it goes way back

Pepperrell Cove’s maritime history dates back to the 1600s when cod fish filled the Atlantic and colonial empires were made. It is named for Sir William Pepperrell, a Kittery Point native who became a decorated soldier, merchant and landowner in the early 1700s. Sir William Pepperrell owned more than 130 ships that operated out of Pepperrell Cove. He was commander of the colonial forces that took Louisbourg, Ile Royale (Cape Breton Island) in 1745. He was known to be one of the wealthiest and most powerful men during the colonial era. Author Patricia Wall, who wrote "Lives of Consequence" about the "invisible" population of African Americans in Old Kittery, detailed that Sir Pepperrell was also a slave owner, including a woman named Molly Miles, who was born in 1719 and lived to be 107 years old. According to the Maine Historical Society, evidence reveals that Sir Pepperrell left four slaves to his wife in his will.  Lady Pepperrell reportedly  "liberated" her slaves around the time of the American Revolution. According to the publisher, "In Lives of Consequence, Patricia Wall has forever destroyed the old myth that there were 'just a few' persons of color living in colonial Maine. In the towns of old Kittery and Berwick alone, her in-depth study finds nearly 500 Black, Indian, and mixed race individuals--both enslaved and free--from 1645 to statehood in 1820. Despite many self-serving myths their lives were no less harsh and their neighbors no less racist than other parts of the country. This well researched book is a significant rewriting of local history and a major addition to the study of African and African-Americans in Maine. A much needed corrective to antiquarian histories of Maine towns that virtually ignored this population altogether, it could be a model for similar local studies all over New England."

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In the early 1800s the Frisbee family made its mark on  Pepperrell Cove, operating what came to be the longest family owned store in the country. In the market's early days, its location enabled boats carrying coal and grain to make deliveries almost directly to its door. In the early 1900s, a new store was built in front of the old one. The original building became Cap'n Simeon's Galley, a restaurant also owned by the Frisbees. Cap’n Simeon’s closed in 2010. One of the current owners of the complex, Henry Ares, got his
start in restaurant business at the popular Cap’n Simeon’s Galley and worked there for many years.

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The Frisbee family donated their waterfront pier to the town in 1955 and continued to run Frisbee’s Market until 2011. The current owners are local restaurateurs who live in the community and have tried to honor the Frisbee’s legacy while creating a new waterfront experience for visitors and locals. The third floor bar at Bistro 1828 is called the Ski Club – a reference to the Water Skiing Club at Pepperrell Cove that provided much entertainment during the mid 1900s. The Ski Club has some of Frank Frisbee’s water skiing relics from the days when the group of locals put on waterskiing shows around the Seacoast.

For more on the area...

New York Times writer Robert Anderson offers this description:
Kittery Point begins at the Spruce Creek bridge and extends to Brave Boat Harbor, a distance of five miles. Spruce Creek, actually a small bay, traces a small peninsula out of the stretch from the bridge to Pepperrell Cove by dint of the backwater tributary of Barter's Creek. No more than about a mile, the reach is a succession of the scenic, the noteworthy and the unexpected. The unaware motorist, negotiating the hard-right, pause, hard-left driving test State Route 103 poses near the bridge, may well see a regal Georgian house in the rear view. It is the Lady Pepperrell House, built in 1760 for Sir
William's widow, and contrasting nicely with the adjacent austerity of the First Congregational Church, a 1730 clapboard with a truncated bell tower. The church looks seaward, across Route 103 to the Old Burying Ground, where the tombstones are a roll call of the family names that settled Kittery Point: Gerrish, Cutts, Frisbee, Blake, Seward, Thaxter.

Up the road a hundred yards or so, the William Dean Howells estate fronts on Route 103. The two-story Victorian, where he entertained Henry James, Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett and other literary figures, was the summer home of Howells from 1902 to 1911. The house, now owned by Harvard University and used as a faculty retreat, commands a spectacular view of the harbor and the Atlantic beyond. From his library Howells could "look up from my paper and see two lighthouses, one on each side of a foamy reef; three sails are sliding across the smooth waters within the reef, and far beyond it lie the Isles of Shoals in full sight."

Could you ask more?
The answer to the question has to come at nearby Fort McClary, since the house is closed to visitors. Save for the hexagonal blockhouse, the fort is distinguished for its incomparable view of Portsmouth Harbor. Dating to 1690, McClary was fortified as
recently as the Civil War. Now a state historical monument, the fort is martial on the harbor side (stone block battlements), and pacific on the Barter's Creek side (a picnic ground stands just across Route 103). Howells' long village of Kittery Point, which
rises and sinks beside the shore like a landscape with its sea-legs on, comes next. The village, overlooking Pepperrell Cove and a congested anchorage in summer, is not much different from what it was in Howells' day: a post office that is still the center of village life, Frisbee's Store (dating to 1828), a few dozen houses, a town pier, and, side by side, two historic dwellings that some consider the birthplace of the American national consciousness: the Bray House (1662), where Sir William Pepperrell was born, and the Pepperrell House (1683), where he presided over his baronial domain.

Howells credits Sir William (1696-1759) with instilling in the Colonists the notion they were "Americans and need be Englishmen no longer" as a result of leading the successful New England expedition against the French at Cape Breton, half a century before the Revolution.