In Monday’s feature (“McIntyre building sits on historic land,” Portsmouth Herald, Jan. 8), I attempted to delicately raise a point. When a new building project like that proposed on Daniel Street “honors the history” of the land it will soon dominate, how far back does that history go? Does the new project honor the 20th century? Or do we think back to what happened on that spot in the 19th, 18th, or 17th centuries?
And what does honoring mean? Are we merely showing respect for the past? Will a speech and a ceremony do? Is an historic marker required or is a monument needed? Can we just borrow a few architectural themes from an earlier building? Or does the honor go deeper, as when we fulfill a legal promise by honoring a contract? My next question, I guess, is – how much do we owe the past? How much honor is enough honor?
In the case of the McIntyre Building, for example, are we off the hook if we name a few hotel rooms for the former owners of the property – the George Jaffrey Conference Room, for example, or the James Stoodley Bar & Grill? And what about Bridget Graffort, the woman who in 1700 donated her land to create Daniel Street and the town’s first public school? Do we honor her gift of real estate, or the spirit in which it was given?
My final question is even more complex. Where, I wonder, does history live? We revere battlefields where people died long after they are gone. So if Paul Revere met with local patriots at Stoodley’s Tavern in 1774, is that address on Daniel Street still an historic site, even if the tavern is gone? Or is the building itself the historic site, since it was moved to another location in the mid-1960s? And how do we pay homage to a patriotic landmark when tavern owner James Stoodley, who kept two enslaved African servants, also held slave auctions in the same building? Where does the historic marker go? Does history actually live in books, in our hearts, on the Internet? I don’t know. I’m asking.
Those questions might come up on Friday, Jan. 12, at a public policy forum entitled “What about the McIntyre Building?” This free event from the Chamber Collaborative of Greater Portsmouth will be held at Discover Portsmouth (8 to 9:30 a.m.) at 10 Middle St. For more information visit http://portsmouthchamber.org.
The photograph above, by the way, is not Stoodley’s Tavern. It shows the Joshua Wentworth House that was moved, courtesy of the Winebaum family, during urban renewal from the North End to the South End of town. It was loaded onto a barge and floated across town. The Joshua Wentworth house, privately owned, now sits near the relocated Stoodley’s Tavern, currently offices and the education center at Strawbery Banke Museum. Across Hancock Street are two more properties moved to Strawbery Banke – the Gov. Goodwin Mansion and the Daniel Webster house.
(Photograph courtesy Portsmouth Athenaeum Collection. “Historic Portsmouth” is presented every Thursday or Friday by J. Dennis Robinson, whose 12 history books are available in local stores and online. He can be reached at dennis@mySeacoastNH.com. This is image number 706).