Throwback Thursday

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...

This glass plate of Dock Square was taken between May 8, 1891, when the White School (1) was moved from the corner of Maine Street and Union Street to its present location tucked behind the Brown Block (2), and October 3, 1893, when the first Norton House burned (3). The building at far right was originally a school on Elm St called the Academy (4). It was moved to Dock Square before 1850. It has since been torn down and rebuilt as part of Alisson’s.

Hundreds of spectators came to see the launching of the three masted schooner Nimrod from the Christenson Shipyard in Kennebunk Lower Village on August 22, 1891. The Nimrod was the last vessel Norwegian shipbuilder George Christenson framed out. He did not get to see her off the ways at what would later become Herbie Baum’s Boatyard. George died of heart failure on March 3, 1891, at the age of 64. Andrew Walker recorded the loss in his diary. “Last Monday night George Christenson, a shipbuilder at the Port, arose about midnight, partly dressed himself and laid down on a sofa....

The Ellen Littlefield Doubleday Collection contains the diaries of Frank G. Littlefield of Mills Road from 1895-1918. Frank writes about his day-to-day life in Cape Porpoise. Like so many of his neighbors, he worked a lot of jobs to make ends meet. He painted and papered local houses and hotels, he cut ice in the wintertime, and he was a gifted taxidermist. He and his wife Emma Louise grew vegetables and raised livestock. Despite all that effort, they still had to go out and fetch wild fish or fowl for the family to eat most days. On November 26, 1897,...

Shortly after I posted my Throwback Thursday column last week, I read in a local Facebook Post that Hurricane Restaurant in Dock Square was on fire. My mind was immediately flooded with images of the two previous fires on that side of Dock Square that had caused so much damage. All but one of the commercial buildings on the north side of Dock Square were destroyed by fire in 1877. The anchor of the block had been the first Parker House Hotel and Restaurant built around 1870 by Swedish-born William C. Parker. It was described by the press as “a...

The Kennebunk River was not originally suitable for shipbuilding or even navigation of merchant vessels, for that matter. A large ledge called Perch Rock obstructed the east side of channel. At low tide, only 10 inches of water passed over a sandbar across the mouth of the river. Shifting sands were liable to change the location and configuration of the channel during every storm. Local businessmen and the Federal Government made numerous improvements to navigation on the Kennebunk River that we take for granted today. In 1793, local merchants led by Tobias Lord, Oliver Keating, and Thatcher Goddard, invested $3,000...