Portsmouth Librarian's Secret Suitors

I’m confused. If former Portsmouth librarian Dorothy Vaughan didn’t want us to read her love letters, then why did she give them to the NH Historical Society?

Vaughan, who died just shy of her 100^th birthday in 2004, was a powerful, sometimes controversial Portsmouth figure. An early founder and first president of Strawbery Banke Museum, Vaughan worked at the Portsmouth Public Library for half a century, where she came to dominate the dissemination of information in an era before the Internet.

An obsessive collector of all things Portsmouth, Vaughan professed to be writing a book about local history. Her home and garage on Summer Street were packed with books, prints, pamphlets, paintings, and institutional records. Very few visitors ever got more than a glimpse through the front door during the last decades of her life. Although she received an advance payment to write her long-promised book, it was never completed.

"Many of these things were stacked near the desks or chairs from which she worked," one friend recalls. "Others were segregated by subject and kept together in paper bags or envelopes. There were narrow pathways between these piles."

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Redefining Dorothy

Over the years, Vaughan became estranged from a number of her favorite institutions including the library, Strawbery Banke and the Portsmouth Athenaeum. Following her death, the bulk of her collected paperwork – nearly 160 boxes -- was given, not to a Portsmouth archive, but to the New Hampshire Historical Society (NHHS) in Concord.

Researchers Elaine Loft and Sherman Pridham, assisted by volunteers, spent two years organizing the materials, funded by the NH Charitable Foundation. Vaughan corresponded with over 170 people regularly. She did extensive research on Portsmouth history for popular authors Kenneth Roberts, Thomas Raddall and Lois Lenski. The Vaughan Collection includes scores of Christmas cards, her unfinished pot-boiler romance novel, hundreds of personal photos, her many awards including an invitation to dine at the White House, and scores of press clippings from newspapers and magazines with titles like "The Woman Who Saved Portsmouth."

And there among the records of a long and productive career, neatly arranged and tied in long blue ribbons, are the personal letters of a little known life. According to Loft, Vaughan, who never married, corresponded extensively with at least two potential suitors – Gardner Hodgdon and Lloyd Ashland. Their correspondence reveals a young woman only her closest friends knew.

Pridham, who served as head librarian in Portsmouth after Vaughan’s retirement in the 1970s, is now retired himself. He first encountered Vaughan when he was a boy from Puddle Dock visiting the library. She would shout, "You, be quiet!" then she would talk very loudly on the telephone, he recalls with humor. The two were never close, but Pridham says he finally came to empathize with Vaughan while cataloging the Vaughan Collection.

"I really had no idea who she was," Pridham says today. "I saw a more fleshed out Dorothy when I started reading those letters."

Elaine Loft may know her best of all. Although she never met Dorothy Vaughan in real life, Loft has read thousands of pages about her over the last 18-months. With the cataloging project now at an end, Loft sees a complex character who came of age during the Roaring Twenties. She says:

"She was the librarian who said ‘Shush!’ and the spinster who lived with her parents, and the little old lady in the straw hat who knew every bit of folklore about the City of Portsmouth. But she also smoked cigarettes to get the attention of a beau, bobbed her hair and dressed like a flapper. She went to Boston to see shows and have drinks at a carousel bar."

A powerful life

Although Portsmouth was her first and truest love, she was not a native. Dorothy Mansfield Vaughan was born in Penacook, NH in 1904. She won her first fight at age five, she once told a Boston Globe reporter, when the boy next door tried to take one of her toys. "I said no and whacked him on the head," Vaughan recalled. "I’ve been fighting and scrapping ever since."

She was twelve years old in 1917 when her father took a job at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and moved Vaughan, her mother and her two brothers, Donald and Oscar, to Portsmouth. In 1921, while still in high school, she became a page at the Portsmouth Public Library, working her way up to head librarian. A Home Economics major in high school, she never went to college, got her driver’s license in her 70s, never married, and saw little of the outside world. Although she insisted on being addressed in later years as Dr. Vaughan, her degree was an honorary title granted by the University of New Hampshire after she founded Strawbery Banke Museum.

