British Steamer Clotilda

Steamer Clotilda went ashore at Wells Beach on December 13, 1870. 

The steamer ran into rough seas that caused her heavy cargo to move. Her Master, Captain Young, put into Dublin, Ireland where 100 tons of coal was dropped in amongst the cargo to prevent further shifting. Consequential to this considerable delay Clotilda’s destination was changed to Portland, Maine.

Contemporary accounts of the Wells Beach accident were published in the Eastern Argus and the Bangor Daily Whig & Courier. A statement of the “material facts” is also included in a subsequent lawsuit filed against the ship and her cargo by Nathaniel Lord Thompson of Kennebunk. It appears in Volume 1 of Reports of Judgments of Hon. Edward Fox U.S. District Judge for Maine District First Circuit, “The weather at the time was stormy, dark and foggy, and blowing a double reef top-sail breeze with a heavy sea. The beach is of sand, quite flat, affording very poor holding-ground, and is at the head of Wells Bay, exposed to the full force of the winds and waves. The vessel went on at a low run of tides, near high water, and the sea broke heavily over her stern, she being fast in the breakers”. Clotilda’s stern, rose and fell digging her deeper and deeper into the soft sand.

The officers went ashore and found lodgings at the house of Mr. Owen Davis, who lived nearby. Robert Cleaves of Kennebunk approached the captain and offered his services to salvage the cargo. Young proposed to pay 1/4 of the shipped value for the discharge of the cargo on the beach above the spring tides to make the ship lighter and easier to get afloat. Cleaves accepted the proposal and the same evening a written contract was signed. Cleaves paid his men $2.00 per tide and ox teams with drivers were paid $4.00 per tide to unload all the soda, and glass, a portion of the sails and about 3/4 of the ferry parts. As the cargo was removed the lightened steamer moved 500-600 feet up the beach and turned broadside to the water with some of her hull being 13 feet deep in the sand. 150 tons of that sand worked its way into the ship. Having done all he could Cleaves assigned his contract with Young to Captain Nathaniel Lord Thompson of Kennebunk.

Thompson released the ship and her remaining cargo to the underwriters who, in March of 1871, hired the New York Coast Wrecking Company to get Clotilda afloat. An article in the Eastern Argus published July 7, 1871 described their Herculean task. “The wreckers first had to cut her round so that her stern would point off shore. By the aid of two steam pumps, a steam winch of great power, and four anchors weighing 4,000 pounds each, one twenty inch and three sixteen inch cables they turned her and hove her 1,000 feet to where she floated. Five times these heavy anchors were hove home and had to be replanted. As fast as they moved her down the beach they had to fill her with water to keep her from breaking up. On the full spring tide of the second month they expected to get her off, but their anchors failed. It was very difficult to work upon her as she listed so that cleats had to be nailed upon her decks for the men to walk upon”. The steamer finally floated off on June 29, 1871 and was towed to Union Wharf in Portland. Clotilda was not in good condition after sitting on Wells Beach for six months. The Eastern Argus reported, “She is the picture of a wreck: rusted, woodwork off, smoke stack and lower masts standing, dismantled and decks encumbered with the wrecking paraphernalia.”

The steamer was repaired and then sat at Union Wharf under the control of the United States Marshall for almost another year pending Nathaniel Lord Thompson’s lawsuit but was finally cleared from Boston for Liverpool, England in May of 1872.

Extracting gold from seawater

Tiny Fort Island, connected at low water to Stage Island, has a rich and colorful history. Cape Porpus Settlers huddled behind the fort there during a 1689 Indian attack. In 1894, Harvard student, Henry F. Knight described colonial artifacts he had collected on the island at a meeting of the Maine Historical Society and again to an audience of summer visitors at the Langsford House.

Melville Freeman, in his History of Cape Porpoise writes “Fort Island was also at one time the scene of considerable granite quarrying”. The Cape Porpoise Land Company purchased it on July 2, 1897. During the year that followed activities on the island were shrouded in secrecy.

The United States had suffered high unemployment rates, recession and bank failures during the 1890s. Alaska’s Klondike Gold Rush, which began in 1897, offered a glimmer of financial hope to many Americans. Meanwhile, a Baptist Minister in Middletown, CT had alienated his congregation by making Catholic-like noises from the pulpit and joined the ranks of the unemployed. Reverend Prescott Jernegan saw a solution to his financial woes in the new public obsession with bling. He claimed to have invented a process for extracting gold from seawater by some secret combination of electrical and chemical reaction.

Several capitalists were invited to accompany Jernegan to a little shack at the end of a deserted wharf on the Rhode Island coast. There he promised they would witness the first test of his mysterious “Accumulator”. The apparatus consisted of a box containing mercury. Two platinum wires ran under water from the box to a homemade battery at the wooded shore. In the presence of the capitalists the accumulator was lowered into the water through a trap door in the floor of the dark little hut.

