Our History

Harbor Candy History
by Jean Sotiropoulos-Foss

Harbor Candy Shop started in 1956 almost by accident. When my father, George Sotiropoulos, brought me to Ogunquit to begin my first summer job at Bessie's Restaurant, he asked that I call home if I noticed any store-front for rent. He had a small confectionery manufacturing business in New Hampshire. Maybe I hoped there'd be nothing, for this was the great adventure of my first summer alone away from home.

However, down Beach Street and over the bridge onto the beach was a "for rent" sign on a vacated fortune teller's shop in part of what is now Huckleberries. I called home. Thus, Lillian Sotiropoulos, my mother, spent that summer traveling by bus every day from Haverhill, Massachusetts to Ogunquit, Maine to run the new shop while my father made the candy in New Hampshire and used the family car to deliver it.

The following year our family moved here for the summer season into today's Blue Water Inn on Ogunquit River, and a portion of the Inn was divided into a tiny candy factory.

The next location in town for manufacturing was the nostalgic Leavitt Theater building on Main Street which operates today as Ogunquit's only summer film theater.

In 1960 Harbor Candy Shop moved to its present maroon and green Main Street building which had been an A&P Market painted originally fire-engine red and which has an interesting architectural history. Within this block was the First National Store (now the Village Food Market), the old Tower's Pharmacy with its popular soda fountain (predecessor to Ogunquit Pharmacy) and the U.S. Post Office. Here our five year lease began at $1,100 and called for annual increases of $100.00 to a total rent of $1,500.00 in the fifth year. When the lease was renewed for five years again, the decision was made to repeat a good thing: the rent began again at the original amount and progressed over five years to the same $1,500.00 total!

Today, we hear grandparents in the shop describing to their grandchildren the favorite candies they used to find at the shop on Ogunquit Beach.