Throwback Thursday

Happy St. Patrick’s Day to you of all nationalities. I was surprised to learn about Thomas Casey, the eventually revered “Patriarch” of Kennebunkport. The Irish Catholic lobsterman was not originally welcomed here with open arms, but he won the love and respect of his neighbors in Kennebunkport by speaking his mind with wit and passion. In an article written by Father Charles W. Collins, Priest of St Martha’s Catholic Church in Kennebunk, shortly before Thomas Casey’s death in 1910, “Everybody knows the Patriarch. He is as much a landmark as the steeple of the Congregational Meeting House. He came from...

The Schooner Sagamore, seen here, was launched from the Charles Ward Shipyard in Kennebunk Lower Village on May 11, 1891. Four days later a reporter for the Eastern Star wrote about it. “The Sagamore launched from Ward’s yard took the water well but the carriage shop of Hall and Littlefield got a wetting, water pouring in the windows.” She sailed cargos of coal along the Atlantic coast until the night of May 10, 1907. Maritime Historian, Charles Morgan wrote, “The handsome big four-master Sagamore was bowling along in Vineyard Sound before a strong northwest wind. According to her master she...

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 in 1902. Henry Allen Heckman died May 21, 1920. The Nonantum was sold to the proprietor of the Thatcher Hotel in Biddeford, within a year of Heckman’s death. Felix Bridger hosted his first season as proprietor of The Nonantum in 1921. Extensive renovations of the...

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 Mr. & Mrs. Harry Small bought the Inn in 1946. Their son, Frank Small took over and ran the inn. A bar was added at the Shawmut in 1962. Further improvements were made to the inn in 1963, 1964 and 1965. After Frank Small died...

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 farm to Mariner Peter Johnson in 1841. Johnson sold it to Ivory Smith in 1868 but 13 years later, Peter Johnson’s wife Sarah bought it back. All that time, it was a lovely farm without a clock tower on the barn. Thomas A. Emmons, a...

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 x 20-foot depot with an attached 40 ft platform. The new Kennebunkport Station can be seen top left when it was first built in 1883. B&M Railroad reported in 1887, that the new 4.5-mile stretch was already one of their most profitable branches per mile....

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 Lois. The Brick Store Museum has a portrait of James Fairfield that, long since being lost at sea in a shipwreck, was delivered to Kennebunkport two years after the Captain’s death. But that’s not the story about the Fairfield House I want to share with...

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 ended United States Zanzibarian relationship with a bang. The first United States Consul to Zanzibar was Richard P. Waters of Beverly, Massachusetts. He was horrified by the inhumane conditions suffered at the open slave market there but quickly learned that if he was to survive...

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 and a tannery on the lot two years later. There were only three other houses in the river village at that time. The Walker Tannery prospered, affording the family the dubious distinction of slave ownership in “poor Arundel,” as Kennebunkport was often called in the...

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 a few hours at Cape Ann to give their boilers time to build up a head of steam before screaming across the starting line at top speed. The stakes were high for the first trial in May of 1893. Philadelphia shipbuilder Edwin S. Cramp had...

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 is often faded somewhat on the cards that have survived. The 1883 railroad platform can just be seen at the far right here so we know this picture was taken no earlier than 1883. Notice that the 1878 Brown Block now known as Colonial Pharmacy...

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 came from Newburyport around 1790. His mother was Mary Hovey, granddaughter of Reverend John Hovey, minister in Arundel from 1741 to 1768. The Reverend had kept daily journals of births, marriages and other affairs of the town. Charles Bradbury used what was left of John...