The minister had enlisted the help of experienced diver and childhood friend, Charles Fisher, who hid nearby in his diving suit until candles were lit inside the shack. Then he slipped into the water and using the platinum wires as his guide found the box, replaced the mercury with gold and returned to the shore undetected.

At sunrise the box was examined and a jeweler in the party certified that the accumulator indeed contained grains of real gold. The capitalists in attendance became excited and begged the minister to let them invest in his invention. Reluctantly, he accepted enough money to set up a full scale operation in Lubec, Maine. The 20 foot tides at the easternmost town in the United States would maximize their gold collection opportunities, Jernegan said and security would be easier to maintain at such a remote location. The Electrolytic Marine Salts Company was incorporated with a capital stock of $10,000,000 in shares of $1 each.

Several of the capitalists who witnessed Jernegan’s successful demonstration were summer residents of Kennebunkport. Rather than purchasing expensive shares of his company they made plans to reproduce his apparatus on Fort Island. May B. Whiting, regular contributor to Henry Ford’s publication, The Dearborn Independent, wrote about the Stage Harbor Gold Rush in 1926. “On Fort Island, off Cape Porpoise, they erected a clubhouse but instead of the customary furnishings they installed pumps of the largest and most expensive make. For a week they pumped. They pumped the ocean side and they pumped the harbor side, but mud remained mud and sand remained sand with never a gleam”.

Melville Freeman wrote “The little building which now stands on the island was built around the turn of the century to house the large water tanks belonging to a corporation which was formed to extract gold from sea water. It was found that gold could indeed be obtained in this manner but at a cost of about five dollars for every dollar’s worth of the precious metal”. In the August 1898 Wave it was reported that the furnished cabin at Fort Island was a perfect picnic retreat. Clearly, all gold prospecting had ceased.

The Lubec Gold Plant proved no more successful. Reverend Jernegan and a large amount of his stockholder’s money disappeared In July of 1898. He was never tried for the crime but paid for it in a bizarre twist of poetic justice. The swindler discovered a British company that claimed to have found the secret of extracting gold from seawater. Believing the process to be genuine, Jernegan invested his entire fortune in the fraudulent company.

Prodigal Absconder

Wells treasurer Alfred A. Whiting was defeated in his bid for re-election at the March 1923 town meeting, but he wasn’t present to hear the vote. Nobody had seen him for days. Joseph Littlefield, the new treasurer, soon realized that something was amiss. Payments owed to town employees were not up to date and state and county officials had never received tax money that had been deducted from the treasury.

Alfred was a popular man. He and his wife Mary had moved to town in 1916 and purchased the year-round Elmwood Hotel. Nobody wanted to believe he had run off with the town’s money. His clerk told a reporter for the Boston Daily Globe that the boss was on a business trip, but in truth, even Mary didn’t know where he was. Nevertheless, she defended his honor in the Biddeford Journal by promising that any irregularities discovered would be made right.

Reluctantly, Wells selectmen voted to conduct a full investigation and a shortfall of $22,079.98 was revealed. For two months the people of Wells spoke of little else. Their sympathies were with Mary Whiting and her two small children, but they could not abide double taxation to offset the loss. A special town meeting was finally called for the purpose of deciding what action could be taken against the accused and whether or not his property could legally be seized.

After the meeting was called to order on the evening of July 5, 1923, there was a confused moment of silence before local attorney Roy Hanscom entered the hall, followed by his client Alfred Whiting. A collective gasp rose from the assembly as the lawyer took the floor. “My client is prepared to make a statement and you will all see that he has done you no harm,” he announced. Then Whiting himself addressed the crowd. “I’ve had promises that if I came back I would not be prosecuted and I have come with a certified check for $22,079.98.” The crowd cheered the prodigal absconder. In their great relief, the taxpayers voted nearly unanimously to declare the town satisfied.

The following morning Whiting granted an interview to a reporter for the Portsmouth Herald. “I wanted my friends and my enemies to know that I was trying to be on the level,” he said. “That’s why I came back and paid every cent of the shortage of my accounts. Where did I get the money? That’s my business. The account is now closed. Everybody is satisfied. I am going to settle down again and give all my attention to my hotel. No more politics for me.”

Wells town clerk Edmond Garland, one of the few who had voted against absolving the ex-treasurer, told the same reporter that only about $6,000 of the amount returned was Alfred’s own money. The remainder had come from the same bonding company that had quietly returned another shortage of $3,500 in 1921 during Whiting’s second term. “Mixing the town’s money with the receipts in the cash register in his hotel, the Elmwood, was given as the cause of the latest shortage,” said Mr. Garland with contempt.

