Seacoast History Blog #98
October 22, 2010

When a local newspaper reporter called to ask my expert opinion of the potential destruction of the Wentworth School building, my learned response was, “What Wentworth School?” Turns out the old “Acres” grammar school was built to house the huge influx of families who came to Portsmouth during World War II largely to work in the local shipyard making submarines. The school was rundown and no longer used for public classes and, as it turns out, was just a mile from my house. I never saw it. Now it’s gone, flattened to make way for a soccer field. The city’s next job is to “mitigate” the loss of the “historic” building. That’s one of those euphemistic terms like “collateral damage” that lawyers love and writers hate. (Continued below)

Mitigation in many cases is when a city tears down an historic building and puts up a plaque that says there used to be an historic building on this spot. The state of New Hampshire (NHDHR) is in charge of protecting historic sites from being destroyed or torn down. That isn’t working out too well with the potential archeological artifacts beneath the ground at the Portwalk hotel complex in the North End, but it’s going swimmingly with the Wentworth School. The state historians agreed to let the building be razed, but they want payback. In return for removing the structure (and for renovating the Middle School on Parrot Ave) the city has to do something “historical” in return. The mitigation money must come out of the $37.5 million planned for the renovation.  

Which is why we ended up at a Wednesday night meeting in the wonderful “LittleTheatre” at Portsmouth High. My career as a substitute teacher there ended in 1977 and I’ve not been back. The place looks better than I recall in the days when we were teaching two sessions of kids, one early in the morning, and another immediately following in the afternoon.  

The meeting was booked as a “brainstorming” session, but only half a dozen citizens spoke up. I figured the hired out-of-town consultants would offer up their “mitigation” ideas and then get our local reaction. Instead, the spokesperson simply opened the floor to comments. Comments about what? The building is already gone. No one had a single photo of the building. There was no written history handouts. As novices in the field of historic mitigation, we needed someone to prime the pump, to tell us, for example, what other similar sites have done. What is the working budget? Other than “honoring the past” what is the goal of the mitigation? Who is the audience?   

Three or four brave citizens familiar with the late Wentworth School stood up to the microphone that was wired to the Cable 22 camera so that citizens who didn’t show up can watch the session on TV.  The locals were not comfortable with the rigid format, nor were the two “history experts” in attendance (me and Portsmouth Historical Society director Sandra Rux). The observers, those connected with the building project, the state regulators, and city officials, all sat up in the back and said nothing.  

So it went something like this: “Hi, we just tore down the school you either attended or know nothing about. What have you got to say? Be sure to step up to the microphone and talk into the camera. Okay, start talking.”  

The Acres group noted wisely that Portsmouth is a city of neighborhoods, and most neighborhoods had their own grammar schools – Farragut, Sherburne, Whipple, Wentworth, etc. Many of these old schools are forgotten or turned to condos. They all came together when, in 1931, the city opened it’s first Middle School as a weigh-station between the lower grades and high school. This was where the neighborhoods blended and kids got to meet kids from the other parts of town.

That’s a good story. The other story, also noted by the Acres group, is about Portsmouth in WWII. We’re losing our Greatest Generation members rapidly and the loss of the Wentworth School could be greatly “mitigated” by taking the opportunity to do oral histories of seniors before it’s too late.  

I’ve been advocating a system for capturing oral histories in Portsmouth since my students were doing them in the 70s. What I’ve learned over the decades is disappointing. It isn’t as easy as it looks. You can just send kids out with microphones and tape recorders to talk to the grandparents. You can, but what you get is often just some friendly nostalgic anecdotes.  

The best results come when the project is defined, the budget is known, and a few key people get the training needed at a place like the Salt Project in Maine. Oral histories require recording equipment – today it would likely be digital recorders – and prepared questions that give some context to the interviews. The interviewers should have a little training (Don’t ask YES or NO questions, eg). There needs to be lists of interviewers and interviewees. Legal forms have to be signed. Tapes have to be transcribed. Transcriptions have to be edited. Photos need to be taken, perhaps videos.  

Before that process even begins the planners need to determine how the final edited interviews will be seen. Will there be full transcripts available to the public? Where will they be stored? How will they be indexed? Who has access to them? Where are the original tapes kept? In what format will they be stored? Will there be backups? How will they be updated when technology marches ahead into new formats? Who will pay for all that maintenance?  

We agreed that it would be great to create a cell phone style walking tour of the many neighborhoods. We’d like to see displays and exhibits in pubic buildings. Thee was lots of talk about getting the info into the school curricula.  

All that is great. What I’ve learned in my decades here, is that such projects rarely happen. In 1998 a group of us worked on a history of Portsmouth that was funded by seed money from the city and advertising by local merchants. When it was done I personally delivered hundreds of copies to the high school history department. I was told it could not be used because “local history is not in our curriculum” and “we did that in fourth grade.”  

One of the great sad things about writing history in an historical town like Portsmouth is the great disconnect between what we teach our kids and what we teach our tourists. Great teachers have done great work, but generally, Portsmouth kids don’t get much exposure to the incredible resources in their own town. House tours and historical events are attended mostly by older folks. Pontine, Strawbery Banke, NH Theatre Project and others create historical works that are kid-friendly, but for the most part, citywide, we miss the mark.  

So what I see here is another great opportunity. Done right, the Wentworth and Middle School “mitigation” could be the pilot program for much bigger things. A crack has opened up in the system and the schools are being required – as they change their buildings – to include a history component. It could be a plaque. It could be a bunch of stuff in a display case in a hallway. It could be a pile of tapes sitting in a closet somewhere.  

But it could also be something great, something meaningful, something lasting.  According to the Middle School construction Web site, the theme of the project is “Connecting the past with the future.” Let’s see if that’s really true. 

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