Strawbery Banke: A Seaport Museum 400 Years in the Making [Hardcover]

J. Dennis Robinson (Author), Jr. Richard Haynes (Photographer), Ralph Morang (Photographer), Douglas Armsden (Photographer)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 28, 2008

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 Tapping into private letters, unpublished records and personal interviews, the author explores the politics of preservation in a small blue-collar city.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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"[Strawbery Banke: A Seaport Museum 400 Years in the Making] is really two books in one, for the volume covers both the four-hundred-year history of the city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire's only major seaport, and the more recent fifty-year history of Strawbery Banke, Inc (now Strawbery Banke Museum) . . . Robinson has done a superb job telling this tale, weaving together the two stories in an almost seamless pattern."--Historical New Hampshire

"[T]he dramatic story of New Hampshire's oldest neighborhood and only seaport. In 400 pages and over 300 photos and illustrations, Robinson's enthralling narrative takes you back to the neighborhood's beginnings as a British plantation and its bustling Colonial heyday up through its near destruction and controversial founding as a museum fifty years ago."--Accent

Review

"This is an important book about one of the best history museums in the country." (Ken Burns )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Strawbery Banke Museum/Peter E. Randall Publisher (February 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0960389628
• ISBN-13: 978-0960389629
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 8.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,664,370 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

J. Dennis Robinson currently writes books about American history for children and for adults from his office in historic Portsmouth, NH near the swirling Piscataqua River. A popular columnist, educator and lecturer, he operates the award-winning Web site SeacoastNH.com with fresh content added (almost) daily. Robinson's two new books for 2011 are focused on the sea. MARITIME PORTSMOUTH is about a unique collection of paintings and artifacts linked to New Hampshire's only seaport. AMERICA'S PRIVATEER, just released, tracks two letters-of-marque named Lynx designed in Baltimore. One was captured by the British in the war of 1812. The other, a $3 million square-topsail schooner built at Rockport, Maine -- sails today. The author aims to make history relevant, readable, and surprisingly fun for a wide range of modern readers.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing Pictures!, February 11, 2008

By 

Rodman Philbrick (Maine & Florida Keys, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Strawbery Banke: A Seaport Museum 400 Years in the Making (Hardcover)

This is, as the title suggests, a history of a museum, but in addition it's a rather amazing story about how history reached out and touched the folks in a small New England town. It has a wonderful balance of lively prose and what seems to be hundreds of photographs, all beautifully reproduced, that really bring the people and the place to life. If the Thorton Wilder wrote books instead of plays, it would be a lot like this!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The genesis of a museum and the history of a town, March 22, 2008

By 

Lynn Harnett (Marathon, FL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Strawbery Banke: A Seaport Museum 400 Years in the Making (Hardcover)

Not just a beautifully illustrated history of a New England seaport town's colonial village museum, Robinson's book is a lively portrait of New Hampshire's only seaport, Portsmouth. Through the personalities and events that shaped it, Robinson shows how the town grew and shrank and thrived and burned (twice!) and transformed itself again and again to meet the changing times, without being overtaken by them.

First visited by close-mouthed fishermen and settled by venturesome capitalists, Strawberry Banke (as it was first known) resisted the onslaught of Puritans from Massachusetts as best it could, given its isolation, economic woes, and small population. Robinson introduces readers to the men who carved a town from the wilderness, jockeyed for power and abandoned the place when the going got tough.

Robinson brings these and later adventurers to life as he chronicles the early years, Portsmouth's role in the Revolution, the economic woes of the early 19th century and the devastating fires, which drove men, like the young lawyer Daniel Webster to leave Portsmouth forever. He describes the rise of the red-light district, the descent of the waterfront, and the ongoing cries for urban renewal, destruction, and preservation right up to the present day.

Portsmouth's determination to thrive created friction early on between preservationists and those eager to embrace the future by discarding the past. As in many towns the preservationists were often descendants of moneyed summer visitors, like John Mead Howells, son of editor and author William Dean Howells, and Stephen Decatur IV, the latest in a long line of famous military men. Howells and Decatur teamed up with an ambitious plan to restore the waterfront and before their plan fizzled Portsmouth had hit the top ten list of possible National Park projects.

Though Howells failed, his grandson married a woman who was a major player in the founding of the Strawbery Banke Museum, which has preserved and restored many of the city's oldest buildings and relocated them to its village setting across the road from the Piscataqua River.

Robinson weaves the genesis and development of the museum into his narrative. We meet the people who built and lived in the houses that now make up the museum and see the transformations of many of the buildings over the years as people added on, modernized or changed their use entirely.

The hundreds of photographs and illustrations that accompany Robinson's history are integral to the story. They have been carefully chosen to enhance the narrative, from the first drawings of the colonial grounds to the mechanics of moving a building to the Strawbery Banke site and, always, the people who have given Portsmouth its life since the early 1600s.

Well organized, engaging, and attractively designed, this is a book to be savored from cover to cover.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tremendous History on Colonial Landmark, March 1, 2008

By 

Thomas C. Clarie (New Hampshire, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Strawbery Banke: A Seaport Museum 400 Years in the Making (Hardcover)

At the price Amazon is offering this powerful book (I paid $35 for it), this is an incredible bargain for a fascinating read. With its size, scope, and beautiful pictures (2 large sections in color), a publisher like Abrams might charge $90 for it! Author J. Dennis Robinson is known throughout New England for both writing must-read history but also for being a spellbinding lecturer. His knowledge of New England history is deep and sweeping, but more important is his love and "feel" for that history. Not just a history of landmark Strawbery Banke colonial museum, this is a hard-hitting history of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which is even today loaded with hundreds of stunningly huge colonial homes. In these months of a highly interesting presidential race, make sure you read this book to get the true feel of where our nation came from and why we love it so.