Kennebunk, Maine
Near Old Orchard Beach, Maine
Kennebunk takes its name from the Abenaki, meaning long cut bank, a description of the river mouth below town. English settlers were here by the sixteen twenties, and the town was incorporated in eighteen twenty, splitting off from Wells. Shipbuilding made Kennebunk prosperous through the seventeen and eighteen hundreds; its yards launched hundreds of vessels, and the captains' houses along Summer Street, part of Maine's first National Register historic district, still show that wealth.
After the Civil War, as railroads brought tourists south of Portland, Kennebunk and neighboring Kennebunkport became summer destinations for wealthy Boston and New York families. That identity stuck. George H.
W. Bush and Barbara Bush spent decades at Walker's Point in Kennebunkport, turning this stretch of the southern Maine coast into something approaching a presidential address.
