She was built at Scarborough in 1827. Arundel men owned the greater part of the vessel, one brother being the husband. A capt of Kennebunk owned a piece and also a capt of Arundel commanded her with his brother as mate.

 Now, she was bound from New Orleans to Liverpool, with full cargo of cotton near 300 bales. She was a vessel of 389 tons. This was her first voyage. In fact, she had never made a voyage.

 She was a good barque, black, sided with some stripes about her. The crew, some dozen or more, gathered at New Orleans, were all strangers, a mixed lot, with some foreigners among them.

 Now it chanced that a story passed amongst these men, that the vessel had brought a general cargo from some northern part of the southern city. And that a surplus of the money provided to purchase it was still on board, about $25,000; be that as it may ere long they laid plans to gain possession of the craft. They would kill the captain but not the mate as he might serve them later.

 Tales were told that the captain and mate were impetuous but a man who sailed on board as a passenger said it wasn’t so. The sailor’s plot accomplished, then they would scuttle or fire the barque. But it chanced that the cook, a swede, and who also was to perish, overheard the speech and warned the capt and he laid a counter plan of his own to secure them at the first appearance of a mutiny. Ere long several were seized, lashed with cords for there were no irons on the craft. Then in the milee the mate was injured. The vessel being short-handed the capt endeavored to make port at Boston. But wind and ride proceeded and when off this coast he chose to sail for Arundel for there his owner and family were. He also would place the men who refused to do duty on shore, and secure others in their place, would remain over a tide or two only. Ah friend, would that he had not made the mistake of anchoring in an open ??? instead of proceeding to Portland where there was a safe harbor and the US court sat before which the mutineers could be tried. Some persons asserted that the crew believed believed that they were sailing there and that the old observatory on Point Arundel was Falmouth Lighthouse.

 However, the ill-fated vessel anchored inside the fishing rock near the rivers mouth on Wed.

 May 2, 1838. Now when the report reached Kennebunk Village that the Horace was off the bar boys with spy glasses climbed the belfry of the Unitarian Church to see the vessel.

 The mutinous sailors were at once set ashore and transported to Portland.

 The wind came up and blew Friday and Saturday and the condition was serious for the vessel at anchor. A person living near the shore who viewed the vessel straining at her chains exclaimed, “ she will not weather the gale.” Several captains and crew members remained on the vessel. The gale was so heavy seawater was in the fields. The barque was with both anchors ??? with chain cables. Sat May 5 one of the chains parted. The captain feared the other would go and at 11:45 slipped it. And at the same time ordered all hands aloft to loosen the sails intending to work the vessel out to sea but in the extremity of tide and wind the barque would not obey the rudder. Ere the men found time to do their work the captain shouted for them to come down for you must know that he heard the breakers (dirge?) They had barely reached the deck when the vessel struck on the half-way wreck off oakes neck there ½ mile from the anchoring ground. Some call this ledge “wash rock” and declare the vessel left her chain lying across them. She remained there for 15 minutes bumping heavily lost her rudder stern post false keel bent an hogged by the rough usage and filling with water.

 Had the cargo been ought but cotton or had she laid longer on the rock the vessel would have floundered and all persons on board perished.  However, she rose on the ledge with a serge, beat over it and again drifted ½ a mile came ashore upright broadside on with all standing, at night, amid tremendous surf, at first beach some 150 yards from high water mark and hard on 2 acres lot (Lords Point)

The captain, mate and two crewmen swung overboard. He told the owners he would have perished with his vessel if he had it to do again.  Operations were begun to remove the cotton and dismantle the vessel. Many people being employed.     

Author unknown

Thousands of people wiz by Kennebunk’s War Memorial every day but few are aware of its significance or its origin.  

When the citizens of Kennebunk arrived at Town Meeting, Saturday, August 22, 1908, Saco marble dealer, George E. Morrison had already been commissioned to furnish a 21 foot granite figure of a soldier on a seven by eight foot base. The statue honoring Kennebunk soldiers of the American Civil War was to be paid for by the efforts of the Relief Corps and an appropriation by the town.

A satisfactory location for the monument could not be agreed upon. The vote to place it on Centennial Hill passed by a narrow margin but the meeting was contentious. Disgruntled voters grumbled at their neighbors as they left the meeting.

The following Monday, Henry Parsons stepped forward and offered to purchase the land at the corner of Main and Fletcher Streets for $10,000 and donate it to the town for a war memorial. The lot was the perfect choice. It was right downtown and just across the street from the Kennebunk Free Library, which had been built for the town by Henry Parson’s father, George Parsons. Peace was restored. The $4,000 statue was unveiled on October 24, 1908 amid much prayer and fanfare. All the businesses in town were dressed in their finest patriotic buntings.

