10/22/2026
THROWBACK THURSDAY by Sharon Cummins
Corner of Fletcher and Main Streets
I have always admired the elegance and symmetry of the structures at the intersection of Main and Fletcher Streets in Kennebunk. It cannot be accidental that the bank and the library, two very compatible colonial brick buildings flank the stately soldier’s monument and the entrance to Fletcher Street while respecting the antiquity of the Unitarian Church next door. I wanted to know whose vision came to fruition there?
Andrew Walker gave his store to the Free Library Association of Kennebunk in 1888 and left the $10,000 in his will for its support but by 1905 the Walker Hall library location was bursting at the seams. George Parsons owned the house on Fletcher Street that still stands next to the library parking lot. It had been his summer home from 1882 until 1885 when he bought and expanded Riverhurst at Parsons Beach. He offered the Free Library Association of Kennebunk a gift of an elegant new Library building in 1906.
Parsons hired Boston Architect, Franklin H. Hutchins, who had just completed plans to enlarge the Hartley Lord Mansion on Summer Street. He was an excellent choice. Not only did he specialize in building elegant public structures, but his parents were both born and raised in the Kennebunks. Franklin’s ancestors had names like Goodwin, Gilpatrick, and Huff. Hutchins was a gifted architect, as you can see in his 1907 renderings of the interior of his proposed Kennebunk Free Library.
George Parsons died in December 1907, just a few months after his gift of the library building was dedicated in August, during the Old Home Week Celebration. The following year, George’s son Henry Parsons donated the lot on the other side of Fletcher Street for the Soldier’s Monument.
Architect Franklin H. Hutchins wasn’t done in the Kennebunks. In 1921, his prestigious Architectural Partnership, Hutchins & French, designed the new High School at Parks Street. In 1928, his firm was hired to design the new bank building next to the Soldier’s Monument for Kennebunk Savings Bank and Ocean National Bank. When the architect died in 1934, he was buried in Kennebunk.
No wonder that corner makes such a cohesive impression!
