Throwback Thursday

Local Catholics attend Mass in Kennebunk these days, but in 1902, Martha Walker, great grandmother of President George H. W. Bush and great, great, grandmother of President George W. Bush, was the driving force to build a Kennebunkport Catholic Church. You may recall the Irish fisherman Thomas Casey who, as one the few Catholics in Kennebunkport after the Civil War, hosted Sunday Mass in his home just outside Arundel Square. When Martha Walker and her husband David Davis Walker started summering at Cape Arundel in the 1880s, they supported the building of St. Ann’s Episcopal Church, but Martha continued to...

Two of my favorite places to wander offshore at the Kennebunks are Strawberry Island at Kennebunk Beach and Vaughn’s Island at Cape Porpoise. Both are now held in trust; Strawberry Island by the Kennebunk Land Trust and Vaughn’s Island by the Kennebunkport Conservation Trust. Both islands were also once privately owned by Arthur Guy Carlton Libby and his much younger wife Elsie Klingman Libby of Libby’s Colonial Tea Room of Wells, fame. Seth Warren, who had had a house on Vaughn’s Island for many years, sold the island to a development company in 1888 for $3,000. Plan 3 -22 was...

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 Point when the tower of St. Ann’s was still under construction in October of 1891. However, you may not be aware that two of the oldest Maine two-masted coasting schooners still afloat were pummeled by heavy seas at those two Cape Arundel locations within a...

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 school. In 1889, Kennebunkport voted to build a new village school on the burned-out Spring Hotel lot on Elm Street. The first floor of the new school would accommodate grammar and primary students. Upstairs, for the first and only time in the town’s history, Kennebunk...

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 1925 Buick Sedan prominent Kennebunkport hotelier and horse trader, George H. Bayes was driving. Four officers in two automobiles had been lying in wait for George Bayes on suspicion that he was handling wet goods on the regular. One car broke a spring after...

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 force of nature she was to us. Florence “Flossie” Currier grew up at the Kennebunkport Playhouse. She worked in the box office, helped out as Treasurer, and often made appearances on stage. When she was just 11 years old, she appeared in two roles in...

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 because, even though he too has now passed, for me, his voice has not. Goose Rocks Beach artist, Eliot O’Hara, was born in 1890 in Waltham, MA. He became manager of the family business, O’Hara Waltham Dial Co., in 1912. Some of his associates at...

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 1911 on land donated to the community by the Dow & Fearing families on Edgewood. It was the only firehouse in the area when Goose Rocks was hit by the disastrous 1947 fire. The Edgewood firehouse has since been converted into a private home. According...

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 operational 1749 Perkins Tide Mill. I was never lucky enough to dine at The Olde Grist Mill Restaurant. Were you? I would love to hear about your experiences there and what the ambiance was like. Did it feel like a mill? Arthur and Louise Perkins...

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 1775. One of the salt works erected by Kennebunk entrepreneurs was on “Two Acres,” the old-fashioned name for Lord’s Point. “The works were continued in operation four or five years,” wrote Bourne. “In 1779 and 1780 the price of salt had fallen so much that...

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 Calvary during the Civil War and was later counsel and secretary for the Columbus & Xenia Railroad, purchased two Cape Arundel lots from the Kennebunkport Seashore Company in 1890. He had John Calvin Stevens design him a beautiful cottage that he called Kenridge. Captain Smith’s...

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 Club boathouse was built, a proposal to repair Government Wharf included a proposal to build a stone jetty a bit upriver to mitigate a sandbar that was developing there. The Kennebunk River Club Boathouse was constructed in 1890. The new Government jetty in the river...