Throwback Thursday

The bridge that connects Kennebunk Lower Village to Dock Square Kennebunkport has been rebuilt several times. During a freshet on March 1, 1896, the old wooden drawbridge collapsed with a loud crash when big chunks of ice rushing downriver with the violent ebb tide cut through its supporting pilings.The need for safe and attractive vehicle passage from the Lower Village train depot to the Kennebunkport hotels by the time the summer folk arrived was of course the priority but year-round residents of both villages, who shared a post office, a milkman, and a family culture were also greatly inconvenienced. A...

I always assumed that women were gradually, if begrudgingly allowed to play golf with the men as the sport became popular in the Kennebunks but one lesson historical research has to teach me over and over is, never assume. Sarah Bancroft, seen in the first picture showing her Swedish Coachman how to drive, was a major impetus in bringing golf to the Kennebunks. She had learned the game while traveling in England and had purchased two sets of golf clubs of her own. The first organized golf club in the Kennebunks was called the Kennebunkport Golf Club. Artist Prosper Senat...

Kennebunkport and Kennebunk historians do not agree on the date Durrell’s Bridge was built. In his 1837, History of Kennebunkport, Charles Bradbury wrote that Durrell’s Bridge was built before 1751. Indeed, a 1751 entry in the first Arundel Town Book refers to Bartlett’s bridge as the upper bridge over the Kennebunk River implying that a lower bridge existed. Kennebunk Historians have all written that the bridge was built in 1764 or 1765. Bourne says that the first mention of the bridge in Kennebunk Records was in 1765 when Durrell’s Bridge Road was built to access “the bridge lately built.” Perhaps...

The old adage, “History is all around us” rings true here in Kennebunkport. If we are at the Louis T. Graves Memorial Public Library on Maine Street, it is literally embedded in the walls. I have written about the Kennebunk Bank for which the brick building was erected in 1813. Observant Library patrons can still see the old bank vault where gold and silver was kept under three locks and three keys to be turned simultaneously by three bank officials. Customs records were later stored in the vault while the Kennebunk Customs District occupied at least part of the building...

Places hold memories for the ages. If I show you this c.1965 picture of the Olde Grist Mill, a delicious Indian Pudding might spring to mind or maybe your first job waiting tables. You probably won’t reminisce about riding in a horse drawn wagon full of corn harvested from your family fields, on your way to the grist mill to have it ground into meal by miller Perkins, but your great-grandmother might have. Captain Thomas Perkins, Jr. and two of his sons built the Perkins Tidal Grist Mill to work on the outgoing tide in 1749. The eldest son, Eliphalet...

The most beautiful stop for paddlers on the Kennebunk River is Picnic Rocks. It has been so for at least 150 years but a few times it came this close to being split up for development. Thank goodness, preservation-minded individuals stepped up just in time. Cape Arundel Cottagers made Picnic Rocks a popular canoeing destination starting in the 1870s. By the time The Kennebunk River Club had built a boathouse in 1890 their annual canoe races conducted at Picnic Rocks were the Club’s most popular annual activity. The property around Picnic Rocks belonged to two older local men, Henry Towne,...

The history of Kennebunkport during the early 19th Century can be told through the experiences of Brigadier General Simon Nowell because he had a piece of most everything… until he didn’t. Simon Nowell, born in York, ME in 1779, first came to the Kennebunks as a live-in apprentice for the Kennebunk Landing baker, Mr. Brookings. Young Simon’s job was to push a wheelbarrow full of gingerbread around the Landing and sell to the hungry shipyard workers. Before long, Nowell had moved on to clerking at an Arundel West Indies store and then trading on his own account. Within a few...

The Kennebunkport Inn lot has been through many changes since Ephraim Perkins built a family home overlooking Dock Square around 1800. At that time, the property extended all the way to the Kennebunk River. There wasn’t yet a bridge into Lower Village and except for Ephraim’s own wharf and store, there were no neighboring businesses. Over the years, the commercial aspect of Dock Square grew up around the Ephraim Perkins center-entrance colonial. Kennebunk-born, Boston tea and coffee dealer Burleigh S. Thompson and his wife Harriet were living in Kennebunkport Village when the 1880 census was taken. They probably moved here...

Last week’s Throwback Thursday featured the c.1724 Thomas Perkins House, the oldest house in Kennebunkport Village. This week, the oldest commercial building still standing in the village is our focus. The Eliphalet Perkins wharf and store were built c.1775 for the West Indies trade. Perkins ships carried Arundel fish and lumber to the West Indies and returned with molasses for making rum. In the 1840s, Mrs. Jeffery ran a sailor’s boarding house upstairs in the store. Eliphalet Perkins III and his son Charles E. Perkins, who built the Nott House, owned the business when the Maine liquor law passed in...

Captain Thomas Perkins brought his family to Arundel from Greenland, NH in 1720. Within a few years, he owned about all the land along the Kennebunk River from Bass Cove and Walkers Point. That area includes all of Kennebunkport Village and Cape Arundel today. His eldest son, also named Captain Thomas Perkins, built the Oak Street saltbox featured in today’s story c. 1724. The oldest house standing in Kennebunkport is now just shy of 300 years old. It stood alone in the wilderness in 1724 still very vulnerable to attacks by the local Indian tribe who had fished the Kennebunk...

Kennebunk River near the old Mitchell Garrison 1870s Unknown Our mystery vessel somehow managed to get herself in this precarious position in the mid-1870s, based on the vessel on the stocks at the nearby Titcomb & Thompson yard at far right. By 1891 when the bottom picture was taken, what remained of her hull was visible near the Mitchell Garrison, which would later be replaced by the Franciscan Monastery. What remains of her today in the mudflats can best be examined by kayak at low tide. Monastery and Ella Clifton Derelicts are slowly disappearing