The Story Behind the Scenes (continued)

Portsmouth Practices Preservation

The saving of 27 houses and the start of Strawbery Banke was the culmination of a series of events that came to a head in 1958. But it was not the first time that local citizens had come together to preserve its unique architectural heritage. The city’s first pocket guide to historic houses was published in 1869. A tourist boom after the Civil War drew national attention to the faded colonial seaport.

The process began one house at a time. The local trend toward individual house museums began in 1908 with the opening of the Thomas Bailey Aldrich House on Court Street, now part of Strawbery Banke. The Wentworth-Gardner house (1760) and the John Paul Jones House (1758) opened to the public in the 1920s, followed by the Warner House (1713) a decade later. The Moffatt-Ladd (1763), Jackson (1664), Langdon (1784), Lear (1740), Wentworth-Coolidge (1753) and Rundlett-May houses (1807) followed. But no one thought to preserve an entire neighborhood.

The waterfront saw a massive change when Charles Prescott died in 1932 leaving a $3 million fortune to his two sisters Josie and Mary. They used the money to buy up and destroy all but two buildings on the water side of the street to create a public park across from what would later become Strawbery Banke Museum.

The idea of turning the waterfront into a tourist Mecca actually dates to the 1930s. Architect John Mead Howells, a Kittery summer resident, conceived a plan to create an historic maritime village. With naval historian Stephen Decatur he hoped to preserve the buildings and rebuild a replica of Portsmouth in its heyday, complete with tall ships.

The National Park Service took an interest in the Howells/Decatur plan and listed the Portsmouth waterfront among its top ten potential projects. A government-sponsored survey examined over 200 buildings in the Puddledock area. But the National Park Service took a pass on Portsmouth. In 1935. The idea was not financially feasible. Howells and Decatur tried shopping their Maritime Village idea to other backers, but no funding was found. In 1940, Capt. Chester Mayo of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard spearheaded a plan to survey and restore the waterfront neighborhood. Librarian Dorothy Vaughan was among the volunteers. But Mayo was transferred out of town, war intervened and the plan lapsed.

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