"It was pretty bleak," Bruce Fuller recalled more than forty years later. "It was bare bones. The opening was a milestone, but a non-event." Then a freshman at the nearby University of New Hampshire, Fuller was hired to write a series of upbeat newspaper features about The Banke leading to the Memorial Day opening ceremonies. He reported weekly to "Captain" Carl Johnson, "a rather intimidating man," the Strawbery Banke executive vice president and former acting commander of the U.S. Naval Base at the Portsmouth Shipyard. Johnson’s office was located in the middle of the restoration project, Fuller recalls, in a "rundown, musty old place" surrounded by one boarded-up, weather-beaten building after another. Weeds grew thick between the battered buildings separated by fields of yellow ragweed and grass as tall as hay.

"True," a Strawbery Banke press release admitted in May 1965, "some of the structures have fallen onto evil days and are in poor repair, perhaps covered with ugly asbestos siding or simply left to weather."

By 1965 over half a million dollars in federal funds had been spent clearing out five junkyards and removing forty-four "ugly new" houses and many outbuildings. More than one hundred families were also removed from the "substandard" dwellings, evicted under federal eminent domain legislation. Many of the "displaced" Puddle Dockers found housing in the South End nearby or were relocated to new garden-style apartments for the poor and elderly elsewhere in town. A federally funded brochure in 1966 described Portsmouth—along with Savannah, New Orleans, Chicago, San Francisco, Norfolk, and others—as "an outstanding example of a city’s use of urban renewal to achieve historic preservation goals." Almost half a century later, resentment against urban renewal in Puddle Dock and in other parts of the city still lingers.

"Even the skeptics will admit," the Portsmouth Herald announced in a special twenty-eight-page Strawbery Banke advertising supplement, "that tomorrow’s dedication ceremonies signal the beginning of a new era in Portsmouth."

It was true. Downtown Portsmouth blossomed over the next few decades from a gritty seaport to a popular cultural destination, trading topless bars for tasteful boutiques, restaurants, galleries, and theaters. While some still prefer those blue-collar days over the charming and gentrified city, no one doubts that Portsmouth re-invented itself with an eye towards preservation. The "Old Town by the Sea" had a longstanding reputation for its aristocratic colonial architecture, colorful folk tales, and independent historic house museums. The media attention lavished on early Strawbery Banke simply put Portsmouth "back on the map"—and this time—it stuck.

But in May 1965 the skeptics remained skeptical. Only the most visionary could have predicted that the city’s broken-down South End waterfront would rise again. Not even the cluster of teenaged Strawbery Banke "belles" in their strawberry-print gowns or the red, white, and blue bunting could disguise the forlorn looking Puddle Dock on opening day. Cloudy skies, scattered showers, and cool temperatures dampened the formal ceremonies and turned the plowed areas between the empty houses into pools of mud.

Copyright © 2007 by Strawbery Banke Museum and J. Dennis Robinson. Excerpted and adapted with permission from Strawbery Banke: A Seaport Museum 400 Years in the Making, published by Peter E. Randall, Publisher, 2007. All rights reserved.