Customer Reviews

Strawbery Banke: A Seaport Museum 400 Years in the Making

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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!

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.

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.