New Hampshire’s Historic Seacoast

NEW HAMPSHIRE’S HISTORIC SEACOAST
Eva A. Speare, 1969
64-page booklet

There have been dozens guides to historic Seacoast, New Hampshire, starting with a fragile pocket-sized 1873 volume by Sarah Haven Foster. These tourism publications range from heavily illustrated hardcovers to a booklet the size of a large postage stamp. Back in the ’90s, I spent a costly year creating a videotaped guide to more than 100 local destinations. VHS was a bad investment.

It’s impossible to write about old New Hampshire without bumping into Eva A. Speare (1875-1972), a prolific teller of Granite State tales. Speare was wrapping up her nearly 100-year career just as I was getting mine off the ground. We never met, but her influence is still felt through her many well-researched and highly readable books and her columns on New Hampshire history for the Manchester Union Leader. Think Fritz Wetherbee in drag. OK, strike that image.

Speare spent most of her days in Plymouth, New Hampshire, so she was not a true Seacoaster. She was a teacher, author and an active member of women’s groups and her husband was a superintendent of schools. Speare is best known for the book, “Stories of New Hampshire,”a collection of columns she wrote while in her 90s. The loving introduction to the book is by none other than the crusty publisher and editor William Loeb.

So imagine my surprise to discover this glossy 64-page booklet from 1967 titled “New Hampshire’s Historic Seacoast” by Eva Speare. Having penned a couple thousand articles on the topic, I was intrigued. Speare writes that she grew up near the Seacoast (although she doesn’t say where) in the days of horse-drawn wagons. Her memories, despite the decades, were vivid.

Her little guide hits all the high points including Portsmouth’s historic house museums, the “sunken forest” in Rye, and the fort at New Castle. Strawbery Banke Museum had just opened two years earlier, and Speare stopped by to visit its first president, Portsmouth librarian Dorothy Vaughan. Vaughan was, at that time, filled with dreams of building a Colonial-era replica of downtown Portsmouth that never came to pass.

Speare loved folk tales and, understandably, was drawn to stories more myth than fact. She fell for the imagined viking “runes” on a rock in Hampton and for trumped-up tales of a visit by Erik the Red. She got details of the 1623 arrival of the Thompson family wrong and waxed poetic about pirates who, all evidence suggests, did not bury gobs of treasure at the rocky Isles of Shoals.

But despite her rose-colored view, Speare got the Seacoast right. And pretty much every historic attraction she mentioned in her booklet is still where she left it half a century later. When people tell me the region has destroyed its historic charm, I say baloney. We are superb stewards of our Seacoast heritage and Speare’s folksy guide still lights the way.

Copyright J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved.