HISTORY MATTERS

Be thankful this holiday that Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis did not turn Great Bay into the world’s largest oil refinery. Aristotle who? How quickly we forget. In 1974 the most important thing that happened in Seacoast New Hampshire was what did not happen. Tankers did not prepare to offload 400,000 barrels of crude oil daily into a giant pipeline at the Isles of Shoals. (Continued below)

Here we go again. It’s been stripped, sold off, broken apart, moved across town, remodeled, moved again, disassembled, trucked to Concord, stored in a trailer, eaten by bugs, and studied piece-by-piece at great expense. The surviving bits of New Hampshire’s First State House once stood in the middle of Portsmouth’s busy Market Square. Now it’s time to decide, once and for all, what its future purpose will be. Is it a priceless artifact of New Hampshire history with an important story to tell? Or is it a crumbling over-analyzed wooden footnote to a forgotten era?

HISTORY MATTERS

“Oh God, it’s October again!” Prof. Emerson Baker groans over the phone, and I can almost hear his eyeballs roll up towards the heavens. Reporters by the dozen call “Tad” Baker this time of year for their annual Halloween fix. (Continued below)

HISTORY MATTERS

They were welcomed back as royalty. Dozens of Portsmouth Athenaeum proprietors raised a wine glass last month to toast the return of George and Clementina Jaffrey, a hip young Portsmouth couple of the early 1800s. (Continued below)