"I was there [at the library] for fifty-four years," Vaughan said at her ninety-fifth birthday party as the mayor presented her with the key to the city. "When I was head of the Portsmouth Library, my mother was head librarian at the Athenaeum. We had power!"

CONTINUE Love Letters

Private disappointments

We have very few of Vaughan’s own letters. Her personal life must be interpreted from letters she received from others. But it is clear, Loft agrees, that Vaughan’s dreams did not always come true. She hoped, at first, to become a famous author, and developed a crisp, entertaining writing style. She hoped to attend college, but could only take a few local and correspondence courses. She applied for library jobs in Boston, New York and Chicago, but without luck. She read novels and romance magazines, loved socializing with young men, adored the movies, but preferred classical music to jazz.

Intelligent and precocious, Vaughan admired independent single women like Rosomund Thaxter of Kittery. She found her niche as a history researcher and used her vast knowledge of local fact and folklore to make her mark in Portsmouth society. She assisted famous architectural historians like John Mead Howells and William Sumner Appleton. But she worked mostly as a volunteer in the background and her big break did not come. As the Great Depression evolved into the Great War, like many Americans, Vaughan suffered from bouts of loneliness and depression. A prolific letter writer, she kept up a special correspondence with two soldiers.

Love letters uncovered

Gardner Hodgdon, four years her junior, had apparently proposed marriage while in Portsmouth but Vaughan turned him down. He enlisted in March of 1942 and was sent to Fort Bragg. He wrote to Vaughan from England later that year:

"Little did we realize last June when I kissed you goodbye at the South Station, that we might never meet again...that is why I came back that Friday night...Then anyway, by God's grace I'll come back and we can be together always. And I hope it will be soon, because I love you...The only thing I can hope is that you will forget the mean tricks that I played on you and remember the good times we had together".

What the "mean tricks" were, research has not revealed. The correspondence continued throughout WWII and Hodgdon penned this note from "Somewhere in Africa" in 1944:

"Was sitting here thinking of the first time I took notice of you--can see you now in that pink dress -- wide pink hat--cream gloves--and not forgetting those million dollar legs...Maybe some time soon we will be able to start over new and I can assure you Dot that it is going to be different. A fellow has lots of time in 22 months to think things over…Love me always my dear."

Vaughan meanwhile had met Lloyd Ashland who was serving at Camp Langdon at New Castle. Ashland was from Vermont and six years younger than Vaughan. The two, accompanied by Ashland’s best friend Phil, went on frequent excursions and he was definitely, according to Loft, "the love of her life." In a letter written in 1942, Ashland sympathized with her "situation" regarding a suitor, probably the persistent Hodgdon. He wrote:

"I know just how you feel…but don’t you think that a quick clean cut would be the best…I once read that in marriage if there was any doubt at all in either of the minds of the ones concerned that there should be no marriage."

Vaughan, meanwhile, had her heart set on Ashland, despite his weak attempts to "clarify the situation" and explain that he had no romantic designs. In a hand-written message penned towards the end of the war, he said:

"I understood perfectly when you gave me your love, I had realized, before then, how you felt, and it was causing me some anxiety because I know how unhappy one could be – one who loved and that love was not returned. I didn’t want you to be hurt, that is why I tried to tell you how I felt."

The message did not come through clearly. Now well into her 40s, Vaughan continued to carry a torch for Ashland, writing and visiting with him and his family after the war. The eight-year relationship ended suddenly when an unexpected invitation arrived. Ashland, the formal note said, would marry another woman on August 14, 1949. Vaughan and her family were invited to attend.

Like so many other scraps of paper that passed through her hands, Vaughan filed the wedding invitation among her souvenirs. It is now in the archives of the NH Historical Society. Although shocked and devastated by the news, Dorothy Vaughan quickly threw herself back into her work and back into the warm embrace of her beloved Portsmouth. As the 1950s dawned, her best years were yet to come, filled with the accolades and attention she longed for.

Copyright © 2008 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved. A small portion of this article is excerpted from Robinson’s book "Strawbery Banke: A Seacoast Museum 400 Years in the Making" that includes much more on the life of Dorothy Vaughan. This article also appeared in the Portsmouth Herald, September 22, 2008.