The Just History Walk

The Just History Walk

Saturday, November 8, 2025 | 12:30 - 6 pm

Beginning at Rogers Pond Park, 49 Water St, Kennebunk
Ending at First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church, 114 Main St, Kennebunk

The lower Kennebunk and Mousam River watershed region has provided people with homes and sustenance for more than ten thousand years. We know something about them from over 400 years of written history, and through oral traditions and artifacts that date back much farther. But the historical narratives, signs, and portraits that we most commonly encounter represent only a small glimpse of the tapestry woven here in this place over the centuries. While the lives of sea captains and soldiers, farmers and factory owners, bankers and builders are made visible throughout town, those of many others remain hidden from view.

The Just History Walk is not about the men traditionally credited with building the wealth reflected in the homes and businesses along Main Street and Summer Street. Rather, it’s about bringing stories of people who also shaped this community but whose contributions have been erased to the foreground, including:

• Wabanaki people who inhabited this land for millennia 

• People of African heritage who were kidnapped and transported here

• Enslaved people throughout the “New World” whose labor was the basis for much of the town’s wealth

In walking together, we’ll meet:

Ramanascho ✭ Shepard Bourn ✭ Richard Hill ✭ Phillis ✭ Tom Bassett ✭ Lucy Nicolar ✭  Primus Goodale ✭ Salem Bourne ✭ Scipio Black ✭ Joseph Ranco ✭ and others

Along the route, selected stories shared by presenters—together with performances, artwork, crafts, and artifacts—will offer opportunities for people of all ages and backgrounds to reflect on both what we now know about the diverse community that lived here and what remains unknown. What do these gaps and silences tell us about how history has been told?

At the conclusion, we will gather to collectively weave what we have gleaned and build connections over a meal that celebrates the ancient Indigenous roots of this community. Together, we will confront the suffering created when land and people are treated as property, and celebrate the resilience that persists when we honor our ties to land, waterways, wildlife, and each other. 

Rewiggling our History

Today, ecologists in Scotland and even here in Maine are working to “rewiggle” rivers that were once artificially straightened to make them easier to control and use. Straightening rivers, we’ve learned, destroys their vitality: salmon and other species depend on the complexity of winding waterways to thrive.

Our histories, too, have been straightened—cut and channeled into neat, efficient narratives that erase the twists and turns, the complexity, and the people that make them whole. By actively rewiggling our history, we begin to restore its natural flow, allowing a more diverse and resilient community to flourish.

As we walk together, we’ll surface stories that help us reconsider the Kennebunks’ layered past, touching on:

• Indigenous history, pre- and post-contact

• Early Wabanaki deeds and land transactions

• Revolutionary War service by local residents of color

• The role of West Indies commodities in the local economy

• Segregated church services and racial exclusion in worship

• The Ridge community and its enduring legacy

• Shipbuilding at the Kennebunk River yards and its Atlantic world connections

By rewiggling our history together, we’ll open space for truth-telling, repair, and renewed connection—to one another, to this land, and to the waters that continue to shape our shared story.