I’m having a moment. A year ago, this website was a secret project. I worked on it for hundreds of hours, tapping away behind the scenes, often until the dawn’s early light. There were no underwriters, no sponsors or assistants. The goal was to assemble as many of my published stories (about 2,500 over the decades) onto a central site. I wasn’t shooting for a “best of” collection, but for a living “hub” focused on local history.
I was not a history major. My interest in the past has always been in what it can teach us about our brief time on Earth. Before he disappeared, Carl Sagan reminded us how time flies. His Cosmic Calendar compressed the universe’s 13.8 billion years into one calendar year. On Sagan’s timeline, humans don’t appear until 10:30 pm on December 31, the last hours of the last day of the year. A single human life of 75 years lasts less than one-fifth of one second on that calendar.
On turning 75, I knew I had to get on the stick if I planned to leave something memorable and accessible behind. Then I got sick. Nothing brings the Cosmic Calendar into focus like a large, lobulated, heterogeneous enhancing mass lesion within the soft tissue of the right neck. Rock stars and movie actors and people I know began following Carl Sagan into the unknown.
I’ve spent the last 30 years writing about Seacoast history because our region is unique. It is incredibly tiny, a mere 18-miles. Wedged between Massachusetts and Maine, early New Hampshire played a critical role in colonial history. We were the buffer zone between two Puritan regions. Since Portsmouth was the only major port in the entire province, it dominated New Hampshire history well into the Revolutionary Era. A lot of important things happened and continue to happen in this tiny area, making it a sort of core sample of the American story.
Our local history, brief and compact, is therefore highly teachable. One story bleeds into the next in the same way one local character is related to another or one street connects to its neighbor. And yet, each little Seacoast town has a distinct personality.
Portsmouth has a human scale, even with some of the ugly new buildings, that is relatable, comforting, and understandable. And while some feel “their town” has lost its charm, many of us are still drawn to Portsmouth’s blend of history, arts, parks, architecture, people, shops, events, riverside scenery, and culture. History teaches that we don’t own the city; we’re only passing through.
My secondary goal with the website, after adding a ton of content (almost 800 blogs so far), is to duplicate that sense of scale and connectivity online. I’m slowly linking each new story to ones already in the archive, making it like a baby Wikipedia. This lets readers, even those who have never visited or heard of Portsmouth, explore and become familiar with our shared past. It’s their town too.
As a history writer, to quote the late David McCullough, my life is marinated in that past. When I walk down Daniel Street, for example, I’m immersed in over 400 years of change. I see the current buildings and shops, but I can sense the centuries that came before. By Carl Sagan’s example, if my 75 years equals one-fifth of a second, then the city we call Portsmouth has been around for almost a SINGLE SECOND. And if my math is correct, the Indigenous People, who have been here 12,000 years, occupy 27.4 seconds on the final day of the Cosmic Calendar.
The more one studies history, I find, the more comforting the present day becomes. Historians get to see how much the world has changed and yet, how similar people are through recorded history and across the planet.
I felt that twinge today looking at a photograph of a boy with a big hat standing on Daniel Street. He stood, we’re not sure exactly when, a few yards from where the controversial McIntyre Block is about to be rebuilt for an estimated $200 million. The photo comes from the Portsmouth Athenaeum archive.
To the right of the boy in the photo, we get a glimpse of Stoodley’s Tavern (circa 1761). That historic meeting place (the first tavern burned) was moved across town to Strawbery Banke Museum in 1966. People often associate Stoodley’s Tavern with Robert Rogers of the French and Indian War. Rogers was featured in a bestselling novel, Northwest Passage, that was made into a movie of the same name starring Spencer Tracey.
On the left side of the photo is the Old Custom House (1817) still standing. It has since served as a shoe shop, a laundry, a restaurant, a pawn shop, a shell shop, and more. In the distance is the 1740 Clagett-Hart House. Once owned by Noah Parker, locals called it ‘Noah’s Ark.” The building was razed for a bank parking lot in the middle 20th century. It is now the unique Brick Market at 60 Penhallow Street.
If you clicked on any of those links, for a moment, you saw this old town by the sea as I see it—frighteningly in flux, warmly familiar, and endlessly interesting. All things must pass, the late George Harrison reminded us. Amid a wild and often scary 24-hour news cycle, with only milliseconds of my time left on Earth, I find that notion comforting.
(c) 2026 J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved.
Portland Burned, Portsmouth Spared in 1775