News that the Board of Adjustment has given the first green light to the potential sale and revival of the Tobias Lear House reminded me of this photograph. Someone took it from behind my back as I waas presenting a gift to city historian Dorothy Vaughan in 1999. Dorothy had been the go-to history contact for 50 years or more at the time and, while it was an unpaid job, I was in the running.
The photo was taken in the main room of the Tobias Lear House where Dr. Dorothy Vaughan (her degree was honorary since she never attended college) was celebrating her 95th birthday. A large group had gathered in the room that, legend says, George Washington met the mother of his secretary Tobias Lear. Mayor Evelyn Sirrell, who was seated to Dorothy’s left, had just given her the symbolic key to the city of Portsmouth.
I presented Dorothy with the sheet music to a song about Portsmouth, printed in 1923, with lyrics by the “blind poet” Clara Lynn, whom Dorothy had known decades ago. She seemed pleased with the offering. Outspoken to the end, she died in 2004 at age 99.
Dorothy Vaughan was 12 years old in 1917 when her father took a job at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and moved the family from Penacook, N.H., to Portsmouth. She was fascinated by the old houses and the stories of the wealthy aristocratic families that once lived here. In her 53 years as a city librarian, “Miss Vaughan” became a key source for information about local history. As a preservation advocate, she helped found Strawbery Banke Museum and served as its first volunteer president. In 1969, Dorothy, five years after the museum opened, was interviewed by history professor Charles Hosmer for his classic study “Preservation Comes of Age.” Her words seem apt today.
“Every time they tore a house down or anything was destroyed, it simply broke me all up, even though I was just a young girl,” Vaughan told Hosmer in a taped interview. “I couldn’t bear to have any of Portsmouth destroyed, or broken up, or pulled apart.”
“The people of Portsmouth have lived here all these years,” she said. “They’ve lived with these old houses, and they’ve meant very little to them. And the people that come in from the outside and see them, the carpetbaggers like myself … have come in and seen the beauty here and wanted to do something about it.”
Almost no one in town cared about history in the 1930s and ’40s, Vaughan said in the rarely seen interview. But in 1958, she helped convince local politicians and businessmen that the oldest buildings in the 10-acre site, formerly Puddle Dock, should be preserved.
“We’ve fought bloody battles,” she told Hosmer in 1969, “and we’ve almost gone under time and time and time again. And sometimes, I think that it was nothing, but sheer dedication and positive thinking that has brought Strawbery Banke Museum through, because we could have lost it so many, many times. But we wanted it so much – I wanted it so much – that I made other people think that they wanted it, too.”
Copyright J. Dennis Robinson
The Happy & Useful Life of W.H.Y. Hackett