Sunday Lunch

By Dabney McCoy

standing from left: Bunny, Derry, Lisa, Helen, houseguest;  seated: Nancy Burkham Williams, Mason, Christy, Frances, Dabney

My great-grandmother Fanny Young Miller brought her daughter to Biddeford Pool in the early 1900’s. In 1909, the family rented the Flatiron, the little cottage on a triangular lot near the fire barn, and Granny bought it in 1952.

As the oldest of the grandchildren, I was lucky enough to visit my grandparents (Fanny and Carrington Williams, Sr., known to my siblings and myself as Granny and Garganny) every summer in Maine until I went to college in 1961. My grandparents’ cook, Hannah Moore, also came to Maine for the summer. Hannah and Granny fought like cats and dogs, but they actually were great friends.

During these idyllic summers, Sunday church attendance at St. Martin’s-in-the-Field was mandatory. Everyone wore their Sunday best. Often, all the girls were invited back to the Flatiron for Sunday lunch, prepared by Hannah while we were at church. The menu usually consisted of fried chicken and rice or roast beef and mashed potatoes, along with vegetables, rolls and dessert. We were often so full that a nap on the beach afterwards was a must!

Our group consisted of Lisa Barstow, Helen (Reilly) and Christy Bergland, Bunny Burkham (Borders), Derry McLernon, and Mary Lee Bryant.  Some Sundays, my sister Frances and my brother Mason were also there, and one of the girls might also bring a sibling or houseguest.

Lunches at The Store and ice cream across the street at Rosa and Carlos’s store were a treat after tennis or sailing. In those days, we had “group” nights at the Abenakee Club, consisting of supervised games such as Capture the Flag. Bingo nights and buffet dinners at The Inn also provided an excuse to show off our Sunday dresses. It was a sad summer when my husband and I drove up Mile Stretch and saw an empty field at the top of the hill where The Inn had been.

As we entered our teen years in the 50’s, when life was safer than it is now, we were given free reign of the Pool, hanging out with boys, and often playing Spin the Bottle in the Flatiron dining room. (The floor of that dining room is still slanted, and still generates lots of laughs when we gather there!) Helen and Lisa always had their pick of the boys!

                                                                                  jh photo

More mischief ensued when I spent the night at the Burkhams’ house. They always left a sign-in note on the stairs, which we dutifully checked off. Then we went upstairs, waited a while until Bunny’s parents were asleep, and then snuck back out.

During our later teens, we ventured further afar to Prout’s Neck or Kennebunkport. One summer, Christy and I dated two brothers who had Harleys, and my boyfriend Punch used to delight in revving his engine below Granny’s window! I cannot believe my grandmother allowed me to ride on a motorcycle from the Pool to the Port and back! Another summer, Helen and I had mad crushes on Bill Wakelin and Bordy Snow, and we spent hours listening to them play their guitars in the Wakelins’ garage apartment, which was located where the Hogans’ garage is today.

To this day, those of our group who still summer at the Pool howl with laughter as we reminisce about those summers. Our grandparents and parents were friends, we all remain friends, and our children and grandchildren have grown up together at the Pool. Though Sunday lunches are a thing of the past, Biddeford Pool continues to be our “slice of heaven” through five generations, no matter our age. How lucky are we that our grandparents discovered this special place!

           

           

The First Summer I Came to Maine

by Mike Swanton

This is all I can remember about the first summer that I came to Maine.

It was around 1955. My dad built a platform over the rear seat of his 1949 Dodge sedan. The luggage went on the floor and the three boys slept on the platform. I was sound asleep when I was loaded into the car in the wee hours and driven from New York to Maine. It was an 11 hour car ride up Route 1 in those days. When we arrived it was foggy, cold and damp. I wanted to go home.

I was the youngest child, so I don’t have any idea how many summers my parents had been doing this before my arrival. My mother, Peg Swanton, told me that the first time she and my father, Bill, went up to Maine, they split the rental of the cottage with my dad’s sister Sally and her husband and two kids. The rent for Mrs. Young’s cottage was $25 per week, split two ways. The cottage was the first house on the right on 1st Street.

