This Day in Portsmouth History

n 1907, a group at the North Church in Market Square published “An Historical Calendar of Portsmouth.” It must have been a herculean effort.

The book was an early version of the popular “This Day in History” websites with significant and insignificant local events listed daily from January through December. It’s the kind of idea that, halfway through the project, you wish you’d never started. You’ll find your free digital copy on Google Books.

A lot of the entries are fuzzy filler. According to the calendar, for example, in the first week of June 1603, Martin Pring first sailed up the PIscatqua River in 1603 in search of sassafras. In other news that week, the non-denominational chapel on Little Harbor Road opened (1903). Amos Toppan opened the first Portsmouth Sunday School (1838) with no division of “sex, sects, or complexions.” The provincial Assembly urged Gov. Benning Wentworth not to allow a theater to open in town (1762). And the Portsmouth Improvement Association held its first meeting (1903.)

Two events from the first week of June changed my life. In 1793, Charles Pierce launched his newspaper The Oracle of the Day. That paper became the Portsmouth Journal that was written, edited, and published for decades by Charles W. Brewster (1802-1869). Without him, I would not be with you today. Brewster assembled 80 of his history essays into a book that went on sale the first week of June in 1859. The second volume of Rambles About Portsmouth appeared after Brewster’s death and was published by his son Lewis.

Brewster’s “Rambles” are the gold standard for writers of Portsmouth history, a small cadre of historians who burn the midnight oil to exhume tales from the city’s past. Some of Brewster’s essays, heavy on genealogy, are like slogging through the Old Testament. But his wide range of topics offer us scattered bits of local history that might have been lost. Had these articles (about 160 in two volumes) not been bound into sturdy volumes, they too would have been lost amid decaying copies of the Portsmouth Journal.

And I might never have rediscovered “Rambles” had the two hard-to-find early volumes not been beautifully reprinted in 1971 and 1972 as a fundraiser for Theater by the Sea. That modern edition sparked this effort to publish, so far, roughly 2,500 articles (including this one) about the history of Portsmouth and the Piscataqua region.

The detail in this photograph above comes from a portrait of Charles Brewster by Charles Fenton, created around 1839. When the painting, rarely seen, was displayed at the Portsmouth Athenaeum a few years ago, library “keeper” Tom Hardiman penned the following description:

“Charles Brewster, the beloved author of Rambles About Portsmouth, worked for 43 years as the editor of a local newspaper, the Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics. Rambles was a compilation of historical articles previously published in the Journal. While much less reliable for strict adherence to documented fact than lawyer Nathaniel Adams’s Annals of Portsmouth (1823), the colorful and easily relatable stories in Brewster’s Rambles now frame much of our perception of Portsmouth’s past.”

“The artist Charles Fenton worked primarily in Boston and was a contributor to exhibitions at the Boston Athenaeum and the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association. With heavy local competition from more than 40 other portrait painters in Boston, Fenton followed numerous other painters into northern New England in search of clients. He placed advertisements in Portsmouth newspapers in the summers of 1838, 1839, 1840 and 1847. Charles Brewster is depicted proudly holding Volume I of his Portsmouth Journal, published in 1839. That very edition carried an editorial by Brewster noting: ‘Mr. Fenton–who gave so many specimens last year of accurate delineation … has again taken his former room in State Street. A better Portrait Painter has never visited Portsmouth.’ Fenton’s portraits of Brewster and his wife Mary were likely painted in payment for the advertising and to entice further sitters.”

Copyright J. Dennis Robinson