At his retirement in 1922, the Rev. Alfred Gooding tallied up his score. He did not mean to sound vainglorious, he told his saddened parishioners at South Church on State Street. He simply loved facts.
And the facts were as follows: in 37 years as Portsmouth’s Unitarian minister, Gooding married 416 couples and conducted 619 funerals. He made about 9,500 calls to parishioners at their homes and at hospitals, for which he felt a great sense of happiness and personal reward. He preached 1,780 sermons and gave more than 200 public lectures. Most of those lectures focused on the history of his adopted city, the “Old Town by the Sea.”
Gooding was bookish from the start. Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1856, he graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1881. A classmate recalled that he was a “high scholar,” who was interested “entirely in the intellectual side of college life.” In other words, Gooding was no party animal.
After serving as pastor in Brunswick, Maine, Gooding was “called” to Portsmouth in 1884. His installation ceremony at the Greek revival-style stone church was a big event. The sanctuary was awash in floral arrangements. Gooding became only the eighth minister in a parish that traced its history back to 1715. His predecessors, including Samuel Haven, Nathan Parker, and Andrew Peabody had been important religious and political figures in town.
In the service of history
Gooding was enthralled by the colorful stories of New Hampshire’s only port. The city’s key historians, journalists Charles Brewster and Tobias (”Uncle Toby”) Miller were dead and Gooding, a compulsive scholar, soon became the go-to expert on Portsmouth’s past. In 1899, as the 20th century dawned, he organized “The Portsmouth Book,” featuring essays on the city’s historic houses, churches, taverns, wharves, libraries, fire societies, cottage hospital and more.
In 1917, the John Paul Jones House, just up State Street from the Unitarian Church, was nearly demolished. The Portsmouth Historical Society was formed to save the declining Colonial mansion, and Gooding volunteered his services as president of the fledgling group. In 1920, the first museum dedicated to preserving the city’s history opened, and Gooding gave the dedicatory speech.
The society will “do what it can,” he vowed, to preserve Portsmouth history from” the growing powers of commercialism.”
His mission was to spread knowledge about the historic city, to instill respect for traditions, and to foster “a real affection for the ancient things that make Portsmouth the most delightful of all early American towns.”
When Portsmouth celebrated its 300th anniversary in 1923, the Rev. Alfred Gooding gave the keynote address at The Music Hall. He did not mince words. “New Hampshire was first settled by English traders and fishermen who came over for the purpose of money-making,” Gooding told his audience. Portsmouth was no mythical shining city on a hill, founded by religious zealots. The Unitarian minister seemed to delight in reminding listeners that early Puritan church-goers attended droning daylong services on backless seats in frigid weather. Those who fell asleep in church or took tobacco on the Sabbath could be fined, pilloried on the stocks, or locked in a metal cage.
Gooding was also president of the Portsmouth Athenaeum, where he spent countless happy hours among the library’s books, early newspapers, and yellowing documents. His wife, the former Mabel Sise, was the daughter of John Sise, whose insurance company had originally owned the handsome Federal-style athenaeum building downtown. The minister also served as a trustee of the public library, raised scholarships for students, taught Sunday school, worked with the Cemetery Society, and local charitable groups.
A very good man
If Alfred Gooding committed a single misdeed during half a century in Portsmouth, no record of it has surfaced. “He occupied a place of esteem, affection, and influence among the people of that city,” one friend recalled. He was sincere, kind-hearted, and sympathetic. He was concerned for the welfare of everyone “regardless of their color or creed.”
Gooding often explained that his cheerful attitude came directly from his faith. “I believe in the Unitarian’s optimistic view of man as, not fallen, but imperfect, as involved in a process, not of decay, but of growth, as constantly progressing from lower to higher things,” he told his congregation. Gooding preferred to focus his efforts on the immediate daily things that were troubling his parishioners, rather than waste his energies on headline news. His guiding principle was the “Golden Rule” that he both followed and preached.
At his funeral in 1934 a fellow clergyman mounted, “Portsmouth has known many of the finest types of men, but today there has passed from us one of the dearest, respected, and honored of her adopted sons.”
Passing the torch
Although he was not a journalist, the Rev. Gooding filled the gap as town history writer between the era of Charles Brewster and the arrival of Raymond Brighton at the Portsmouth Herald. Gooding also inspired a girl who would go on to become a leading advocate for preservation in Portsmouth. Dorothy Vaughan was 12 years old in 1917 when her father took a job at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and moved the family from Penacook to Portsmouth. Vaughan worked as a page at the brick public library downtown, now Discover Portsmouth. During World War I she volunteered to roll bandages at the as-yet-unopened John Paul Jones House Museum. Like Gooding, she fell in love with the old buildings and romantic legends of her adopted city.
When visitors to the library had questions about Portsmouth history, they were directed to young Miss Vaughan. Dorothy would run to visit the Rev. Gooding, president of the historical society, who lived around the corner on Middle Street.
“He was quite a historian and quite an elderly man,” Vaughan recalled in a 1969 interview, when she too was a senior citizen. The two amateur historians sat on Gooding’s front steps, and he would answer her questions “in his long-winded way.” As Gooding delivered the facts, Vaughan said, “I would sop them up in my little spongy brain because I might need them someday.”
When Alfred Gooding died at age 78, Vaughan was bereft. “Heavens, what are we going to do now?” she recalled. “Who’s going to answer all these questions?”
Vaughan’s boss, librarian Hannah Fernald, pulled Dorothy aside. “Now, Mr. Gooding has gone, it’s up to you,” Fernald said. “You’ve got to stand on your own two feet.”
“And so from that time on,” Vaughan said, “I sort of dedicated myself to Portsmouth, to finding out the things that people wanted.”
Dorothy Vaughan died in 2004 at age 99 and the torch has since passed to others. Gooding’s name has faded, but his work survives in footnotes and occasional quotes, and in his hand-written sermons and published lectures. Summing up his work as a disciple of Portsmouth’s past, the Rev. Gooding liked to quote John Albee, whose history of the little town of New Castle appeared in 1884, the same year a young Harvard graduate preached his first sermon at South Church.
“I would rather be remembered in such a place,” Albee wrote, “than to be famous in ten cities.”
Copyright 2017 by J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved.
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