As for the windmill?

Once the war was over and Eastport returned to the United States in 1818, the Shackford family thrived anew.

The heart of his activity seems to have been an old log store built at what would become Steamboat Wharf. Described as being at the foot of Shackford Street, it would more accurately be placed right below our house. When the store was constructed, the Customs Office was south of Shackford Cove, rather than to the north of the eventual downtown and its docks. That first store was standing as late as 1840 but being used as a stable.

Its replacement, the so-called Red Store, was removed from the waterfront around 1833 by John Shackford junior and still exists within the main part of the residence at the south-west corner of Third and Middle streets, an elaborate mansard house best known as master shipbuilder Caleb S. Huston’s residence.

Another portion of the old building went into a small, two-story frame house, “situated on the windmill lot” on Water Street, at the foot of Third Street — diagonally across the corner intersection from us. I’m told that the windmill foundation sits in the cellar of that house.

Windmill, you ask?

Captain John junior is also credited with building a windmill upon the bluff at the entrance of Shackford’s Cove, one that “proved faulty in construction and was of no practical value, but remained standing on the bluff for many years as a conspicuous landmark.”

The small Cape at the left in the painting would be our house.

In the Kilby history, Samuel Shackford recalled, “The windmill which stood upon the bluff at the entrance of Shackford’s Cove for a generation or more was built for him,” John Shackford junior, “but, on account of location or fault of construction, proved a failure. In a moderate breeze, like a balky horse, it would not go, and in a gale of wind nothing could stop it until the wind abated. The old mill, after it had become dilapidated by wind and weather, was a picturesque object in approaching the town from the sea. It was taken down by its owner about forty years ago, much to the regret of the public.”

That is, dismantled around 1848.

~*~

But that leaps ahead.

All of it, of course, has relevance on the house we bought.