Honoring History is a Moving Experience

What does honoring history mean? Are we merely showing respect for the past? Will a speech and a ceremony do? Is a historic marker required, or is a monument needed? Can we just borrow a few architectural themes from an earlier building and glue them onto a new one? Or does the honor go deeper, as when we fulfill a legal promise by honoring a contract? How much do we owe the past? How much honor is enough honor?

In the case of the controversial McIntyre Building on Daniel Street in Portsmouth, for example, are we off the hook if the developer names 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?

And where, I wonder, does history live? We revere battlefields where people died long after the bodies 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, too, 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 and what does it say? I don’t know. I’m asking.

To make matters even more confusing, Portsmouth loves to move its historic buildings around town. 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.

Copyright 2018 by J. Dennis Robinson