In 1911, Kennebunk Legislator, Charles Perkins acquired a battle-worn cannon from the Government to be placed near the statue. After World War One, a plaque listing names of the Kennebunk soldiers who served was added to the park. William Barry donated his grandfather’s old ships cannon that had been fired from Centennial Hill to celebrate Armistice Day. Both of these old guns have since been put in storage.

A June 7, 1924 Act of Congress provided for the distribution of captured enemy artillery as war memorials for American cities and towns. Maine was allotted its share of German WWI field guns and the Harold A. Webber American Legion Post was the first to apply for one. The request was passed over even though Kennebunk had sent more men into the World War per capita then any other town in Maine. 

Henry Parsons, a member of Kennebunk’s American Legion Post, stepped forward again. This time he was determined to acquire a piece of German Artillery. In 1928 he became aware of 20 captured Howitzers that had been placed with the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. They were being stored on the grounds of War College for lack of space at the museum so Parsons went to Washington DC to examine the collection. He picked out his three favorite guns and wrote an appeal to the Smithsonian Institute on behalf of the Kennebunk American Legion. “The cannons are seriously deteriorating through the rusting of the steel and the decaying of the wood-work,” he wrote.  “The Harold A. Webber Post respectfully request that one of these cannon be donated to the Post as a war memorial – all expenses in connection with such donation to be paid by the Post.”

After many letters between the Post, the Smithsonian Institute, The War Department and United States Congressman, Lister Hill, the donation was finally approved. These letters, which have been carefully preserved in scrapbooks kept at the Webber-Lefebvre Post 74, were graciously shared with your columnist by Commander Brian McBride. In one rather terse letter from the Post to Governor Ralph O. Brewster, the Post Commander complained that as deserving as the large voting membership of the Kennebunk Legion was they had been overlooked to receive one of the original allotment of German cannons. He then suggested that the Governor might want to rectify the situation by applying to the War department on their behalf.   

In the early part of August, 1928, the German 150mm sFH13 Lang Howitzer arrived at the depot on a flat bottom car. The 4700 pound field gun was unloaded and hauled behind an auto-truck to Town Hall by Henry Parsons, Elmer M. Roberts and Post Commander A.L. Leach. It was riddled with shrapnel and bullet holes; clear evidence of combat against the allied forces. Mobility and fire power made the sFH13 one of the most important pieces in the arsenal of the German Artillery during WWI.  The Fried. Krupp Steel Company had delivered 3,409 of them to the front lines by 1918 when Kennebunk’s Howitzer was captured off a French battlefield.

At the beginning of WWII the Howitzer was contributed to a war effort scrap drive, to be cut up for bullets. As it turned out, the Biddeford junkman did not own an acetylene torch hot enough to cut the cannon into pieces for smelting. After several years of storage at the junkyard it was hauled back to the American Legion Hall on High Street. There it remained until the new Legion Hall was opened on Water Street.

It was reported in the Star that Kennebunk citizens voted to accept the Howitzer as a donation from the American Legion in 1977 to keep it in town “since other area American Legion Posts wanted it.” It was placed at the War Memorial and there it remains to remind us of the price of war.

The leonine month of March lived up to its reputation in 1960. Nearly a foot and a half of snow fell on coastal York County March 4th. The following week, gale winds blowing from a southeasterly direction scoured Kennebunk Beach in an unusual way exposing the remains of a shipwreck that few remembered.

Bill Calder and Charles Robinson were the first to see crudely constructed ribs projecting 18 inches out of the sand on March 11^th and they called George Stevens, photographer for the Kennebunk Star. Some of the ribs were 2 feet wide and a foot thick giving the wreck an ancient appearance.  A six inch trenail (a wood fastening peg) removed from the planking had an unusual diamond-shaped wedged hammered into the end of it.

Sandy Brook, Editor of the Star, contacted marine expert and author, Edward Rowe Snow, at his home in Marshfield, Massachusetts and invited him up to examine the unusual wreck.  By the time Mr. Snow arrived with Marine Architect, Bror Tamm, the timbers were almost entirely covered again by the shifting sand. Kennebunk’s Fire Chief, Harrison Coleman was persuaded to dispatch a fire truck from the Washington Hose Company and volunteers removed enough sand with a high pressure fire hose to give the experts a good look at the 65 foot wreck where she lay some 70 feet from the seawall on Mother’s Beach.

Mr. Snow, who was perhaps best known as “The Flying Santa Claus” for his annual delivery of Christmas presents to the families of New England lighthouse keepers, returned to Massachusetts to write an article for the Patriot Ledger. In his column, Snow theorized that the Kennebunk Beach wreck was the remains of a coasting packet, the “Industry” built in 1770 by Irish shipbuilders in St. George, Maine.  “A colony of ship builders from Northern Ireland settled in St. George. They were the only ones to use a diamond-shaped wedge at a convex angle in the end of their trenails,” explained the maritime historian. Wreckage of the “Industry” superstructure had also been found in this area after she was lost on her maiden voyage. 

