Comment on Cape Elizabeth man walks ancestor’s groundbreaking path

Cape Elizabeth man walks ancestor’s groundbreaking path

BIDDEFORD — Ray Shevenell set out from Hollis Center on Friday morning on the last leg of his 188-mile trek from Compton, Quebec. “This is the very first day my feet don’t hurt,” the 74-year-old said when he was about a mile-and-a-half from his destination, Shevenell Park in Biddeford, named for the great-great-grandfather who took the same journey 170 years earlier. Israel Shevenell, recognized as the city’s first French-Canadian settler, was 19 years old in the spring of 1845 when he left on foot for Biddeford to find work as a bricklayer at the mills being built. That fall, he walked back to Canada to retrieve his family, who returned with him. It’s a story that’s stuck with Ray Shevenell since his father told it to him when he was a young boy.

 

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