In celebration of the 40th Market Square Day in 2017, let’s look back at a bustling day in downtown Portsmouth in 1853. This detailed illustration appeared that year in Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, an illustrated periodical published in Boston. For three dollars per year, readers enjoyed a publication chock full of engravings–” a record of the beautiful and useful in art.”
“The buildings are of brick, built in the old-fashioned style.” Gleason’s reported on Portsmouth, “which gives some parts of it a very antiquated appearance, but there are many well built and elegant mansions.” The July 23, 1853 issue also included detailed engravings of the Portsmouth Navy Yard, State Street, and a river view of the city from the North.
There were early photographers in Portsmouth by this time, but periodicals for the next few decades relied on engravings created by talented artists. This pre-Civil War image looks amazingly like the Market Square we know today, if you don’t count the horses, cattle, and ox carts.
Early copies of the illustration were hand-colored, but do not reproduce well. I scanned this image directly from an original copy of Gleason’s, yet the dark aging, textured paper, and tight engraving lines tend to muddy the details. With an hour of amateur Photoshopping, I managed to pull out sample details of a hay wagon and a team of cattle heading to market.
Other details, visible when magnified, show a horse cart piled high with logs and a man pushing a wooden wheelbarrow. An empty horse carriage waits under trees while three men stand in front of the Portsmouth Athenaeum. A mother hurries her son through the heart of the square. A stagecoach rushes in from Daniel Street, passing what is now Alie’s Jewelers when that building was four (now three) stories tall.
Copyright J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved.
Why They Called It Market Square