Fascinated by the story, Dick Bedard, who now lives in Columbia Falls, Maine and three of his friends dug down four feet in an effort to reach the keel of the vessel. “I have a trenail that I carefully removed from one of the rib stumps, and often show it to people,” Dick said recently.  The young men also found some broken pottery, pieces of leather punched with small triangular holes, unidentifiable chunks of a heavy, hard, black substance and half a pulley carved from lignum vitae, a wood species only found in South America and the West Indies.  Remains of an old leather boot, a bone and a china plate were also uncovered and turned over to the Kennebunkport Historical Society. 

According to Cyrus Eaton in his 1877 book, “Annals of the town of Warren,” Waterman Thomas had a store of West Indies goods in St George and leather shoes were made there before 1770 by Jonathan Nutting. The coasting packet, “Industry” was the first vessel ever built in St. George.  She was lost on her first trip to Boston in the fall of 1770 and no one onboard was ever heard from again.

Her captain was a promising young man who had invested in the vessel after sailing the coasting route for several years with Reuben Hall.  Captain David Patterson, 2^nd had built his bride of two years, Anna James, an elegant home in St George and their first child, David, had just been born.  

Mrs. Benjamin Packard was also aboard the ill-fated “Industry” with one of her children. Her husband, a carpenter, owned a share in the Industry and likely had a hand in building the ship. He and Anna Patterson, the Captain’s wife, soon commiserated in their grief and married each other.

Captain Patterson’s unmarried cousin, Abigail Patterson was also lost as were George Briggs, John Porterfield, Robert Gamble, John Mastick, David Malcolm of Massachusetts, Alexander Baird and Samuel Watson.

 The loss of the vessel was briefly noticed in the October 25, 1770 issue of The Boston News-Letter. “We hear that Capt. Patterson, in a vessel which sailed about three weeks ago from St. Georges, at the Eastward, bound to this place, having on board a number of passengers, is supposed to be lost in a storm which happened the day they sailed, as she has not since been heard of –and ‘tis said the wreck of a vessel was lately seen a little without the capes.”

 During the two weeks in 1960 when the shipwreck was visible, a piece of the stern post was examined by Robert W. Morse and Gerard Aycrigg, members of the restoration Dept. of the Mystic Marine Museum. They confirmed that the vessel was more than 100 years old but with such limited examination, would not support or refute Edward Rowe Snow’s identification of the “Industry”.

Kennebunk Beach had its usual array of summer sojourners in August 1914 but the fresh sea breezes were tainted by the scent of trepidation. Even though President Woodrow Wilson had quickly tried to balance declarations of war in Europe with his own declaration that the United States would remain neutral, the specter of war was omnipresent. As a diversion, the manager of the Atlantis Hotel invited aviator Victor Vernon and his family to stay at the hotel for free if he offered tourist rides on his new-fangled, Curtiss Flying Boat, The Betty V.

Before World War I, aviators were fearless pioneers. Some might even call them reckless. Vernon had been a car salesman for the American Automobile Manufacturing Company only a few months earlier. When the company went into receivership, Victor, who had seen a plane land on the water the previous summer, went to Hammondsport, N.Y., took a few flying lessons from a Curtiss test pilot, and purchased the newest model “hydro-aeroplane” money could buy. He had given just a few exhibitions flights on Lake Erie when he disassembled his Flying Boat and had her shipped by railroad to Portland, Maine.

Little more than a decade earlier, the Wright Brothers had made their first 20-minute flight. The Curtiss Flying Boat was touted the world over as “the sportsman’s vehicle of the future,” and “a marvel of engineering.” The mahogany-hulled, hydroplane was as beautiful as she was fast. Equipped with a 90-horsepower motor she could reach speeds of 60 miles per hour on the water and 75 mph in the air. Vernon anticipated making a fortune flying passengers over Kennebunk Beach with the Betty V.

The Atlantis Hotel, advertised as “a hotel of the very best class,” was built in 1903 in the Spanish mission style. Private bathrooms were available for those willing to pay extra; a rare luxury in 1914. Victor Vernon offered rides from Middle Beach where privileged hotel guests could watch him take off and land from the veranda. His best customer was Atwater Kent, who owned a cottage near St Ann’s by the Sea, in Kennebunkport. Kent had made his fortune by inventing an automobile ignition system that could be engaged from inside the car. He loved any cutting-edge thing with a motor and couldn’t get enough of the Betty V. He showed up day after day to fly with Vernon, sometimes with Mrs. Kent and sometimes alone.

