Forging a collective memory

As always, the colorful human accounts, not the statistics, stir the emotions that link us to the past. And as usual, we can thank Portsmouth Journal editor Charles W. Brewster for recording the oral history of the city’s great disasters. Born the year of the first blaze in 1802, Brewster kept the memory of fire alive by publishing nostalgic interviews with former victims. Half a dozen of those detailed essays survive in his collection Rambles About Portsmouth published in two volumes. John H. Bowles, a Journal reader, was responding to Brewster’s history column when he wrote the stirring account of his aunt and uncle. These intimate memories of the "awful grandeur of the conflagration", printed in the newspaper of the times, is what speaks to us today.

"In many instances," Bowles wrote to Brewster about the 1813 fire, "the entire fruits of a life of industry were swept away, leaving the sufferers at mid-winter, without a place of shelter, or a dollar to recommence the world anew."

People were shocked, Bowles noted, by the way the fire swallowed up the town. Those who saw the blaze in the distance, in less than an hour, found themselves in the frigid streets. Many moved their possessions to safer locations, then into the streets when those sites too were threatened, only to find the same items swallowed up by fire. The morning after the 1813 fire, with Christmas just two days away, the streets were littered with furniture including fashionable sideboards, still set with Christmas pies baked the day before.

Some residents simply lost their wits, Bowles wrote to Brewster decades later, "causing them to commit absurdities which it afforded them much amusement to relate in after years."

"One good lady, with a houseful of furniture, and the fire but two tenements distant, was running about in a green baize dressing-gown and red woolen cap with an empty bottle in her hand. And another, had three bonnets in her hand and none upon her head."

But in report after report -- with a total of over 500 buildings destroyed – no record of a single death appears. That, local historians continually point out, is the true miracle of Portsmouth’s Christmas fires.

Copyright © 2008 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved. Robinson is editor of the history web site SeacoastNH.com and author of the award-winning history of Strawbery Banke Museum, available in bookstores and on Amazon.com.