08/27/2026
THROWBACK TURSDAY by Sharon Cummins
SHARK!
Sharks were sighted last week off Goose Rocks Beach and off Gooch’s Beach. It made me wonder if we had any history of fatal shark attacks in the Kennebunks. I didn’t find any instances of sharks killing people here but lots of accounts of people killing sharks.
An 8-foot “maneater” was captured off shore at Kennebunk Beach in 1893 by Wash Jacobs and Charlie Stevens, who hung it up on display at The Cove. Melville and Frank Darling chased a school of 3 Hammerhead sharks, prodding them with their oars while they were fishing off Cape Porpoise in 1913. The sharks ignored them until Frank hit one on the head with a harpoon. The sharks responded by capsizing their boat and attacking the fishermen. The fishermen and the sharks survived, all a bit worse for wear.
Melville Campbell, who ran a store at Beachwood, aka Goose Rocks Beach, brought a 500-pound shark home from a local fishing trip with his sons in September 1929.
Cape Porpoise fishermen, George Nunan and Arnold Stinson caught a 25-foot, 4,000 pound shark in their net on June 18, 1934 and hauled it alive to the Cape Porpoise Pier, where they displayed the “Sea Monster” for several days.
A year later, Maine Governor Louis J. Brann, Author Kenneth Roberts of Kennebunkport and Sanford Mills executive Col. William N. Campbell, who lived at what we now think of as the Franciscan Monastery, proudly landed a 500-pounder on their deep-sea fishing trip off Kennebunk Beach aboard the Eiderduck.
Kennebunk Police Chief, Frank Stevens and four of his men armed with rifles, shotguns and dynamite charges planned a shark hunt after a Coast Guard rescue unit from Boston reported seeing approximately 24 sharks ranging from 6-12 feet long, off Kennebunk Beach. The shark-hunt was twice postponed for choppy water. Finally, after a four-hour seagoing expedition up and down the coast from Biddeford Pool to Wells on June 18, 1964, aboard a Coast Guard boat from Fletcher’s Neck, they could find no trace of sharks. Cape Porpoise fishermen had insisted all along that they had most likely been chasing porpoise or blackfish.
Do you remember the great shark hunt of 1964?