“During Mr. Kent’s first ride with me,” Victor Vernon wrote in his memoirs, “a wave top broke over the Betty V when landing and dampened the magneto. The motor stopped and we started drifting toward a rocky section of the beach near our point of operation. I shouted to Mr. Kent what was most undoubtedly the trouble, but he, an electrical expert, already knew and offered to climb up alongside the motor, remove the magneto cover, clean and dry it out and replace — no easy job in a pitching, rolling ‘boat,’ and not good for his flannels, either. He did an expert job just in time as when I cranked the motor and she caught with welcomed roar, we were only a few feet from huge, jagged boulders and rocks stretching out from shore into deep water and being swept by the waves. He was the highest priced, but unpaid mechanic ever voluntarily serving under similar circumstances, I’m sure.”

After several weeks at Kennebunk Beach, Victor received a phone call from the Chairman of the Labor Day Celebration Committee, Bar Harbor, Maine. He was offered $500 to fly there in time to make an exhibition flight on Labor Day. All his expenses were to be covered. With the economic uncertainty of war looming Vernon accepted the offer, even though no such flight over the ocean had ever been attempted. Nationwide newspaper coverage of the flight made Victor Vernon a household name.

“Victor Vernon made an over-water flight of 150 miles yesterday from Kennebunkport to Bar Harbor,” wrote a reporter for the Lowell Sun on Sept. 4, 1914. “The hydro-aeroplane flight made at 2,000 feet took 2 hours – 32 minutes of actual flying time. Three stops were made; the first at Port Clyde for supplies, a second at Rockland and the third at Northeast Harbor, which the aviator mistook for Bar Harbor.”

By 1916, American participation in World War I seemed probable. Vernon was approached by the Signal Corps, which at that time was the aviation branch of the U.S. Army. The U.S. Air Force had not yet been organized. He accepted the position of chief civilian instructor in its new aviation training program. During the war, Victor Vernon tested Flying Boats built by the U.S. Navy to patrol for U-boats and deliver torpedoes.

Chicago’s Sears Tower had two arrivals from Kennebunkport on Memorial Day 1981. Only one was invited. Frank Handlen, your “Old News” illustrator, had sold 14 paintings meant to grace the walls of Sears Corporate Headquarters. Around the time the crate was delivered, Danny Goodwin, Kennebunk High Class of ‘74, appeared at the west side of the 110-story building in a handmade spandex Spiderman costume. He intended to scale what was then the tallest building in the world.

As a boy growing up on Fishers Lane in Cape Porpoise, Goodwin writes in his recently published memoir, “SKYSCRAPERMAN,” he loved to climb trees. “So much so the police tried to arrest me for climbing one of the tallest in Portland, Maine. But despite their use of a cherry picker, they weren’t able to catch me.”

Goodwin was 25 years old and about 20 floors up when a Sears security guard angrily held a note up to the window demanding he descend. Spider-Dan, who was climbing up the window washer track, stuck a suction cup over the note and proceeded up the side of the building. Ambulances, hook and ladder trucks and helicopters were dispatched to the scene. At the 35th floor, Dan became aware that a window washing machine was descending the track in his path and that the window next to him had been removed from inside the building. Using suction cups equipped with stirrups, he scooted horizontally away from his would-be captors. Some six and a half hours and 1,450 feet into the climb, Dan duct-taped an American flag near the top of the Sears Tower.

“It was my way of thanking my father for fighting in the Korean War,” he writes.

Meanwhile, his father, Dale Goodwin, was back in Cape Porpoise, completely unaware of Danny’s plans until he was contacted by a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. Though proud of his son’s courage, Dale was grateful he hadn’t known about the stunt ahead of time.

“If I’d known he was going to do this I would have been a nervous wreck,” Dale Goodwin told a reporter for the Biddeford Journal Tribune.

Brenda Buchanan, a correspondent for the York County Coast Star, talked to local folks about the feat.

“That’s Danny for you,” they told her in unison, “always looking for another adventure. Danny Goodwin — daredevil, track star, mountain climber, skier, gymnast and stuntman. Danny Goodwin — bohemian, dancer, dreamer, wanderer, always looking for something to be afraid of, climbing the cliffs over the ocean because there was nothing higher to climb.”

Well, Danny had found something higher.

As soon as he reached the top of Sears Tower he was taken to jail overnight on charges of disorderly conduct, criminal trespass and criminal damage to property.

After celebrity appearances on Johnny Carson and the Today Show, Dan pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct. His fine was only $35, but Fire Commissioner William Blair threatened dire consequences should Goodwin ever attempt to climb another building in his jurisdiction.

That was a challenge Danny couldn’t resist. On Veteran’s Day he scaled Chicago’s John Hancock Center while the gathering crowd below chanted, “Let him climb. Let him climb.”

