STRAWBERY BANKE
A Seaport Museum 400 Years in the Making
Strawbery Banke Museum is a rich core sample of an ever-changing America. The ten-acre museum campus, New Hampshire's earliest neighborhood, began as a British plantation on a tidal inlet. Abandoned by its founders in 1635, the settlement "accidentally" named Strawberry Bank survived to become New Hampshire's only seaport. A century later the bustling Portsmouth waterfront was home to royal governors, tall ships, skilled artisans, and wealthy merchants. When the maritime economy crashed and the city burned in the nineteenth century, the "Puddle Dock" neighborhood drew waves of immigrant families to its ancient low-rent buildings. Then in the twentieth century, fearful of urban "blight," a federal redevelopment project went off here like a neutron bomb. The population and the junkyards disappeared, but a grassroots preservation movement saved many historic buildings from the bulldozers of progress.
Rich with pictures and painstakingly researched, this work is actually two books in one.
The first tracks 400 years of history along the Piscataqua River with dramatic tales that will surprise even New Hampshire natives--and reads like a thrilling adventure novel. The story then goes behind the scenes to the controversial founding of Strawbery Banke Museum in 1958. Tapping into private letters, unpublished records and personal interviews, the author explores the politics of preservation in a small blue-collar city. Always lively, this highly readable history tracks modern Portsmouth from a gritty working seaport to a cultural heritage destination, assessing what is gained and what is lost along the way.
HISTORY / NEW ENGLAND
432 pages with hundreds of images, two color galleries
Peter E. Randall, Publisher
Hardcover
AUTHOR'S NOTES:
This is a heavy hardcover book, though I tried to keep the text light and narrative moving as swiftly as the Piscataqua River. This was, at the time, the biggest project I had taken on, working solo for much of three years, the last six months nailing down 400 images, co-designing 400 pages with Grace Peirce, and assembling as many footnotes. While some thought this might be another house-to-house guide, I saw the first half of the book as a history of colonial and Revolutionary Portsmouth since all other city histories were out of print, still are at this writing. As an English major, I am always on the lookout for strong characters and found them in the contrast between librarian Dorothy Vaughan and philanthropist Muriel Howells who, each in her own way, created the 10-acre museum. In the intervening decade, Director Larry Yerdon made great strides in putting them museum on its fiscal feet. The books was reprinted in 2019 for the third time, but is hard to come by outside of Portsmouth. I have presented my slide lecture version of the book dozens of times across the state thanks to New Hampshire Humanities. Council. It never gets old.
Back to MY BOOKS
This is a heavy hardcover book, though I tried to keep the text light and narrative moving as swiftly as the Piscataqua River. This was, at the time, the biggest project I had taken on, working solo for much of three years, the last six months nailing down 400 images, co-designing 400 pages with Grace Peirce, and assembling as many footnotes. While some thought this might be another house-to-house guide, I saw the first half of the book as a history of colonial and Revolutionary Portsmouth since all other city histories were out of print, still are at this writing. As an English major, I am always on the lookout for strong characters and found them in the contrast between librarian Dorothy Vaughan and philanthropist Muriel Howells who, each in her own way, created the 10-acre museum. In the intervening decade, Director Larry Yerdon made great strides in putting them museum on its fiscal feet. The books was reprinted in 2019 for the third time, but is hard to come by outside of Portsmouth. I have presented my slide lecture version of the book dozens of times across the state thanks to New Hampshire Humanities. Council. It never gets old.
Back to MY BOOKS