The front cottage on 1st Street, as it looked in 1986. It was demolished a few years later. (JH photo)

We stayed in the rear cottage and my aunt and uncle stayed in the front. There was a cast iron Glenwood wood-burning stove in the kitchen and an icebox. A real icebox. I believe it was Lester Orcutt who delivered the ice. The exterior walls had exposed framing and the interior walls were a fibrous material called beaver board. The walls were about eight feet high and stopped well short of the ceiling. You could throw your dirty socks over the wall and hope that you would hit your brother in the next room right in the face!

I remember the long path through the brush and poison ivy to the beach. We would spend all day there and when we got home they stood me up naked on the porch and hosed the sand off of me with a garden hose. Biddeford Pool has always had exceptional water pressure!

I don’t know what attracted my father to Biddeford Pool. He was brought up in the Bronx, in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge. Why was an urbanite like him attracted to such a rustic vacation? After he finished high school, and before he marched off to World War II, he had spent some time in logging camps up north in Connecticut. Maybe he was revisiting his youth.

We came up for a few summers and stayed in that cabin. Then we skipped a few years because our town had built a public swimming pool and we couldn’t afford both. We started coming back to Maine when I was about 12. Mrs. Young had died (I think she was 102) and her son Bernie had remodeled the cottage. The horse-hair mattresses were gone and were replaced with real beds. There was sheetrock on the walls. My dad started talking about retiring and moving to Maine. A year or two later we did so, on June 24, 1966.

The Triplets

The Story of South Point , Part Five

By Mary Morgan

A view of the triplets taken in the early 1900s. At that time there was a boardwalk over the rocks at South Point. 

South Point, Biddeford Pool is a breathtakingly beautiful place: a small point of land with a view of waves breaking on the rocks in one direction and a two-mile curve of sandy beach in the other. No wonder it is home to three of the most iconic houses at the Pool.

The houses at 30, 34 and 38 Ocean Avenue are called the three sisters, or the triplets, because they are so similar: all are three stories high and feature gambrel roofs, white trim and diamond-shaped window panes. They were all built in the early 1900s and belonged to three families from Holyoke, Massachusetts. Descendants of the original owners, including the Celce and Oldershaw families, still summer at the Pool.

South Point belonged to farmer Isaac Bickford until 1874, when he sold it to Dominicus Jordan. Jordan sold interest in the property to two business partners, William Hill and Thomas H. Cole. In 1882, this group launched a plan to develop the area called the South Point Cottage Lots Plan. The lots on which the triplets were built were sold by these developers’ heirs and successors more than 25 years later.

The most noticeable of the triplets, located at 38 Ocean Avenue, is now the summer home of the McGuire family. Right at the tip of the peninsula, on lot 61 of the South Point Cottage Lots Plan, it was sold as a vacant lot by Sarah Emma (Berry) Littlefield to Dr. Frank F. Celce in 1906.

Frank F. Celce (whose full name was Franz Friedrich Celce) was born in Germany in 1867. His parents immigrated to America when he was one year old. He married Jean Hose from New York, studied medicine in Europe and set up in general practice in Holyoke. Frank’s and Jean’s second child, Freidrich William Celce, born in the U.S. in 1896, also became a doctor.

This original owner of 38 Ocean Ave., Frank F. Celce, died in Holyoke in 1942. A year later, son Fred W. Celce sold the house and lot. 

34 Ocean Ave.

The second of the triplets, at 34 Ocean Avenue, now the summer residence of the McClure family, sits on Ocean Avenue lots 51 and 53. These lots were also vacant when Clara (Berry) Hyde sold them to Louis A. LaFrance in 1909.

LaFrance was born in Chambly, Quebec in 1866. His family immigrated to the U.S. when he was age three and settled in Holyoke. He grew up to become a successful building contractor and real estate developer.

He and his wife, Eugenie, had four children: three daughters and a son. Paul Louis Napoleon LaFrance eventually joined his father in the building and real estate business. Louis died in 1938, and his widow sold the house at South Point six years later.

Son Paul LaFrance married Virginia Jones from Tuscola, Illinois. After Paul and Virginia divorced, she married her South Point neighbor Dr. Fred W. Celce. Their son, Fred Celce, has a house at Biddeford Pool, overlooking Saco Bay, to this day.