Enraged, Commissioner Blair ordered his firemen to wash “Spider Dan” Goodwin off the side of the building with a fire hose. The defiant climber clung to the building 300 feet off the ground. Unwilling to be responsible for the death of a beloved comic book hero, the Mayor of Chicago ordered Blair to shut the water off and Spider-Dan finished his ascent. Damages to the building and other expenses reportedly totaled $16,000.

This time, the sentence was a year’s probation.

When asked what possessed him to take such risks, Spider-Dan replied, “I have a new idea, a new concept for fire rescue. I needed a forum to present these ideas to the public.”

In his memoir, Goodwin writes that he was motivated to climb buildings by two life-altering experiences. After witnessing the MGM Grand Hotel fire in Las Vegas, he was haunted by the reality that firefighters had no way to rescue victims trapped on the middle floors of a skyscraper fire.

And then, a few months after the fire, Dan sustained serious injuries in a car crash. During his recovery from the accident he vowed never again to be dissuaded from his dreams.

Spider-Dan climbed the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York on Memorial Day, 1983, nearly falling to his death when the window washer track pulled away from the building. Mayor Edward Koch was not impressed.

“These stunts endanger participants, police officers and onlookers,” he said to the press. “And it cost taxpayers $4,235 just in police department man-hours and equipment.”

Somehow, Dan Goodwin always evaded authorities long enough to finish his intended climbs. Until July 1983, that is. Dan was escorted away from the Bald Head Cliff by officers of the York (Maine) Police Department.

“But three days later, he returned, after notifying local newspapers,” Brenda Buchanan wrote in the Boston Globe. “He told the officers who met him at the bottom of the cliff that he was determined to make another ascent.”

Unlike police forces in Chicago and New York City, York’s finest were able to take Spider-Dan into custody when he was just a couple feet up the cliff.

Queen Victoria had little inclination to appease her Canadian subjects who, throughout the 1850s, clamored for a royal visit. She was even less inclined to acknowledge the hoodlums that populated “those United States.” But her husband, Prince Albert, believed a royal visit would be politically prudent.

Meanwhile, Victoria’s teenage son Albert, the heir apparent, embraced the frivolity of youth. He exasperated his mother by indulging affections for wine, women and cigars, not necessarily in that order. The Queen once wrote to her eldest daughter, “I never can, or shall, look at him without a shudder.”

By early 1860, Victoria wanted the boy out of her sight. She killed two birds with one stone by sending her 18-year-old son across the pond for an extended diplomatic tour of North America.

After spending two months in Canada, the Prince of Wales danced with the ladies of Detroit, Chicago, St Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Washington, Richmond, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston. The average-looking teenager didn’t exactly live up to the American fantasy. Harpers Weekly magazine published an illustration captioned, “The Prince; Ideal & Real.” Albert’s imagined regal visage, slaying a dragon, felling a giant and winning a jousting tournament, appeared on one side of the page. On the other side, the rumpled boy was realistically depicted being carried across a tiny stream on the back of a servant, falling ineptly on the dance floor and sleeping through a public appearance. A reporter for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper wrote that “dressed like a Prince” was a phrase that would never again be used in America to signify anything very significant.

The British Royal Squadron sailed into Portland Harbor on Oct. 16, 1860, to carry the future King Edward VII back to England. Exactly 85 years earlier on Oct. 16, 1775, a British fleet had entered the same harbor and destroyed the city. This coincidence was not lost on local reporters.

Trains were added to the schedule to accommodate the thousands who travelled to Portland to see Albert off. Merchants capitalized on the royal fever, selling hand-held British and American flags. “Two Princes in our City,” one opportunistic Portlander advertised, “The Prince of Wales and the Prince of Peddlers.”

Officials of the Eastern Railway fitted out a special three-car train for the final leg of Albert’s American tour. Its interior walls were draped in red and gold silk. The car ceilings were covered in rich blue silk, pleated and powdered with silver stars. Outside, a platform extended off the back of the train from which His Royal Highness could present himself to the eager citizens gathered at every station along the route to Portland.

The train left Boston shortly after 10 a.m. on Oct. 20, 1860. The prince was accompanied by his entourage, as well as, the governors of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, the president of Harvard, the mayor of Boston, Sen. Charles Sumner and a few railroad officials.

In Kennebunk, children were let out of school for the royal visit. Everyone in town showed up at the station expecting a day-long celebration. When the royal train finally pulled into West Kennebunk depot it barely stopped. The prince waved briefly from the platform then hurried back into the car. The people of Kennebunk, who had decorated the station with buntings and dressed in their finest ensembles, were bitterly disappointed.

Back in the car, the defiant teenager plopped down on a velvet sofa. According to a report in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Albert turned to the governor of Massachusetts, “will you take a little wine, or is the Maine Law in force here?” he asked. “I’m out of my own jurisdiction,” the governor replied, “and I’ll take the consequences.” The strict Maine liquor law had also been set aside in Portland the night before at a champagne reception for the officers of the royal squadron.