A week later, much to most everyone’s surprise, Alfred was arrested and arraigned for embezzlement of public funds. As he waited in Kennebunk’s municipal court room for his bondsmen to arrive he told a reporter, “You could have knocked me down with a feather when Sheriff Haven Roberts drove into my yard and said he had a warrant for my arrest. I do not understand this action after the vote of the town not to prosecute me if I returned the money. I was in Mexico, out of reach of the law and need not have returned to Wells, but did so of my own free will and paid the full amount of my indebtedness. I suppose that time will tell who are my persecutors.”

It was Alfred’s belief that a formal complaint by the town clerk was the catalyst for his arrest, but the county prosecutor insisted, in a Biddeford Journal interview, that the action was based entirely on newspaper reports and that he was not constrained by any agreement entered into by the town of Wells. “Embezzlement is still embezzlement even if the money is returned,” he insisted.

Alfred was slapped on the wrist by the law, but karma and a multitude of creditors caught up with him after all. Within four years he had lost the hotel to foreclosure and moved his family out of town.

A Home-Water Marauder by Frank Handlen

Five German U-boats cruised the Gulf of Maine during the final months of World War I. The U-156 first appeared in July of 1918. She sank 35 ships before succumbing to a mine off the Norwegian coast. Twenty of those ships were commercial fishing vessels.

The folks at Cape Porpoise had heard rumors that the enemy was near and they were suspicious of every foreigner that came through town that summer. Their apprehensions were validated when a dory carrying three exhausted fishermen from Gloucester, Mass., appeared in the harbor on the evening of July 23, 1918.

Fred Eaton, a gill net fisherman who lived near the waterfront, invited the trio into his home to recuperate. While his wife Nellie prepared them a good hot meal, Fred and his neighbors listened intently to how their fishing party had been attacked by a German submarine.

At 10 o’clock the previous morning the knockabout schooner “Robert & Richard” had been making her way back to port with 90,000 pounds of fresh fish. She was 60 miles off Cape Porpoise when a shell came screaming across her bow. Just able to make out a long gray mass surfacing 200 yards away, Capt. Bob Wharton swung the schooner into the wind and ordered his crew to take to the dories. The 21 crew members quickly readied the boats while Charles Gowen, a quick thinking 13-year-old boy, retrieved a gallon of fresh water and some ships biscuits from the galley.

Everyone piled into six dories. The U-boat commander stood on deck and watched. As the fishermen started to pull away he signaled for Capt. Wharton to bring his dory alongside the undersea craft. He and his second officer climbed into the dory and ordered that it be rowed to the schooner.

The Germans chatted as they searched the cabin of the Robert & Richard. Wharton later recounted the conversation to a reporter for the Boston Daily Globe.

Kapitanleutnant Richard Feldt spoke perfect English as he declared his mission. “I have been sent here to annihilate the American fishing fleet and I am going to do it.” He then picked up a photograph of Wharton’s young sons, Robert and Richard, for whom the boat was named. Commenting on the sturdy appearance of the boys he added, “We got the tug Perth Amboy and four barges off Provincetown yesterday and turned the crews adrift. Among them was a boy just six years old. It was pretty rough last night and I doubt if they got ashore.”

The second officer told Capt. Wharton that he had sailed on American ships for many years before the war and had owned a summer home on the Maine coast since 1896.

Once the ship’s papers were confiscated, the Germans placed a time bomb in her hold and ordered her captain to row them back to the sub. They climbed aboard and then gestured to Capt. Wharton and his men to get out. As the men rowed away they heard an enormous explosion. The Robert & Richard sank at exactly 10:33 a.m.

The weather was mercifully calm. Each of the dories, but one, was equipped with a single small sail. Occasional light puffs of southerly wind helped the little fleet make its way toward the Maine coast. Only one of the dories had two sails. She also carried the water and biscuits that were judiciously doled out to all hands.

All six dories managed to stay together throughout the first day, but when the sun rose on the 23rd, the three men in the fastest dory found themselves alone. They rowed in shifts all day and were nearly exhausted when they finally arrived at Cape Porpoise.

After a good night sleep at Fred Eaton’s house, the Gloucester fishermen were taken to Portland. Eventually all of the schooner’s crew was accounted for and debriefed by authorities. Scores of patrol boats and hydroplanes were sent out in pursuit of the enemy, but the submarine avoided capture.

The U-156 surfaced again in late August. She captured the Canadian steam trawler Triumph and converted her into a surface raider. Her captured steward later told a reporter for the Kennebec Journal, “The Germans were so polite that it started getting on our nerves. They offered us brandy and cigarettes while they used our trawler to blow up fishing boats all around the Bay of Fundy.” When the Triumph’s coal was depleted, she was blown up and her crew was released. On the way home to Germany on Sept. 25, 1918, the submarine U-156 tried unsuccessfully to run through a mine field. All but a few hands perished.

