Redefining Dorothy

Over the years, Vaughan became estranged from a number of her favorite institutions including the library, Strawbery Banke and the Portsmouth Athenaeum. Following her death, the bulk of her collected paperwork – nearly 160 boxes -- was given, not to a Portsmouth archive, but to the New Hampshire Historical Society (NHHS) in Concord.

Researchers Elaine Loft and Sherman Pridham, assisted by volunteers, spent two years organizing the materials, funded by the NH Charitable Foundation. Vaughan corresponded with over 170 people regularly. She did extensive research on Portsmouth history for popular authors Kenneth Roberts, Thomas Raddall and Lois Lenski. The Vaughan Collection includes scores of Christmas cards, her unfinished pot-boiler romance novel, hundreds of personal photos, her many awards including an invitation to dine at the White House, and scores of press clippings from newspapers and magazines with titles like "The Woman Who Saved Portsmouth."

And there among the records of a long and productive career, neatly arranged and tied in long blue ribbons, are the personal letters of a little known life. According to Loft, Vaughan, who never married, corresponded extensively with at least two potential suitors – Gardner Hodgdon and Lloyd Ashland. Their correspondence reveals a young woman only her closest friends knew.

Pridham, who served as head librarian in Portsmouth after Vaughan’s retirement in the 1970s, is now retired himself. He first encountered Vaughan when he was a boy from Puddle Dock visiting the library. She would shout, "You, be quiet!" then she would talk very loudly on the telephone, he recalls with humor. The two were never close, but Pridham says he finally came to empathize with Vaughan while cataloging the Vaughan Collection.

"I really had no idea who she was," Pridham says today. "I saw a more fleshed out Dorothy when I started reading those letters."

Elaine Loft may know her best of all. Although she never met Dorothy Vaughan in real life, Loft has read thousands of pages about her over the last 18-months. With the cataloging project now at an end, Loft sees a complex character who came of age during the Roaring Twenties. She says:

"She was the librarian who said ‘Shush!’ and the spinster who lived with her parents, and the little old lady in the straw hat who knew every bit of folklore about the City of Portsmouth. But she also smoked cigarettes to get the attention of a beau, bobbed her hair and dressed like a flapper. She went to Boston to see shows and have drinks at a carousel bar."

A powerful life

Although Portsmouth was her first and truest love, she was not a native. Dorothy Mansfield Vaughan was born in Penacook, NH in 1904. She won her first fight at age five, she once told a Boston Globe reporter, when the boy next door tried to take one of her toys. "I said no and whacked him on the head," Vaughan recalled. "I’ve been fighting and scrapping ever since."

She was twelve years old in 1917 when her father took a job at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and moved Vaughan, her mother and her two brothers, Donald and Oscar, to Portsmouth. In 1921, while still in high school, she became a page at the Portsmouth Public Library, working her way up to head librarian. A Home Economics major in high school, she never went to college, got her driver’s license in her 70s, never married, and saw little of the outside world. Although she insisted on being addressed in later years as Dr. Vaughan, her degree was an honorary title granted by the University of New Hampshire after she founded Strawbery Banke Museum.

"I was there [at the library] for fifty-four years," Vaughan said at her ninety-fifth birthday party as the mayor presented her with the key to the city. "When I was head of the Portsmouth Library, my mother was head librarian at the Athenaeum. We had power!"

CONTINUE Love Letters