June 2009
Portsmouth, New Hampshire

TO THE NEXT OWNER OF OUR HOME WHO DISCOVERS THIS --

After owning the house for 10 years, we finally got around to renovating our kitchen. It was the last step of our piecemeal renovation projects. The fence, the furnace, the bath, the shed, and more all had been tackled. Thanks to record low interest rates, during the biggest economic slump since the depression, we refinanced the mortgage and bit the bullet.

I bought this house from Jane Porter in 1999, after renting it for a year from her. Dennis moved in shortly after. She sold us the house for under the assessed value; we had no realtor, no attorneys. She took me out to dinner after we closed. I had worked with Jane at the Portsmouth Athenaeum where she was the Keeper for 14 years. Jane bought this house in the early 1980s when she moved back here from St. Louis.

Dennis and I got married in 2002. Dennis writes history nonfiction in the back yard, in the renovated “shed.” I work for a charitable foundation.

Everybody loved our vintage kitchen. Dennis didn’t understand why we would change it. But it was old, and drawers didn’t close right, the sink leaked, and a list of other tiny complaints were stacking up like worn dishes. The house was built in 1919 along with 250 other units in this brick village of “garden city apartments”. Prof. Richard Candee has written an entire book on Atlantic Heights. The kitchen was last remodeled in the 1940’s or 50s. The porcelain sink sat on top of a rusting metal cabinet. The crude, home made cabinets were functional but long outdated.  The day before the carpenter arrived, the plumbing under the sink literally fell apart. The kitchen itself was ready for a make-over.

There is one piece of our old kitchen I sorely miss—a bit of Atlantic Heights history, with its own little story attached. You see, our kitchen had a secret hideaway compartment. Yup, a secret panel built into the cabinet. It was about the size of a large, round cake pan cut in half.  We would never have found it on our own. We might never have known about it  without Marion.

Marion Fritz is one of the longest term residents of Atlantic Heights. She’s been here 70+ years. She lives two doors down, and is now in her 80s. We count on her for every bake sale and potluck. Her scones are legendary. In this cloistered neighborhood of similar houses down a little-known street, people still talk to each other. We hold house tours, cook-outs, pot lucks, political meetings, garden activities, etc. Right now I’m tending a little victory garden plot with half a dozen others. At one such event Marion told us the story that I want to pass on to your family.

The woman who used to live in this house – before us, before Jane, before the person before Jane -- was married to a man who liked to drink. When Marion was visiting this house five owners ago (counting you) the woman pulled her aside. 

“If anything should ever happen to me,” she told Marion, “I want you to know where I keep my money.” Then she bent down below the kitchen counter and showed her a secret compartment inside the lower cabinet. She pushed on the piece of wood and out slid open the compartment, exposing a little metal tray. That’s the tray we buried behind the new counter (now your old counter) in which we hid this message and a few mementos for you.  

It once fit snugly in the base of the rounded edged book shelf, cleverly concealed inside a wooden shelf. The woman didn’t want her husband to drink the money away, she told Marion. Perhaps she feared she might meet her demise prematurely at the hands of a drunken husband. Perhaps, she just needed a safe place to squirrel away a few dollars. We found a couple of empty liquor bottles hidden around the basement when we renovated it recently.

I stored cash in the cabinet secret compartment in the early years we lived here, hiding the money from myself. It was in that cabinet that I saved up enough cash to buy a fancy Space-Age mattress for us -- just over $1,000. We considered preserving the old curved counter return, but it just didn’t make sense. We thought about moving it intact to the basement as an historic artifact, but the next thing we knew, the old sink was in the backyard and the cabinets were broken up and trucked away. We salvaged the secret compartment. Now it belongs to you – until the next owner moves in.

© 2009 Maryellen Burke and J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.