Seacoast History Blog #05
November 5, 2008

The organizers of the new Discover Portsmouth visitor center met today to kick off a yearlong study supported by the New Hampshire Humanities Council. The first year at the DPC, amazingly, is over. Now the really hard part begins – keeping the new facility alive. This extraordinary concept, housed in two 1810 brick buildings, is hardly a slam dunk. It may look sturdy, but it is still a fragil institution. (Continued)

Putting Portsmouth Heritage Trails Under One Roof

It was scarcely a year ago that volunteers began an effort to save the old library from being sold off as a commercial property. The Portsmouth Historical Society was the only group to propose an alternative use – the creation of a roomy, central, attractive information center for visitors and locals. The Discover Portsmouth Center under Richard Candee immediately launched three art exhibits and attracted over 6,000 visitors in its first season. But the future of the DPC is far from guaranteed. The volunteer group needs to raise a million dollars within the next two years to convince city officials that this is a viable idea. The focus of the organization is to welcome, orient and inform visitors, then send them off to see the scores of cultural events in the Portsmouth area. The NHHC grant is designed, in part, to create a central location for a series of historic tours that will all begin at the DPC. I’m pleased to be among the project scholars with professors Richard Candee, David Watters and Jeffrey Bolster. Roughly a dozen of the city’s heritage tourism experts will meet regularly for the next few months to devise a plan for the DPC.

Officially titled "Putting Portsmouth on the Map", the advisory study is administered by the UNH Study for New England Culture and the Portsmouth Historical Society. Our formal goals are to develop a permanent exhibit of the history of Portsmouth, revise and enhance the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail and to create a new trail called "Footsteps of Washington." Since the creation of the Portsmouth Heritage Trail at the local chamber, we’ve been building new self-guided trails, all of them largely overlapping the same downtown area. Besides the Black Heritage Trail, we’ve worked on a Ranger (John Paul Jones) Trail, a Literary Lions Trail, a 1905 Treaty Trail, tours of historic graveyards, and what could best be called an "underbelly" tour featuring the darker side of local history. Can all these and other trails work together? Originate from a central point? Share a database? How will they operate? What mediums are best – cell phones, iPods, paper maps, audio CD? How do other towns accomplish this? How can we develop the DPC as the central stopping point for locals and tourists? These are questions we’ll be exploring.

© 2008 J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.