  

Grandma Wakelin’s House

The third triplet has a street address of 30 Ocean Avenue, but it actually sits on 7th Street, lot 1, of the South Point Cottage Lots Plan. It is the summer home of the Reinharts.

There are many fine details, such as diamond-shaped window panes, in all three houses. (JH photo)

It was originally sold to E.H. Friedrich in 1909 as a vacant lot by Dwight Hill and the other heirs of South Point investor William Hill. The buyer, Ernst Hugo Friedrich, was born in Saxony, Germany, in 1857. His family came to the U.S. when he was 11 years old and settled in Holyoke. When he grew up, Ernst built a large plumbing business in Holyoke. He married Catherine Bertha Leining, from Rockville, Connecticut, and they had four children born between 1884 and 1914.

Daughter Bertha Friedrich, born in 1886, married William Wakelin Jr. from Grand Rapids, Michigan in Holyoke in 1912, and they had three children: Fred, Edmund and Virginia. Bertha lived a long life and continued to spend her summers at the Pool. In fact, she became known as Grandma Wakelin, and many people still remember the three-story house at 30 Ocean Ave. as Grandma Wakelin’s house.

Grandma Wakelin’s house was sold in 1988, however, the Wakelin family continued to own a one-story cottage nestled between the triplets for many years. Recently, the Hogans purchased it and built a new, larger house in its place.

                                               

There remains one other connection to these original South Point families: Virginia (Ginny) Wakelin married Louis Oldershaw, and their three children, Peter, Rob and David, continue to summer at Pool in their hillside house on Mile Stretch Road.

The triplets were probably built between 1906 and 1909. One suggestion is that Louis LaFrance built the houses for his three daughters. Two of the three original owners were in the building trades. They were all successful men from Holyoke who knew each other. According to Fred Celce, building materials could be purchased at a discount if purchased in quantity, and perhaps that was the motivation behind a joint construction project.  

At the time these houses were built, most summer residents of Biddeford Pool lived closer to the village or along Main Street (now Lester B. Orcutt Blvd.) The construction of these distinctive houses at South Point was a bold step that may have encouraged other people to investigate the beauty of this part of the Pool.   

References:

“South Point Cottage Lots” Plan Book 3 Page 2, Published in 1882

            York County Registry of Deed, Alfred, ME

Deed Book  554 Page      7 Frank F. Celce purchase of 38 Ocean Avenue (18 Aug. 1906)

Deed Book  579 Page      5 Louis LaFrance purchase of 34 Ocean Avenue (4 May 1909

Deed Book  586 Page    60 E.H. Friedrich purchase of 30 Ocean Avenue (17 May 1909)

Deed Book  579 Page      6 George Cross to E.H. Friedrich lot 47 on Ocean Ave.

Deed Book 4845 Page 259 Bertha Wakelin to John and Susan Posser

Deed Book 1016 Page 118 Eugenie LaFrance to George Berube

Deed Book1007 Page 169 Fredrick William Celce to Thomas Paraday

1909 Map of Biddeford Pool owned by Anne Kenney: Picture: BP 1909 1

Obituary of Louis A. LaFrance, 21 March 1938

Saving the Promenade

Stories from South Point, Part Four

By Mary Morgan

According to the original South Point Cottage Lots Plan, there would have been roads and cottages between the beach and Great Pond. Later, the city wanted to put in a parking lot between 7th Street and the beach. JH photo.

For many years, the city of Biddeford tried to provide access to the Atlantic beaches for its citizens. They looked to Old Orchard Beach for an example of what was possible. The summer residents of Biddeford Pool resisted these efforts, fearing excessive development and a challenge to the Pool’s exclusiveness.

In 1930, the City of Biddeford wanted to build a parking lot on a common area on the water side of Ocean Avenue between 2nd and 4th streets. The owners of this property were the original developers’ beneficiaries and descendants. In order to prevent the city from moving forward, they leased the land to the nearby cottage owners, who successfully took the city to court. The details of this of this first attempt to increase parking access to the shore are described in the article in this series called Blue Point.

In 1966, the city decided to build a parking lot on the Promenade, a street described on paper in the South Point Cottage Lots Plan as being between the beach and 7th Street. The city’s attempt was blocked by the diligent efforts of Rev. Stanley Hyde. As the descendant of Clara (Berry) Hyde, he retained ownership of most of the undeveloped building lots in South Point, and of the paper streets like the Promenade.

