Brick Store Museum: A Depression-Era Act of Preservation

In eighteen twenty-five, a Kennebunk merchant named William Lord began building a dry-goods store on Main Street. The red-brick building he constructed became a prosperous fixture of the town for more than a century. In nineteen thirty-six, Lord's great-granddaughter, Edith Cleaves Barry, inherited the building and did something unlikely in the depths of the Great Depression: she turned it into a museum and funded it with her own money.

The Brick Store Museum was one of only a few museums in the entire country to open between the start of the Depression and the end of World War Two. Barry spent the rest of her life building its collections, which now include tens of thousands of objects, documents, and images documenting the social, maritime, and decorative arts history of the southern Maine coast. The museum is today one of the leading regional history institutions in New England, and the building that holds it has been on Main Street in Kennebunk for two hundred years.