Article by Sharon Cummins originally published in the York County Coast Star

The Dan Sing Fan Ogunquit by Frank Handlen

The pagoda-like buildings of the Dan Sing Fan Tea House and Gift Shop had overlooked Perkins Cove for 75 years when it was deliberately burned during training exercises by the Ogunquit Fire Department. The curious landmark is gone but the Coolidge Family, whose proprietorship made it the center of Ogunquit’s summer social life, will not soon be forgotten.

Brooklyn, N.Y. credit broker Paul Coolidge and his wife, Mary Mountfort Coolidge, purchased land on Shore Road from Ethel Perkins in the fall of 1920. Their sons, Harold Mountfort Coolidge and Richard Burton Coolidge, were both artists. They had studied with Robert Henri in New York and Hamilton Easter Field at Perkins Cove. The creative sensibilities of Ogunquit’s summer society suited Mountfort and Richard — and along with their sister Dorothy — they each set about making contributions to it.

Richard Coolidge and his partner, Italian born actor Luigi Balestro, built the Dan Sing Fan on the Paul Coolidge lot overlooking Perkins Cove. The Tea Room first opened, by invitation only, on Tuesday, June 28, 1921. The gala event was reviewed in the Ogunquit and Kennebunkport Bulletin. “In response to an attractive invitation about 60 of the summer guests and residents of Ogunquit gathered at the tea room where sandwiches, cake, Chinese fruit punch and tea were served by Messrs. Coolidge and Balestro.” The editor went on to describe the festive decor. “The porch, with its Chinese wall decorations painted by Mr. Coolidge and which for dancing can be opened into the stormy-day tea room with its stone fireplace, suggestive of good cheer, was most inviting. A fine time is the verdict of the guests present.” Later that summer the editor reported, “The ‘Dan Sing Fan’ continues to be the center of Ogunquit’s social life at tea hour,” and “The fame of the ‘Dan Sing Fan’ fudge cake has travelled abroad and Mr. Coolidge and Mr. Balestro have approximately 100 guests daily.”

By 1927, the tea house was in every Maine resort guidebook. Coolidge and Balestro had built their own summer cottage next door and the Dan Sing Fan had been expanded to include a gift shop. The men often wintered in Italy but spent the next 35 summers together in Ogunquit serving tea and entertaining summer sojourners.

While wintering in Italy on Jan. 15, 1957, Richard Coolidge legally adopted 30 year old, Osvaldo Riva of Genoa. The waiting list for Italian immigration was long so Osvaldo entered the United States on a visitor’s visa two month later. When the young man’s visa expired after several extensions, Richard Coolidge contacted ex-governor Edmund Muskie to request that a residence visa for his son be expedited. Muskie began his first term in the U. S. Senate in 1959 and one of the first bills he authored was S2164 — Relief of Osvaldo Riva Coolidge. Letters from Richard Coolidge were included in the report for Congress. In them, he explained that as a 66 year old single man with considerable means and a long established business in Ogunquit, he had wished to find an heir to whom he could leave his beloved Dan Sing Fan. His partner of many years was no longer associated, and young Osvaldo Riva, whom he had known since 1949, had few job prospects in Italy.

Osvaldo Riva Coolidge, who had placed fifth in welterweight Greco-Roman wrestling at the 1952 Helsinki Summer Olympic Games, was awarded permanent residency in the U. S. 1960. Ozzie married an Italian girl, just days before his father’s death in 1964. Much to the delight of Richard Coolidge, the ceremony was performed at his bedside.

Dan Sing Fan became Cove Garden and the menu changed to northern Italian cuisine. Ozzie was as much of a fixture in Ogunquit’s social life as his adopted father had been. After 38 years in Maine, he sold the restaurant and retired to his homeland. On his last visit to Ogunquit he learned that the Dan Sin Fan had gone up in smoke to make way for the new owner’s home, and with tears streaming down his face, watched a neighbor’s film of the controlled fire.

After word reached Ogunquit of Ozzie’s death in 2004, good friend Mike Horn remembered him to York County Coast Star reporter, Jennifer Hagan, as a passionate character who loved entertaining his patrons with stories. “You didn’t want to mess with Osvaldo, either,” Horn said. “As long as you praised his food, you were a life-long friend. But if you didn’t like it and said so, you never stepped foot in the door again”.

Pre-historic tree stumps at Kennebunk Beach

Mainers paid homage to the role trees had played in the history of their state by selecting the pine cone and tassel as Maine’s official floral emblem in 1895. For hundreds of years trees had provided timber for their homes, masts for their ships, fuel for their fires and food for their tables. Scientists, historians and journalists have recognized the significance of a few particular living landmarks on York County’s coast.

