Throwback Thursday

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,...

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

The dam at Goff’s Brook near the golf club was still standing in 1899