Albert’s train arrived in Portland at half past one. He toured the crowded streets in an open horse-drawn carriage on his way to the docks, where a barge was waiting to take him out to the screw battleship Hero. Two large steamers, the Lewiston and the Forest City, sold tickets for a voyage to accompany the royal squadron out of the harbor at 4 p.m. The little prince stood on the poop deck waving his hat at the cheering crowds while a 21-gun salute was fired, casting a haze of gun smoke across the harbor. A few minutes later he was gone.

Something was amiss with the cosmos during the third week of July 1926. The temperature hovered near 100 all up and down the eastern seaboard and as far west as Ohio. All but convicted murderers were released from the stifling prisons in North Carolina where temperatures reached 107. Hundreds slept out in the open on the Boston Common.

Just before sunrise on July 18th a blinding bluish light filled the cloudless Maine sky from Dexter to Saco. The flash was immediately followed by an explosive sound that awakened the whole City of Portland. Professor Charles Hutchins of the Physics Department at Bowdoin College confirmed to the press that a meteor had exploded over the crook in the Androscoggin River.

Hours earlier a 14 year old boy had witnessed the bursting of a large bright light in his grandfather’s Vermont cornfield. On the morning of July 18th he collected a handful of porous meteor fragments layered with quartz that he found lying on top of the plowed earth. Robert Dunklee, the boy’s father, telephoned authorities at the Harvard College Observatory and promised to send the rocks to Cambridge by express mail.

The scientists, who had just received a call from Professor Hutchins at Bowdoin, were puzzled. Meteors did not typically contain quartz. Furthermore, it was way too early in the season for these incidents to be part of the annual Perseid Meteor Shower. Seven unexpected fireballs had also been documented the previous November and December. One that exploded over Hornell, NY was reported to be the size of a freight car but no fragments of that celestial body were ever recovered.

At 3pm on the afternoon of July 18th the people of Portsmouth and Kittery observed a huge dusky cloud approaching from the northwest. Within five minutes the worst summer storm in their history was upon them. Vivid lightning struck. Torrential rain flooded the streets. Golf ball sized hail swirled into Portsmouth. Some of the hail was actually tiny stones coated in ice. The stones were smooth, polished white quartz like those one might find on a beach. The nearest beach with all white quartz stones was Rye Beach some 8 miles to the south. Hail that fell on Kittery was strange, too; 5 1/2 inch disks of ice indicating 3 separate freezes inside the cloud.

Terrific wind hurled the rocks and the hail in a circular motion breaking hundreds of windows. Thirty minutes later the storm had lifted leaving destruction in its wake. Farmer’s crops were flattened and some of their cows were dead. Storekeeper’s goods were ruined by the water that poured through broken windows. Banks of frozen rocks and golf ball hail had to be shoveled out of dining rooms. There was not enough glass in Portsmouth to repair 1/3 of the broken windows and it hadn’t even rained in Dover, NH.

Meanwhile, the railroad station at Brockton, MA had been destroyed by lightning. 500 seats at Fenway Park were lifted away from their bolts and deposited by a 100 mile an hour gust of wind into the center of the grandstand, twisted and broken. A 90 foot steeple was blown off the Asbury Methodist Church in Springfield, MA.

The damage was still not completely repaired on July 22, when a great brown cloud appeared high over Portsmouth. This time it came from the Southwest in dirty whirlwinds. Though it lasted but 10 minutes the second storm effected a larger area. A Dover, NH house lost its roof. At Gray Lodge in Kittery, Phyllis Gray was giving a bridge party on her front lawn. One of her guests didn’t have time to get up off the lawn pillow upon which she was lounging. She was rolled 100 feet across the grass. Wind swept through York Beach with a force that picked up men, women and children, swirled them in the air and then dropped them banged and bruised on the sand. Several York Beach cottages were blown from their foundations. The bell tower at The Nubble was blown off its base and moved 4 feet to the edge of a deep cliff. Two lifeboats at the Ogunquit lifesaving station were splintered. Three houses were destroyed at Wells Beach.

In Kennebunkport, author Booth Tarkington had put out in his three-ton motor boat, the Zantu seeking relief from the heat. He was accompanied by his secretary Betty Trotter and Captain Harry Thirkell. When they were near an island 6 miles from shore, a fire started on the boat. Tarkington and Thirkell sustained minor burns extinguishing the fire but that was the least of their problems. The ignition wires had burned through and the craft was disabled. Betty and Captain Thirkell began the long row to shore for assistance leaving Tarkington to guard the anchored Zantu. Just as the dingy was reaching shore, storm clouds darkened the sky. The Zantu was buffeted about until her anchor rope parted. Tarkington, headed out alone into the dark open sea, set paper fires in a bucket to make his vessel more visible. His last scrap of paper was burning when Captain John Peabody finally spotted him and towed him back to shore through convulsing waves.