Stumps of ancient white pine trees rooted in peat were uncovered on Wells Beach by wave erosion in 1955. Radiocarbon dating performed in 1959 by geologist Arthur M. Hussey indicates that, 3,000 years ago, these trees were growing in a wooded upland, but were gradually drowned by the rising sea level. As the topography changed, the dunes moved up and over the ancient roots. Similar stumps have also been found in the intertidal area along Kennebunk Beach.

Charles Bradbury, in his 1837 “History of Kennebunkport,” wrote about a mysterious reference in 17th century town records to a marker at the “cursed fruit.” Historian Ruth Landon later identified the reference as an apple tree near Tyler Brook, the bitter fruit of which had inspired the name.

Cape Arundel cedar tree

In her 1901 book, “Ropes Ends,” Kennebunkport librarian and author, Annie Peabody Brooks, published a photograph of a little bonsai-like cedar tree growing out of the rocks at Cape Arundel. Her caption read, “Old as Capt. Gosnold.” Starting in the 1890s, the same photo was periodically printed in tourist publications and the scraggly cedar became an icon of Cape Arundel’s picturesque rocky shoreline. The tenacious little conifer was still clinging to the rocks in 1950 when artist Frank Handlen captured its likeness in a pastel now owned by the Kennebunkport Historical Society.

A notable landmark at Beachwood (aka Goose Rocks Beach) was described by a Boston Daily Globe correspondent 1911. “In a broad expanse of eye-pleasing landscape in the village of Beachwood, a part of the town of Kennebunkport, Me, stands a group of old birches, long known to the native dwellers and summer sojourners as the ‘Twelve Apostles.’ From good viewpoints they can be seen from miles around and old time residents of the village say that originally there were 12 trees, healthy, white of bark and glorious in green foliage when the months of bloom rolled their courses.”

The majestic anatomy of elm trees often qualified them for landmark status. On May 17, 1826, a giant elm located 1½ miles from the Wells shore was uprooted in a late spring gale. The New Hampshire Statesman and Concord Register reported the loss. “The Great Elm, in Wells Me, which has long been a landmark for vessels entering that harbor, was blown down in the gale on the 17th ult. It was estimated to be 100 feet in height and rose 60 feet clear of limbs. Its circumference was 27 feet, 4 inches.”

Kennebunk has had its own iconic elms. Vintage postcards of the tree growing through the roof of the first Storer Mansion barn are still among the most prized eBay finds. The barn was built in 1855 by owner Captain Lord. Wishing to save the stately elm that stood in the way of his barn expansion, Lord left a hole in the middle of the new structure allowing the tree to grow unimpeded. Lattice and lead flashing wrapped around the opening had to be adjusted periodically as the trunk expanded. Kennebunk Town Historian, Kathy Ostrander, writes in her 2005 book, “Kennebunk,” that the barn was torn down in 1929.

Lafayette Elm

In the field next to the Storer Mansion stood the Lafayette Elm named for the French General who served under George Washington during the Revolutionary War and who furthered French commitment to American interests. The wildly popular Marquis de Lafayette visited towns all over New England in 1825. At Kennebunk, an elaborate celebration was planned to honor his service to America. All the well-heeled ladies in town were invited to the Storer Mansion to meet the French dignitary, whose admiration of women was notorious. They reportedly dined in the shade of an already formidable elm tree. The Lafayette Elm succumbed to Dutch elm disease in 1971, but a slice of its trunk was saved by the Brick Store Museum. Naming an elm tree in honor of Lafayette’s excursion was apparently not an idea that originated in Kennebunk. The “Lafayette Elms” scattered all over Massachusetts and New Hampshire might lead a student of history to conclude that General Lafayette toured the elm trees of New England in 1825.

Many of the beautiful trees we wiz by in our cars every day were admired by horseback-riding residents of the Province of Maine and should be treasured as a link to our ancestors.

Christenson Shipyard in Lower Village by Frank Handlen

Jorge Christenson was born into a shipbuilding family in Bergen, Norway, in 1826. He and his brother Jacob immigrated to this country in early 1850 to escape the high unemployment rate in their native land. Jacob settled first in a Norwegian community in Wisconsin, but eventually built ships at the Portsmouth Navy Yard. Jorge settled in Kennebunk, Maine.

Shipbuilding in the Kennebunks was in a period of transition when he arrived. Until the early 1840s most of the ships launched on the river were built at Kennebunk Landing. The demand for larger ships and growing competition from ship builders in Lower Village and Kennebunkport, motivated a group of up-river ship builders, owners and merchants to invest in building river locks. The gates were to be closed until sufficient water had been captured to float enormous vessels over the rocky falls. When the locks were finished in 1849 ship builders Stephen Ward of Kennebunkport and Clement Littlefield of Lower Village were already working hard to make them irrelevant. The locks remained operable for 19 years, but the yards downriver had an obvious financial advantage. Shipbuilding at the Landing dwindled after the Civil War and the locks were abandoned.