Stan and Arelene Hyde, 1978. Hyde family collection 

Rev. Hyde (1904-1981) was educated at Thornton Academy in Saco and the University of Maine in Orono and received a bachelor of divinity degree in 1930. Two years later, he earned a master of arts in religious education from Columbia University. Throughout his career he was a pastor and educator in Vermont, Massachusetts and Illinois, and he wrote numerous articles for religious educational magazines.

His efforts to protect land at South Point began in late summer, 1966, after the city sent bulldozers to the Promenade to begin work on a public parking lot. According to a Hyde family story, “One morning, nearby residents heard the bulldozers moving toward the Promenade to begin work. These ladies ran out of their houses in their house dresses, threw themselves down in front of the bulldozers and refused to move.” The Biddeford-Saco Journal described that day in August 1966 in a front page article. Common sense prevailed, no one was injured, and the city continued working. It took a law suit and the Rev. Hyde’s actions to stop the parking lot.

Hyde used a two-pronged approach to block the city. First, he sold to the owners along 7th Street the sections of the Promenade abutting their properties. Second, he traced the living descendants of Captain William Hill, who still retained one-half ownership in South Point land, and purchased from them all the paths, paper streets, beaches, rocky areas, unbuildable slopes and land not designated as building lots.

Thanks to the Hyde and Billett families, there is a network of pedestrian paths around South Point. This one leads from the beach, through the pine grove to 7th Street. JH photo. 

After acquiring ownership of all this un-taxable land, he began the process of deeding it, and much of the land between Great Pond and the ocean, to the Biddeford Pool Improvement Association. When he died in 1981, this process was unfinished. His widow, Arelene Hyde, completed the process the following year.

Finally, in 1996, the Hydes’ daughter, Pat Billett, and her husband, Herb, conveyed the two and a half acre tract known as the South Point Sanctuary, which includes the pine grove and a new boardwalk to the beach, to the BPIA in order to preserve the land in perpetuity. The BPIA subsequently conveyed this land to the Biddeford Pool Land Trust.

The third attempt by the city to increase public access to the Pool beach was in 1973, when the city acquired the Biddeford Pool Beach Association’s beach club property by eminent domain. The details of that event, and the court case that followed, will appear on Stories from the Pool in the coming months.

References

“South Point Cottage Lots Plan”, 1882

Deed Book 1776 P223, 16 July 1967, heirs of William Hill sell to Stanley Hyde all parts of South Point that are not building lots; that is, all paper roads, rocky areas, beaches, avenues.

Biddeford-Saco Journal, 31 August, 1966, Page 1, Column 5 - 8,

            McArthur library microfiche roll 191.

            Follow-up articles on September 20 and 23, 1966 on microfiche roll 192.

Stanley Hyde’s consolidation of parts of South Point that are not housing lots is illustrated by the following deeds:

Book 1738 Page 169 15 Aug 1966 with Inez Staples (daughter of Rowland Hill)

Book 1743 Page 102  21 Oct 1966 with Alice (Berry) Sawyer of St Petersburg, Florida

            (daughter of Clara (Berry) Hyde)

Book 1776 Page 223 16 July 1967 with William P. Libby (great grandson of E. Dwight Hill

Book 1782 Page 305   6 Sep 1967 with Ann Mabbett Clark (daughter of E. Dwight Hill), et al

Book 1785 Page 224 27 Sep 1967 with Elizabeth (Foss) Clary (daughter of Mary M. Hill)

Deed Book 2966 Page 245, 08 Sep 1982, Arelene Hyde sells to BPIA 3.03 acres.

Book 3014 Page 85 30 Nov 1982 Arelene Ware Hyde’s deed to the BPIA.

The deed states that in the event that the BPIA dissolves, is sold, merges or no longer wants the property, every effort is to be made to inform the people of Biddeford Pool and find another organization to assume ownership.

Probate Record #81-635 resolution of Stanley Berry Hyde’s estate

“The Rev. Stanley Hyde”, (obituary) Journal Tribune, Biddeford, Sept. 15, 1981

“In Memory of Herb and Pat Billett,” Biddeford Pool Land Trust, South Point Sanctuary Bulletin Board