Temperatures in southern Maine dropped from 104 F before the storm to 72 F immediately after. Freak Week on the east coast resulted in 160 deaths and over $1,000,000 in damages. The sudden storms were called cyclones in 1926 newspapers but in retrospect they were more likely tornados.

Summer newspapers in the Kennebunks have been published by all kinds of people; a wet-behind-the-ears son of a Kennebunk farmer, a big city dandy who arrived with much fanfare but left town under the cover of darkness and a woman of fortitude who never allowed her gender to be a handicap, to name but a few.

When John Collins Emmons started “The Wave” in 1887 at the tender age of nineteen, he was already an experienced “journalist”. As a reporter for the “Old Orchard Summer Rambler” he had learned that a successful summer resort paper needed to include plenty of name dropping and local gossip. Emmons delivered the hotel registers, train schedules and an occasional stock engraving twice a week. Advertising sales were brisk and by 1892 The Wave was 8 pages long.

Constantine Annis, the superintendent of circulation of “Godey’s Magazine” of New York, arrived in Kennebunkport that summer with a 170 lb Saint Bernard named Kinglimmon. The poor beast, who was reportedly the largest canine born in America, was employed by Annis to advertise the establishment of a new summer paper in the Port called “The Open Sea.” Kinglimmom pulled local children around in a dog cart adorned with a flashy billboard.

The first issue of “The Open Sea” was published in July 1892. Annis boasted that the paper would include half-tone photographs by A. B. Houdlette. Vaughn Island real estate was advertisements covered the back page as they would be for the next three years. Annis wrote in his first editorial, “The Open Sea is a business investment and the Publisher having a pecuniary interest in property within the district is naturally desirous of enhancing its value through the medium of this paper.” The Open Sea, he wrote, “was far better than any other summer paper in town.” Since The Wave was the only other summer paper in Kennebunkport it was a direct affront. Emmons tried to appear unfazed but he did call in question Annis’ self-serving motivations. That summer real photographs appeared in “The Wave” for the first time.

By 1895, the real estate development on Vaughn Island had failed and Con. Annis had lost his winter job at Godey’s Magazine. He started a year-round paper in Kennebunk called “The Kennebunker” taking on “The Eastern Star.” On May 2, 1896, Annis, finding himself overcome with debt, sent letters to all his local creditors apologizing for the fact that he would not be able to pay them back. He left town in the middle of the night, never to return. Emmons gloated in the first 1896 issue of “The Wave,” calling Con. Annis a third rate confidence man. The disgraced dandy fled to Alameda California where in 1913 he started the California branch of the Modern Order of Praetorians, a new fangled life insurance Company. Emmons sold The Wave to Henry Dean Washburn before the 1906 season began. His printing business went to Lester Watson. Emmons was the force behind The Wave and it folded in 1908.

While Con. Annis was trying to stave off his creditors in Kennebunk the former Annie Joyce of Brunswick, Me. was trying to adjust to being a wife and mother. As a child of 7, she had sailed to San Francisco with her father Captain Daniel Joyce and the family later moved to Japan. Annie learned a lot about the world, first hand. When she returned to Brunswick, Maine as a teenager she could not be contented to wait in the parlor for a husband to determine her future. She went to work for the Brunswick Telegraph and learned every aspect of the newspaper business.

Annie did eventually marry Dr. David B Crediford in 1894, whom she had met while he attended Bowdoin medical school. After he was discharged from his job at the Augusta State Hospital for the Insane, amid scandal, David, Annie and their infant son Richard moved to Kennebunk, Me. The marriage was a rocky one. Annie was uncomfortable with her role. Dr. Crediford ran off to California with another woman and Annie was granted a divorce in 1900. To preserve her reputation, she told her Kennebunk neighbors that her husband was dead.

The “Widow” Annie Crediford got to work. At first she was employed at the short-lived Kennebunk newspaper, The Local News. In 1901 Mrs. Crediford started the summer tourist newspaper, The Seaside Echo, which survived The Wave. In 1904 she established The Kennebunk Enterprise in Eastern Star territory. Unlike Star editor, Lester Watson, Annie never hesitated to express an opinion on local matters. Steven Burr reports in his 1995 book “Kennebunk Main Street,” that Annie led the fight for a public sewer system in Kennebunk. In addition to the two newspapers Annie ran a fully equipped job printing company and a wood yard that put out 500 cords of wood a year. By the time her son, Richard Vaughn Crediford reached adolescence, Annie had saved up enough money to take him to meet his father in Rialto, California.

The Seaside Echo went out of print at the beginning of World War I. Richard took over his mother’s printing business and in 1920 she finally retired the Enterprise, but not before earning the deep respect of readers and competitors alike.