Young Jorge Christenson was welcomed into Clement Littlefield’s home and given a job in his growing shipyard in 1850. After a few years the ambitious Norwegian had saved enough money to purchase a home using his newly Americanized name George. He married Maria Stackpole and sent to Norway for his father Christen and the rest of his brothers and sisters. In 1853, hoping to someday operate a shipyard of his own, he joined forces with some of his Lower Village neighbors to buy a piece of land on the river just north of the bridge to Kennebunkport.

Just then, when the future looked bright for Norwegians living in Kennebunk, the economy took a nose dive and shipbuilding in the Kennebunks suffered an alarming decline. Local diarist Andrew Walker wrote that the only people making money in shipbuilding in 1856 were the lawyers whose job it was to inventory the belongings of failed business owners and negotiate the 15 cents on the dollar their creditors felt lucky to get. The assets of both the D&S Ward Shipyard and the Emmons Littlefield Shipyard were assigned to lawyers within 24 hours of one another.

Shrewd Landing shipbuilder Nathaniel Lord Thompson seized the opportunity to move his considerable operations below the bridge. He purchased the bankrupt Emmons Littlefield Yard retaining master carpenter Clement Littlefield and his son in-law David Clark. Clark later bought a piece of the old Emmons Littlefield Yard from Thompson and went into business for himself. George Christenson decided to go it alone on his riverfront lot above the bridge. His first vessel, the barque Jacob Merrill, was launched from the Christenson Shipyard in the spring of 1858. In the years that followed, George built several vessels for N. L. Thompson and a few for himself. Work was scarce during the Civil War, but he got by building one or two schooners a year. The Norwegian shipbuilder was regarded as an honest and methodical man. He acquired several adjoining lots — expanding his shipyard while real estate was cheap. When the war ended George hit the ground running and for several years his shipyard thrived.

The Christenson family moved to Milwaukee in 1868 where many of their kin had settled, but returned to Kennebunk in 1872 and resumed shipbuilding in the Christenson Yard. The largest ship ever built there was George’s last — the Louis V. Place, a 698 ton schooner that was launched Aug. 2, 1890. When George died in the middle of the night of March 3, 1891, at 65 years old, it seemed he had prepared himself for passage. Andrew Walker recorded the event in his diary. “Last Monday night George Christenson, a shipbuilder at the Port, about Midnight, arose, partly dressed himself and laid down on a sofa. At 3 o’clock his wife spoke to him. Receiving no reply she went to him and found he was dead.”

George’s son William kept the Christenson Shipyard open through 1892. David Clark, who had moved across the river into the old Ward Shipyard in 1880, built his last ship, the four-masted schooner Savannah, in 1901. Stephen Ward’s son Charles built ships at the old Emmons Littlefield Yard in Lower Village until July 10, 1918, when he launched the last of the large sailing vessels built on the Kennebunk River. The four-masted schooner was appropriately named the Kennebunk.

Stage Island Monument at Biddeford Pool by Frank Handlen

One of the most mysterious man-made landmarks on York County’s coast is the monument on Stage Island just off Biddeford Pool. Commissioned by the United States Government, the conical stone structure was to be completed by July of 1825, but tragedy struck during its construction leaving one mason dead and another crippled for life.

The brig Hesper of Newburyport went ashore in 1821 when her captain mistook Negro Island for Stage Island. Capt. Stevens told a reporter for the Newburyport Herald that he had been misled by the directions in the American Coast Pilot. “No mention is made of Todd’s Island (aka Negro Island) in the Coast Pilot, but the passage is said to be between Stage Island and Wood Island.”

Edmund Blunt, author of the Coast Pilot, was outraged by the implication that his directions were inaccurate. He defended them in a letter to the editor. “He who attempts to hide or palliate his want of judgment, attaching blame where it does not exist, creates an alarm which may cause the navigator to doubt in times when decision is all important.” The argument went back and forth in northeastern newspapers for months. A description of Negro Island was added to later versions of the American Coast Pilot but Blunt could not resist the temptation to editorialize. “In running in the Eastern passage” he wrote, “you open a small channel for boats only, between Wood and Negro Islands, but no man of experience would mistake it.”

