Brewster was writing a eulogy rather than a description. He visited he said, out of pity for the "frail tenement". Like a doctor visiting a dying patient, he came only with kind words, "not with the hope of resuscitating it from its sinking disease".

Yet nearly two centuries later, some historians cling to a hope that the bones will rise again. In 1967, in an appeal to preserve the statehouse, attorney David Engel told New Hampshire officials that "this may be the last opportunity we get to save this building which is in deteriorating condition". Forty years later Engel and members of Portsmouth’s Save the Statehouse committee are still trying.

For some, the statehouse symbolizes the critical era in history when New Hampshire transformed itself from a colonial colony to a sovereign state. Built under two royal British governors, the statehouse was the starting point for an early protest march against the Stamp Act. At the height of the Revolution, after Gov. John Wentworth had been driven from his home town forever, locals gathered to hear the Declaration of Independence read from the second floor balcony. Later George Washington reportedly waved to Portsmouth citizens from the same spot. By then, the state capital had already moved to nearby Exeter, and in 1819 to Concord.

No images of the building survive. An artist’s sketch first appeared in a 1902 tourist guide to Portsmouth. That drawing was created "according to the testimony of many old people, who can remember it distinctly." But those old people had certainly seen the building in its declining years, after its adaptation to a Greek-revival style, with no stately cupola and with most of its ornamentation removed. It was not until 1987, when the state of New Hampshire issued a detailed report that a new conceptual sketch showed the likely building at the height of its grandeur. What’s left of that grandeur hunkers today inside a cold steel trailer, slowly returning to dust.