Patrick Cauley (b.c. 1850), confectioner, and Bridget Cauley, mill worker

c. 1890 - Sullivan & Cauley Confectionery - 418 Main Street

This shop was a confectionery store on a South Berwick, Maine, map of 1901, and contained a soda fountain into the mid-20th century.  For a time it may have been called Happy Valley Confectionery.

At the turn of the century the building was owned by Patrick Cauley, who emigrated from Ireland at age 12 in 1862.  He and his wife Bridget moved to Maine in the early 1890s from New Hampshire, where Patrick had worked as a currier and as a shoe maker in a factory. He was able to buy the home on lower Main Street where his family of seven children lived.  By 1910 Bridget died, and all of the children were working in the mills or caring for the family: Mary, the oldest, was at home; Catherine was married and living with her family of 3 in the same house with her siblings; Jennie was a dresser; Delia was at home, perhaps working in the shop; Jeremiah was in the shoe factory; 16-year-old Elizabeth was a spooler; and 12-year-old William was at home.

The candy store was operated by the family out of a ground-floor space facing the street, with two large plate-glass windows to display their wares.  The Cauley family lived in the apartment above.  The shop appears as a confectionery on a map of 1901, and it was still there in 1925 when this ad was printed in the South Berwick Town Report:

Sullivan & Cauley, Salmon Street, South Berwick, Maine – “We wish to inform the people of South Berwick and vicinity, that we have opened an up-to-date store in the Cauley Block on Salmon Street, and carry a first class stock of CONFECTIONARY, CIGARS, FRUIT, ICE CREAM, ETC., which we sell at the lowest prices consistent with the quality of the goods.  TRY OUR HOME MADE FUDGE – Ice Cream and  Pure Fruit Sodas and College Ices a specialty.”     -- 1925 South Berwick town report

The Cauley business was succeeded by one owned by Alfred J. Seymour in 1926, according to town reports. William Cauley lived upstairs about 1925, and married Seymour’s daughter. 

(Summary by Wendy Pirsig from archives at the Counting House Museum. Updated December 2020.)