On Dec. 1, 1823, a petition, signed by “merchants, ship owners, masters of vessels and inhabitants of Winter Harbor,” was presented to the first session of the 18th Congress “praying that a monument may be erected on Stage Island, as a beacon or direction to vessels entering said harbor.” Congress appropriated $1,500 for the project on March 3, 1825, but Portland contractors agreed to build the monument for $1,200. In a later request for additional funds the petitioners testified that John Lowell, Benjamin Bailey and John Leavitt had signed a contract to construct “a column or monument to be built of split undressed stone the foundation therefore to be sunk as deep as might be necessary to make the fabric secure and to lay the same in good lime mortar, the height of the column to be 60 feet from the surface of the ground; the base diameter to be 20 feet and the top diameter four feet; the wall at the base to be four feet thick and gradually diminished so as to leave the wall at the top two feet thick; and to place a cap of hammer dressed granite of five feet eight inch in diameter, 20 inches thick in the center and 10 inches thick at the outer edge on its top; and to make a door in said column or monument; and to whitewash said column and cover the remainder with a coat of pitch and lamp black.”

“Distressing Accident” was the headline in Portland’s Eastern Argus on June 20, 1825. “On Saturday the 18th of June Capt. John Lowell, of this town, aged 39 years, was killed by the fall of a beacon monument, which he and three other persons were engaged in erecting on Stage Island, in Winter Harbor, near Saco,” read the report. All but a small portion of the foundation of the monument was built on ledge. Where there was no rock, a four-foot trench was dug to a hard pan of gravel that the contractors believed would support the weight of the monument. The trench was filled with rock and construction progressed as specified in the contract. John Lowell was working on staging with some of his men 54 feet off the ground when the foundation settled unevenly and the whole structure gave way. Capt Lowell was instantly crushed to death. His workmen, Mr. Samuel Knight of Otisfield and Mr. Grover of Bethel, were both badly injured. Grover recovered from his injuries but Samuel Knight had dislocated his spine and was, for the rest of his life, unable to straighten up.

Lowell’s widow Sally and the two remaining contractors used materials from the fallen ruins to have the monument rebuilt upon a new foundation and collected the originally agreed upon sum of $1,200. In December of 1825 they petitioned the government to compensate their considerable losses. The request was forwarded to the Committee on Commerce, but was ultimately denied because the contract had stipulated that the foundation be secure. The second foundation proved sufficient. The rock and mortar monument still stands perfectly erect more than 180 years later.

Avalanche near Durells Bridge by Frank Handlen

The slippery clay earth along the banks of the Kennebunk River has, more than once, slid into the channel changing the path it meanders.

An article in the Kennebunk Gazette described one such alteration in the river’s course. “A curious migration took place at the Landing during the night of June 11, 1834. About one-fourth of an acre of land, on the eastern bank of Kennebunk River, opposite the dwelling-house of the late Mr. Benjamin Durrell, slid into the river, carrying away nearly one-half of Durrell’s draw-bridge, and nearly filling up the channel for a rod or more. Where, on Wednesday, a ship of the largest size then built on the river might have laid afloat, on Thursday morning the river could be forded without difficulty. The land moved in a solid mass, and the apple trees upon it stood as firmly and as erect, and looked as flourishing, in their new situation as they did the previous day on the location where they were reared.”

Charles Bradbury wrote in his History of Kennebunkport that two other landslides had carried full grown oak trees, and the soil in which they grew, into the middle of the river below Durrell’s bridge.

News of an avalanche in 1670 on the western side of the Kennebunk River found its way to England and came to be known as The Wonder. The few Europeans that had settled on the banks of the Kennebunk River lived close to the ocean and did not witness the event, but it was estimated to have occurred in late June or early July. Word of the miraculous movement of earth reached John Winthrop Jr., the eldest son of the first Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony. The younger Winthrop was serving as Connecticut’s governor in 1670 when he asked two trusted friends to investigate Kennebunk River’s surprising rearrangement. Hartakendon Symons of Salem, who had previously lived in Wells and was familiar with its topography, and Major William Phillips of Saco, reported their findings to the Governor that he might notify the Royal Society.

John Winthrop Jr. was a founding member of The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge. The somewhat secretive organization, whose Latin motto “Nullius in Verba” means “on the words of no one,” was predominately made up of Freemasons and was formed in 1660 to solve the mysteries of the 17th century world without regard to religion. Sir Francis Bacon and alchemist Sir Isaac Newton were both quiet devotees as was King Charles II.

In a letter to fellow Royal Society member Lord Brereton, dated Oct. 11, 1670, Winthrop conveyed an almost magical interpretation of the Kennebunk landslide. “There was a hill near Kennebunk River in the Province of Maine which is removed out of its place,” he wrote. “The hill being almost eight rods from Kennebunk river’s side on the West side of the river, about four miles from the sea, was removed from its place over the dry land about eight rods or perches, and over the tops of the trees also, between the hill and the river, leaping as it were over them into the river, where it was placed the upper part being downward, and dammed up the river till the water did work itself a passage through it. The earth of it is a blue clay without stones; many round bullets were within it, which seem to be of the same clay hardened.”

