Sarah Junkins
Speaking a name and telling someone’s story is a remarkable feeling. Especially if that person is “lost to time” – just a name scrawled in a payroll book, or a letter signed only “your loving son,” or even nothing at all – only a mark on a census sheet. Then step-by-step and page by page, thanks to the history preserved through artifacts, art, archives and archaeology at the Brick Store Museum, this person’s story builds to become a life lived. A story told. An experience shared across time.
Andrew Walker, Kennebunk’s longtime clerk and daily diarist in the 19th century, wrote his thoughts on the value of exploring the past: “We know such events will take place because they have taken place. The past is but a mirror in which the future is depicted.”
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The Museum has in its possession an 1880 ledger recording the working hours of laborers at Robert Lord’s Twine Mill in West Kennebunk. Millions of hours of work by hundreds of unknown men and women went into Kennebunk mills and factories, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Their group photos outside their work sites acknowledge the vast role they played in the Kennebunk economy and how their lives and labor shaped the community. Men and women flocked to work in the local mills like the Mousam Manufacturing Company, the Leatheroid Factory, the Twine Mill, Kesslen Shoe Factory, and others that ran along the Mousam River.
Flipping this ledger open to a random page, you will find the names of workers at the mill for any given month. Sarah Junkins, like many of the people listed on the page at right, was simply a name on that list. Who was she?
In 2012, the Museum installed an exhibition highlighting the stories of local Civil War veterans, including a man named Albert Junkins. Museum staff wondered if they might be related.
We started by guessing Sarah’s age – maybe 30? – for when she might have been working in the mill. We needed her birth year if we were to put her life in context. Next, we scoured the Kennebunk census for Sarah who may have been born 30 years earlier. We found her!
Born in Kennebunk in 1845, Sarah Adjutant grew up in a farming family in West Kennebunk before marrying widower Albert Junkins (the man we already knew as a Civil War veteran!) after he served. In 1868, they welcomed their son, Horace; and in 1870, their daughter Costella. Albert’s 10 year old daughter from his previous marriage also lived with them. One year later, Albert died at age 41, leaving Sarah to raise two young children. We discovered what happened next thanks to information written down by Town Clerk Andrew Walker in 1871:
“He has had three wives. The last wife and three children are now left in reported destitute circumstances.”
Sarah wasted no time supporting her family: she got a job at Robert Lord’s Twine Mill. Following her through each decade’s census, we find that she never remarried and lived with her son and daughter for the rest of her life at their house in West Kennebunk.
The Twine Mill opened in 1860, and did exactly what its name implies: laborers manufactured cotton twine for use in fishing nets. In its heyday in the 1880s, this mill produced 2,000 pounds of twine per day. Robert Lord had expanded the mill in 1871 to double production. Sarah Junkins is listed in the mill’s payroll book alongside her son Horace and several other family members. She was paid $15.00 for the month of May 1880.
What we can assume from Sarah’s journey is that she made the best out of the circumstances in which she found herself; she got her first job at age 26 after losing a husband and realizing her children depended upon her to survive and earn money. We can all empathize with that life-altering situation where you have to dig-deep and push onward.
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These histories turn into exhibitions, programs, tours, internship projects, journal articles, discussion groups, field trip curriculum, virtual series and other multi-generational learning opportunities at the Brick Store Museum, whose mission it is to ignite personal connections to local history, art and cultures. Staff, volunteers and community members rally around these human stories and bring them to life because of the inherent value of each person’s experience, which can in turn inspire another person, and another, and another.
The magic of discovering stories and comparing them to our own is that the process inspires empathy and understanding just as much as it stirs a love for people, places and events in history. The Museum serves 10,000 people a year, with an additional 12,000 online visitors, thanks to the community’s support of our Annual Fund. As the economy changes and grants refocus, and without town or state support, the Museum depends on your support to continue to serve our region through education, experiences, and exploration.
Your support allows students to enjoy field trips and in-classroom activities for free; welcomes family groups to explore new exhibitions; opens the Learning Gallery to young learners who find a space of their own at the Museum; fuels research by staff and volunteers that bring hidden stories to life; preserves artifacts and archives that tell our shared histories; and produces the incredible range of programs for all ages that link the past to the present and future.
Your support of the Museum’s Annual Fund goal of $100,000 this year enables the Museum to help our communities flourish. Thank you for all you do to help this Museum succeed. Click here to donate online.
