Throwback Thursday

Shipbuilder Clement Littlefield was a very young man when he established The Emmons & Littlefield Shipyard in Kennebunk Lower Village in the 1840s. Biddeford Journal correspondent, Jules Righter made his acquaintance in 1887 on a grassy knoll adjoining Littlefield’s home on Chase Hill Road. “I came here [from Wells] when I was sixteen years old and went to work, learning my trade, at the Landing up there,” the retired shipbuilder said, pointing upriver. “We worked from sunrise up to sunset in those days.”… “When I was twenty-one years old, I had acquired sufficient proficiency in my trade so that I...

In preparation for my Dock Square slideshow coming up at the Townhouse School next Thursday evening, I am sharing part of one of the Dock Square history sources I used for the research. “Dissolving Views” was an article printed in the August 1,1913 issue of the Kennebunkport summer newspaper, Sea Shell. The Editor interviewed older Kennebunkport residents who still remembered how Dock Square looked in the 1840s. Hay scales in a tall frame building, stood where the monument is now. A steep flight of stairs led to where one could “look at the steelyard beam, so counterpoised that a heavily...

Here it is May 1, 2025. May Day has meant different things to different people in our nation’s history. What does it mean to you this year? Is it the opening of water recreation season? I’m usually out kayaking by now, but boating weather is taking its own sweet time getting here this year. Is May Day an ancient pagan fertility ritual expressed symbolically with maypoles, wreaths, and baskets? There was much rebirth to celebrate here after the end of WWI and The Spanish Flu pandemic. May Day was primarily an opportunity for children to perform and play dress up...

The United State was at war with Japan, Germany, and Italy by mid-December of 1941. Feelings of patriotism and vulnerability surged in the Kennebunks. A few years ago, I wrote a piece about Location 155 Plane Spotting Tower erected at Cape Porpoise under the direction of The Portland Harbor Defense Board. Another tower was built in Kennebunk to defend a battery near Portsmouth Harbor. While Location 154 was still being constructed, Civilian Defense Volunteers watched for planes from atop the Pythian Block on Main St in Kennebunk. Local Newspaper reporters were cryptic when describing the location of the new plane...

Displaced Persons (DPs) from Ukraine, Estonia, and Poland were offered refuge at Kennebunkport’s Freedom Farm after World War II thanks to the generosity of one Arundel Road farmer. Ethar Milliken had read about the plight of Eastern European refugees and decided to donate one of the two farms he owned to the United Baptist Convention of Maine. The group repaired the old 11-room farmhouse on Arundel Road and reconfigured it into 3 apartments. Kennebunkport people donated labor, money, livestock, and equipment to the cause. The farm served as a temporary home for DPs from 1949-1955; a place where they could...

As most of you know, School Street was so named long before Consolidated School was built. There was a little yellow brick schoolhouse on School Street from 1820-1868. It sat at 6 School Street, where the red dormered gambrel cape now stands. The District # 4 schoolhouse shows up on the 1856 map but was gone by the time the 1872 map was printed. Next door at 8 School St stood an early Meetinghouse by 1816. It was purchased as a home by the Wescott Family before the 1856 map was printed. On the other side of the brick schoolhouse...

The barque Laurens was launched from the Kennebunk River shipyard of Robert Smith Jr. on January 31, 1838, almost exactly one year before the famous revolt of 53 Africans onboard La Amistad. At first, Kennebunks men sailed the Laurens across the Atlantic carrying mostly cotton and tobacco, but she started whaling in the early 1840s. Boston Customs records say her ownership had been “partially transferred” by 1844. Captain Franklin N. Thompson still commanded her in 1845. The Laurens was seized by the U. S. Navy off the coast of Brazil on January 23, 1848. Capt. Littlefield was sailing her to...

The first railroad company to run tracks through Kennebunk was the Portsmouth, Saco and Portland Line. The company opened a depot in West Kennebunk in August of 1842. It was the only depot in the Kennebunks for 30 years. Competitor, Boston & Maine Railroad Company, leased rights to run their trains on this line until PS&P insisted on renegotiating the 6% B&M lease at a higher rate. Rather than pay the increase, B&M Railroad laid their own tracks through Kennebunk in 1872. Andrew Walker wrote about it in his diary starting on August 1, 1872. “B&M Railroad Directors have been...

Do you remember the Langsford House in Cape Porpoise? Were you there when the two upper stories of the yellow hotel building were demolished in March of 1964? Ferdinando Huff first ran an inn on that lot in 1682. The town was twice abandoned during King William’s War and Queen Ann’s War. Thomas Huff returned to Cape Porpoise for the second time in 1715 and garrisoned his property against attack. Cape Porpoise settlers sought refuge there during the French and Indian Wars. Some made it. In October 1723 two men named FitzHenry and Bartow left Thomas Huff’s garrison to go...

One is never too old or too young to be a History Hero. Without the documentation done by young William Harrison Larkin, Jr., at Goose Rocks Beach in the late 1800s we might never have known the location of the buried shipwrecks at Goose Rocks Beach. Two wrecks lie between The Point and Shore Goose Rocks, according to a map Will drew c.1892. He called the one further east, the “Old Wreck.” I have found reports of only two vessels that went aground at Goose Rocks Beach. The oldest of the two was mentioned in the 1853 issue of American...

I received a research request for information about anti-slavery sentiment in the Kennebunks. While the subject is broad enough to fill a thousand 330-word Throwback Thursdays, one example that I first learned from the diaries of Kennebunk Town Clerk, Andrew Walker, speaks volumes. Walker’s diaries are available through DigitalMaine. Eunice Dorman (1803-1852) and her little sister Hannah (1812-1880) were abolitionists in the Kennebunks at a time when shipping fortunes were being made here on the backs of enslaved people in the West Indies and the southern United States. The sisters, founding members of Second Parish Congregational Church on Dane Street,...

Kenneth L. Roberts is best known for his set of historical novels, The Chronicles of Arundel, but he was still a young newspaperman when he bought an old stable at Kennebunk Beach from his wife’s aunt in 1919. Roberts jokingly dubbed it ‘Stablehurst’ but His friends, Booth Tarkington and Hugh Kahley thought the name lacked elegance. They christened it ‘Stall Hall.’ “Though our resources hadn’t allowed us to make extensive alterations,” Roberts wrote in his book ‘I Wanted to Write’ “It already boasted a bathroom, a cookstove, a bed, and a commodious set of living-room furniture I’d made myself out...