Charles Bradbury suggested in his 1837 book that said hill might actually have slid under the tangled roots of the trees at the river’s edge in 1670, leaving a gaping hole where the hill had been. He also offered a plausible explanation for the “round bullets” described in Winthrop’s letter. The pellets, he believed, were formed in nearby Wonder Brook when the stream “running over clayey land, caused little falls of water of a foot or more, at the bottoms of which, by the constant falling of the water, holes of some little depth were worn shaped like a mortar. Small pieces of clay being carried into these hollows were by the rotary action of the water, worn round and smooth and were baked in the summer, by the sun, when the brook became dry.”

Whether you believe, as Winthrop did, that a hill in Kennebunk leapt in the air and landed upside down in the river or that The Wonder was nothing more exotic than wet slippery clay responding to gravity, the banks of the Kennebunk River near the Landing have proved unstable and could someday slip again.

Tragedy at Wells Beach in 1883

The beautiful beaches of York County have been drawing bathers from far and wide since bathing suits had collars, but frolicking in summer’s capricious surf has never been without its risks.

On the morning of Aug. 23, 1883, a party of several vacationing families from Washington, D.C. and the Boston area set out from the Bald Head Cliff House in a holiday frame of mind. They boarded a hotel-operated transport boat for Ogunquit Beach, which crossed the river and deposited them at their usual recreation spot on the sand bar. Heavy surf had, unbeknownst to them, scooped out a deep gully inside of the bar. The party entered the surf at a young flood tide which gradually moved them en masse toward the newly formed gulch as they leapt and laughed in the surging water.

Katie Safford and Edward Gould, both teenagers from Massachusetts, had struck out on their own intending to cross the usually shallow water between the bar and the shore when they suddenly found themselves in water over their heads. Rev. Little, his two sons and young Greenough Thayer, responded to their cries for help, leaving Mrs. Little, Miss Marsh and Emma Gould on the bar in the protective custody of Mr. Kimball, a reporter for the associated press who later recounted the details of the accident.

As the bar became submerged, the ladies, in their water-logged layers of modesty, were no match for the undertow and clung to Mr. Kimball’s bathing suit collar. Lashed together that way they started to sink and would all have drowned then and there had Mr. Kimball not managed to free himself. Rev. Little rushed to the aid of the ladies, but by the time he reached them, Miss Gould had sunk and Miss Marsh had floated away. With much difficulty, he managed to get his unconscious wife ashore. Miss Marsh, a woman of considerable size, was floating unconscious, facedown in the water. It took two of the men to drag her ashore and turn her over. Local fishermen saw the struggle and crossed the Ogunquit River to help, but in the end, four teenage lives were lost: Harvard sophomore Greenough Thayer, Rev. Little’s son, Eddie, Katie Safford and Emma Gould.

Mrs. Little and Miss Marsh were rushed to Dr. Gordon’s office. Their conditions remained precarious for two days, but they both eventually recovered. Due to unusually heavy seas the last of the bodies of the dead were not recovered until nine days after the accident. During all those days and nights family members and townspeople stood watch on the beach dreading and hoping for their recovery.

At Kennebunk Beach, 22-year-old Walter J. Beck of Hartford, Conn., died attempting to save Anna V. Johnson from drowning on Aug. 26, 1915. Mr. Beck and his mother were conducting a boarding house in Kennebunkport that summer. He, his brother in-law, and some of their friends were playing ball on the beach when they heard Miss Johnson’s cries for help. She had been wading in the surf when the undertow and a strong river current swept her a hundred feet offshore. Walter plunged into the water and swam to Miss Johnson’s aid while his brother in-law ran for his boat. The Hartford Courant reported, “His brother-in-law came up in a motorboat and rescued her but in the excitement Beck was forgotten. When his companions noted that he was missing and thought to look for him he had disappeared.”

Another accident at Drake’s Island Beach on Aug. 26, 1927 had a happier outcome. Seven members of the summer colony there were riding the surf and were knocked off their feet by high waves. Caught in the undertow, they could not regain their footing. “They were being swept rapidly out to sea when their cries reached shore,” wrote a reporter from the New York Times. “Donald Strever of Ballston Spa, N.Y. and John Shaw of Lowell, Mass., obtained a long rope and struck out with it from shore. They were joined by four other bystanders who formed a human chain.” Thanks to quick thinking on the part of Stever and Shaw and the concerted efforts of many, all seven bathers were saved.

When one considers the number of people who have enjoyed York County’s beaches since the mid-nineteenth century, accidents have been few and far between. Though they were separated by many years, these three incidents all resulted from overwhelming late August undertow.