“What has become of the Star?” demanded an anonymous Kennebunkport patron to the new owner of the paper.  She was outraged that someone “from away” would have the audacity to editorialize about her local government, and in a liberal voice, to boot. 

 After Alexander B. Brook bought the Kennebunk Star from Willis and Perley Watson in 1958 more subscribers than not had serious misgivings but they continued to read the paper.  Whether they looked for something new to be insulted by or to see what bodacious changes would be made by the new owner, Sandy Brook and his editor, John Cole, rarely disappointed. 

In his 1993 autobiography “The Hard Way,” Sandy wrote that before he and Cole came to the Kennebunks, nobody outside Town Hall knew how things were being run.  The newspapermen wrote about what they thought the public needed to know without regard to ruffled feathers.  The more Brook opined, the more pages he added to the weekly paper.  As his readership grew, so too did his expenses.  New printing equipment was purchased and coverage was expanded southward through Wells Ogunquit York and Kittery, on borrowed money.  In 1965 the name of the paper was changed to York County Coast Star to reflect the expansion. 

The paper was born in Biddeford as the “The Daily Evening Star.” It was first published by Marcus Watson and his son Clarence in 1876 when younger son Willis Lester Watson had just reached the age of majority.  After the paper was in publication for a year Lester purchased it and reduced it to a weekly, re-naming it The Eastern Star.  The following January he moved the whole operation to Kennebunk.  Even though young Lester wasn’t Kennebunk born, citizens welcomed him.  They hadn’t had their own paper in almost 45 years.  The newcomer declared to his readers that his newspaper was to be independent in politics.  He did not intend to take sides in local matters. 

 Before the telephone -much less the internet- local newspapers had a monopoly on information dissemination.  Watson borrowed world news and pithy poems from other papers.  He dutifully printed all notices exactly as they were submitted and rarely deemed it prudent to write an editorial in the four-page weekly. Watson carved himself an insider’s niche in Kennebunk by changing nothing for 44 years.  

In anticipation of making his sons Willis, Perley and Carl partners in the business, Watson renamed the paper The Kennebunk Star in 1921.  This alarming change was not unanimously applauded by his readers.  In 1924, Lester’s sons became partners in the newly incorporated Star Print, Inc.  When he died in 1941 at 87 years old, Lester Watson held the national record of greatest number of consecutive years as a publisher of the same paper.

Willis, who was also town clerk, took over as president/business manager of Star Print, Inc. and Perley became secretary/treasurer.  The brothers were careful to retain their father’s four page, mind-your-own-business, formula. 

The Watson’s printing equipment was antique and the family enterprise had never bothered much with financial record-keeping.  The net annual income of $2,600, as reported to buyer Alexander B. Brook, turned out to be an exaggeration.  Though he gave it his all, the new publisher was never able to operate the newspaper in the black.  After fighting the good fight for almost 20 years, he sold it to Joseph L. Allbritton, owner of the Washington Post.

The New York Times Company bought the paper in 1982 and they sold to Journal Transcript Newspapers Inc. in 1995.  Seacoast Media publisher, John Tabor, wanted to buy the York County Coast Star in 1999 but Journal Transcript Newspapers Inc. sold to American Consolidated Media.  Tabor finally acquired the paper in 2001 and has been its publisher ever since.  Seacoast Media is a subsidiary of Dow Jones Local Media, which itself is a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. 

To this day, nobody who remembers Sandy Brook’s proprietorship of the Star is neutral.  Some are still exasperated by his editorial boldness.  More celebrate his integrity and wish he had never sold the paper.  It’s clear that Brook was in it for the love of journalism.  That’s a hard act to follow, especially since the industry has changed so much.  Sandy himself wrote in 1993, “Weekly owner-editor-publishers are an obsolescing breed.”  

Current Star editor, Kelly Morgan recently discussed the challenges facing modern newspapers.  “The York County Coast Star, like most papers, has to deal with changes in the economy and changes in the way people get their news.  The whole industry is struggling but weekly papers that cover local news are holding on.”  When asked about the preponderance of Portsmouth, NH area ads in the Maine paper the Editor replied, “We are trying to address that issue.  We need to balance retaining a local focus with selling enough advertising to cover our costs.”

Publisher John Tabor admits that like everyone else, Seacoast Media had to tighten its belt when the economy tanked.  “True, we have fewer employees now and a less visible location in Kennebunk but the York County Coast Star makes a profit every month of the year, possibly for the first time in its history.  We will revisit the location issue after the economy recovers,” he said. “I’m in it to own it.” 

Tabor, who remembers Sandy Brook’s Star as the best weekly paper in New England, plans to remain nimble.  “We have to constantly reinvent ourselves in this kind of an economy,” the publisher explained.  “But, our goal is to provide a well-informed editorial page and watch over the environment.  That’s what Sandy did.   That’s what the people expect.”