Throwback Thursday

Paddling by Stage Island and its former appendage, Little Stage or Fort Island, one would never guess it’s enormous historical significance. I’m not talking about Its use by European fishermen as a place to dry their fish long before Plymouth Rock was glorified, nor grazing sheep there in the 1800s, or even harvesting gold from the sea there. Stage Island was the site of another incident in 1689 that entirely depopulated Kennebunkport for more than a decade. A very unpopular Royal Governor, Sir Edmund Andros came through here in 1688 setting up forts along the coast of Maine to protect...

The Kennebunkport Historical Society has in its photo collection an album of cyanotype prints taken by summer visitor, Henry B. Wood, mounted on ruled newsprint and later unceremoniously captioned. Cyanotype prints were most popular with amateur photographers in the 1890s because their processing didn’t require a lot of chemicals or equipment. I always get excited when I see them. They often show parts of town that professional photographers typically ignore. When I first saw the album years ago, one of the images in it intrigued me. Its captioned, “After cyclone; the wharf minus its roof.” and then in another hand,...

I spend a lot of time kayaking our waterways. I’m not alone out there but I hardly ever see canoes these days. There was a time, during Cape Arundel’s heyday, when owning a birch bark canoe made by Louis Francis was something to brag about. Canoes were status symbols and social conduits. On occasion, they even facilitated romance. Long before Europeans arrived on our shores, indigenous people were building dugout canoes here. Cape Porpoise Archaeological Alliance excavated one from Stage Harbor flats in 2019 that was carbon dated to between 1276 and 1393 A.D. It is the oldest dugout canoe...

Artist Abbott Graves purchased and renovated the old Kennebunk Customs House on Maine street in Kennebunkport to donate it to the town as a Public Library in 1920. Above one of the fireplaces, he painted a mural depicting explorer Martin Pring’s ships ‘Speedwell’ and ‘Discoverer’ sailing the vast Atlantic on their way to being the first Europeans to explore the Kennebunk River in 1603. But, to say Pring “discovered” the Kennebunks is to disregard the Indigenous people who had first populated it some 12,000 years earlier. Pring wasn’t even the first white man to come to the Kennebunks. According to...

The 784-ton Ship Anna F. Schmidt was launched on August 25, 1854, from the D&S Ward Shipyard in Kennebunkport. Little did her owner, Capt. Charles Williams, know that day that her demise would make international news and American Civil War history. Captain Henry B. Twombly of Pearl Street Kennebunkport was her master by the time she sailed from Boston on January 13, 1863, bound around Cape Horn with cargo for San Francisco. Just two days out, in a heavy gale from the northeast, the ship started leaking badly. When one of her two pumps gave out Capt. Twombly made for...

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...