Kennebunkport

The Abenaki fished and farmed this stretch of coast long before English settlers arrived at Cape Porpoise, the original town centre. The town was incorporated in 1653 as Cape Porpus, abandoned by 1689 amid Abenaki resistance to colonial expansion, renamed Arundel in 1701 with its centre inland at Burbank Hill, and settled for good only after the Wabanaki Confederacy's expulsion of the English from 1703 to 1717. Later the Kennebunk River's mouth drew shipwrights and merchants.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries the river banks were shipyards. Ships were launched into the Kennebunk, and the captains and owners built the Federal-period houses that still line the village streets. The town took the name Kennebunkport in 1821, reflecting its shipbuilding and trade along the river. In the 1870s the Sea Shore Company bought most of the land on Cape Arundel and promoted it for summer houses, and the resort era began. The Kennebunk River Club of 1889, St Ann's church and the Colony hotel followed, and writers including Booth Tarkington and Kenneth Roberts, whose novel Arundel took the town's old name, summered here.

George Herbert Walker built a summer house on the rocky point in 1903, and his grandson George H. W. Bush made it the 'summer White House' during his presidency, hosting Thatcher and Gorbachev there; his son George W. Bush later received Putin there. Bush died in 2018 and the compound stays in the family. Today the year-round population is small, the village is a historic district, and the town lives on summer visitors, second homes and a lobster fleet that still sails from Cape Porpoise.

Kennebunkport's culture is that of an old Maine coastal town overlaid with a century and a half of summer people. The two coexist on Dock Square, where art galleries and boutiques share the street with the hardware store and the fish market, and at Cape Porpoise, where lobster boats unload beside the restaurants.

The Bush family has defined the town's public image since the 1980s. Residents grew used to motorcades, Secret Service boats and visiting heads of state, and treat the family as neighbours rather than celebrities.

The arts have a long presence. Painters came for the light and the coast, Booth Tarkington worked in his riverside boathouse studio, The Floats, with his schooner moored beside it, and galleries, a summer theatre in nearby Ogunquit and the Brick Store Museum's exhibitions carry the tradition on. The social calendar is seasonal: Memorial Day opens the town, Independence Day fills it, Labor Day thins it, and the Christmas Prelude in late November or early December brings everyone back before the long quiet of winter. Manners are the Maine kind: friendly, a little reserved, and sceptical of show.

About 3,600 people live in Kennebunkport year-round, several times that in summer, when the cottages at Goose Rocks and along Ocean Avenue fill and the inns and rental houses are let. Most year-round residents live away from the village, in Cape Porpoise, the inland neighbourhoods along the Goose Rocks Road and the wooded interior of the town, and they tend to be older than the Maine average; retirees who once summered here now stay all year.

The economy runs on tourism and property — inns, restaurants, shops, building and maintaining houses, landscaping — alongside the lobster fishery at Cape Porpoise and a small number of boatyards, marine services and professionals who commute to Portland. The cost of housing is the pressing issue, as it is along the whole southern Maine coast: second-home prices have put the village out of reach of the people who staff it, seasonal workers are hard to house, and the town has debated workforce housing for years.

Daily life follows the tide and the season. In summer the day begins early at the beaches and on the water and ends at the Dock Square ice cream windows; traffic over the bridge and parking are the daily irritations. From November to April the village is dark by mid-afternoon, most shops are shuttered, the lobster boats work on, and town affairs are settled at the annual town meeting in the Maine way.

Lobster is the point. It comes straight from the boats at Cape Porpoise and the river wharves, and is eaten boiled with drawn butter, in a toasted bun as a lobster roll — Maine style, cold with a little mayonnaise — and in stews and bisques. Fried clams with the bellies on, steamers (soft-shell clams) with broth and butter, haddock, scallops from the winter fishery and thick New England clam chowder complete the list. The casual seafood places by the bridge and at Cape Porpoise serve them at picnic tables; the inns and a few dining rooms in the village and Lower Village do the same ingredients more elaborately.

Beyond the shellfish, Maine's blueberries appear in pies, muffins and pancakes in July and August, whoopie pies — two rounds of chocolate cake filled with cream — sit by every till, and Dock Square's ice cream windows are a summer evening ritual. Kennebunk's Lower Village has a cluster of cafés, bakeries and pubs facing the square across the river.

Drink runs to Maine craft beer, which the region produces in quantity, and to cocktails on the inns' porches. Portland, half an hour north, has a restaurant scene with a national reputation and is where locals go for a serious dinner.