Tattle Tale Talk #1

     The local post office in Kennebunkport never delivered mail to a property. Everyone had to go to the post office to collect mail at a post office box.  This arrangement assured that all the local gossip slipped from one ear to another.   Rumors flew about one of the painters that we hired.  The town folk wanted us to know that one of them one night went on a drug binge, returned home and broke a window entering his sister's bedroom to molest and ravage her.  Somehow, I never could bring myself to believe that story, even though the other painters never let that handsome 16 year old boy on a ladder to scrape the old peeling paint off the our house.  I guess he was always too high to be on a ladder two stories up.  One day he confirmed the rumor about himself, but he told me that he never remembered doing anything so bad as the rumor proclaimed.  A few days later I attended his memorial service with another two hundred people at The South Congregational Church; he stood in front of a fast moving freight train.

     One day after leaving our rented cottage, we heard a car honking at us.  It turned out to be some neighbors from New Jersey.  These people noticed my rusty blue van and connected it with us.  We told them that we were looking for a food store to buy provisions.  They directed us to a food store 25 miles inland to a city called Sanford and told us that was the nearest food store.  I started to get concerned for my family and wondered how one could live here in the winter.  I guess we needed to invest in a large freezer to make sure provisions would be handy for those snowed in situations. Actually, maybe those people were playing a joke on us, because there was a super market about 10 miles from Kennebunkport in another town called Saco.

     Our Carriage House had no kitchen to speak of; it was located in the area that connected the house to the barn.  It consisted of a rough passage room with no cabinets, an old sink and an old chimney that once had a potbelly stove or something connected to it.  One had too walk through a narrow hallway from the dining room; turn left and step down a step to get into the kitchen room. Matters even got more complicated, because the only bathroom in the house was located above the kitchen in another passageway to the second floor of the barn with the same handicap entrance as the kitchen.  This bathroom had a white porcelain claw footed tub, sink and a toilet.  I guess the former owner thought that the necessity of a bathroom should be located away from the living area of the house for sanitary reasons, when the decision was made to bring plumbing indoors. Another dozen rooms made up the main house.  The whole house needed a complete renovation; oak floors sanded; walls re-wallpapered, trim painted, ceilings patched and wallpapered, new furnace with baseboard heating, re-wired and a new roof.  Those improvements were the basics to make the house livable which included mapping out new bathrooms that could be located between bedrooms; a new kitchen that involved a work permit from the local planning board that was turned thumbs down.  "A lot of people have their kitchens located far away from their dining rooms in passage ways to their barns.  This is very normal in New England.  A lot of out of townies want to come here and change things." I really think that the variance committee just wanted to punish us for the black trim.

     Our basic game plan was to renovate one room at a time and then call New Jersey to send up another truck full of furniture for the renovated room.  I was suppose to go back to New Jersey and continue with my employment at the Golden Nugget Casino in Atlantic City which was only 10 miles from Ocean City.  I just could not leave Maine with all the work that was required to restore the house to livable conditions for my family members.

      The casinos and the crime that they festered was one of the major reasons for seeking out a tranquil existence in Maine.  I was working the graveyard shift in the coin department of the casino from 9 p.m. - 5 a.m.  We heard lots of horror stories of casino patrons being followed home and then robbed of their winnings.  Prostitutes claimed their territory on every corner of Atlantic City and would actually come up to you and grope your private parts.  Like many of the established families in Ocean City, we joined them in offering our house for sale.  An investor purchased our homestead giving us a year to move, since he wasn't going to tear down our house right away.  This created a perfect situation for us, since we needed everything we could possibly scrape form our home to move to Maine including the kitchen sink!

   I even took the wallpaper.  There were no stores near Kennebunkport that supplied building materials.  We had to travel to Massachusetts from Maine to find such stores except for one local hardware store whose owner was a selectman. Again, we all received the silent message that we needed to support the local merchants in our town whenever possible to be good citizens. 

    The Carriage House is not only situated overlooking Dock Square business area but also is directly down the street facing The South Congregational Church.   This church is reported to be one of the most photographed churches in New England with its noted Greek revival columns and large clock tower.  Congregational means interdenominational, local community oriented serving all needs.  The minister is the head of the church and makes all decisions that needed to be made in order to run his church.   Directly across the street from The Carriage House and starting from the corner down towards Dock Square was zoned commercial.  On the other side of the corner going north was zoned Village Residential including my side of the street.  Village Residential meant that one could create a limited commercial business on their property with the planning board's permission.  We received permission to have an antiques shop in the barn. We needed this for our overflow of stuff from New Jersey that just looked out of place in our Colonial Home.  Victorian antiques looked too modern and overbearing, so we were glad to sell them off achieving the "right" look.

The barn on our property is three stories high with a copula that provided a view of the river that came up from the ocean about a mile away.  Wives of sea captains and seamen would look out from the copula searching for a glimpse of a ship's mast to see if their husbands were coming up the river in the 1800's. 

     Captain Mason, who traded in salt, built the Carriage House in 1745. This was before the American Revolution, and if your chimney was painted white you showed loyalty to the King of England, and therefore British solders would not burn down your house.  If on the other hand, you left your chimney natural red brick you remained loyal to the Yankee rebels.  The Crown owned all the trees in New England.  A colonist was only allowed to cut a tree down to use in the construction of their buildings only if the diameter of the tree was less than 23 inches wide.  I measured the wallboards exposed in our barn, and they all were just slightly less than 23 inches wide. If the Crown found wider boards in your home, you would be hanged in the town square.  The Crown needed all the larger trees in New England to build hulls for their new ships.  Most of the British Naval Fleet was built in New England towns like Kennebunkport, Maine.  Old photographs show many ship builders headquarters or huts alongside the river beside The South Congregational Church.  Shipbuilding was a major industry that kept the town thriving well into the late 1800's.  Many whale ships and fishing ships found their way into the Atlantic Ocean and around the world from shipbuilders in the Kennebunks. 

     These shipbuilders expressed their skills in building oversized and stately looking homes all along the Kennebunk River for themselves and wealthy ship captains.  Each house has its own distinctive style and appeal hidden behind large elm trees.  Many of those houses have window shutters that can be recessed into the wall or be pulled out in order to act as barriers from Indian arrows.  This is probably the origin of window shutters in New England.  The shutter was modified over the years only to be added to a house for "looks". 

     Indian tribes used to come to Kennebunkport from as far away as Canada in the summertime to hunt and fish.  They co-existed with the colonists most of the time. However, there are accounts by authors who describe Indians from Quebec, Canada who raided the town and kidnapped women to take them back to Canada.  The cottage owner that we rented from told me that her Great Grandmother was shot by an Indian arrow and died on her way home from The South Congregational Church one Sunday.  I believe the Indians came to the town for the summer as late as the 1930's. 

     The Carriage House and surrounding buildings all seemed to have many windows with 12 panes.  In fact The Carriage House had windows in places for no apparent practical reason.  Some windows were closed up with shutters that had solid walls behind the windows.  I learned that the Crown in Colonial times taxed each windowpane.  The more windowpanes a property had the more prestige the family could claim.