EDITOR'S NOTE: The following excerpt is adapted from the opening chapter of our the newly released book Strawbery Banke: A Seaport Museum 400 Years in the Making. For more info on the book CLICK HERE.  

Opening Ceremonies

Advance reviews were rapturous. Newspapers from the New York Times and the National Observer to the Boston Globe and Toronto Star trumpeted the event with over ten thousand lines of type. A million American school children read about the launch of Strawbery Banke in their classroom publication, World News of the Week. After seven years of planning and restoration, the ten-acre "colonial village" in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was finally ready to open. The official ribbon cutting was scheduled for Memorial Day, 1965, but the project had already generated hundreds of press clippings since it was founded in 1958.

The story was unique from every angle. For the first time a city, a nonprofit agency, and the Federal Housing Authority were working together to preserve historic houses. While "urban renewal" usually meant tearing down old buildings to build modern ones, Strawbery Banke Inc. managed to salvage over two dozen colonial structures from demolition. Two other historic buildings had been moved from other parts of town, and four more would follow. Most of the buildings stood on their original foundations in one of the oldest neighborhoods in the nation. Although the 1630 Great House was gone, the waterfront area had once been the hub of the state’s only thriving seaport. But the Portsmouth maritime trade collapsed early in the 1800s and the waterfront neighborhood faded. By the middle of the twentieth century — busy with dilapidated apartments, family shops, homes, and rusting scrap metal yards—Portsmouth’s Puddle Dock region was officially designated as a "blighted" and dangerous slum and targeted for destruction. With almost no financial backing and a poorly paid staff of two men, the grassroots volunteer group persevered. The original founders of Strawbery Banke were mostly downtown merchants. Their dual goal was to preserve Portsmouth heritage while attracting hordes of tourists to spend time and money in the once grand Port City. Simply put, according to The Portsmouth Herald, it was time to "sell the city," and judging from the media blitz in the spring of 1965, the dream was about to come true.

The dream was to transform the Portsmouth waterfront into a northern version of the much-admired Colonial Williamsburg outdoor museum in Virginia. By 1965 Williamsburg had an annual budget of $13 million and its visitors poured an additional $18 million into the local economy, statistics that made Portsmouth merchants dizzy with anticipation. But Williamsburg had a wealthy benefactor named John D. Rockefeller, while Strawbery Banke had local stockholders, most of whom purchased a single share of stock for $10. The most famous stockholder, President Dwight Eisenhower, also owned a single ceremonial share. In true Yankee style, by aligning itself with a federal urban renewal project, Portsmouth preservationists were able to buy a used neighborhood for about $28,000, about $1,000 per preserved house—all of which needed costly work. Portsmouth’s "multi-million dollar restoration project" was rich in dreams, not cash.

"You have ploughed unploughed ground," the founding president of Williamsburg Kenneth Chorley told a gathering of Portsmouth businessmen in 1965, "and established a valuable precedent for this country’s cultural future." But the kudos came with a warning: Strawbery Banke was more authentic, Chorley agreed, than other largely reconstructed historic villages. To compromise that authenticity would lead to failure. "Whatever you do," he said, "don’t try to be another Williamsburg, or another Sturbridge Village. Just be yourselves, for yours is a wonderful opportunity."

The opening celebration, one New Hampshire paper predicted, "will doubtless go down in Portsmouth history." According to another writer, wandering through the restored seacoast village could transport visitors to "a sense of almost unbearable nostalgia." But for some, the opening days at Strawbery Banke were a textbook case of selling the sizzle, not the steak.