the official United States Battle Cruiser speed trials from Seavey’s lookout up on Crow Hill. Each trial consisted of 2 trips over a carefully measured course that ran 41.65 knots at sea from Cape Ann, Massachusetts to Cape Porpoise, Maine. The battleships would circle for...

This Elmer Chickering photograph was taken in 1883 from Lower Village looking across the old drawbridge into Dock Square. Elmer Chickering of 21 West St Boston came through town in his handmade photography saloon during the summers of 1882 and 1883. You can recognize his cabinet cards by their gilt Chickering watermark, though the watermark...

Charles Bradbury, author of The History of Kennebunkport from its First Discovery by Bartholomew Gosnold, May 14, 1602 to A. D. 1837, was born in Arundel, on October 7, 1799, in the Smith Bradbury House (C-5 in Strolling Through the Port). Charles’ father, Smith Bradbury, was a Sea Captain and a merchant in Kennebunkport, who...