Two Worlds of Portsmouth Architecture

Well into the 20th century, residents of Portsmouth were often more inclined to tear down historic buildings than to restore them. Meanwhile, as early as the 1880s, architecture became a topic of academic courses in college. Students and teachers began studying surviving buildings in ancient seaport towns like Salem, Ipswich and Newburyport, Massachusetts, and Portsmouth.

The first attempt to define this city’s “built environment” may be found in a rarely seen collection of essays called “The Portsmouth Book,” (1899). The lead article, “The Architecture of Portsmouth,” was written by a Boston architect named R. Clipston Sturgis (1860-1951). And yes, his analysis was as stuffy as his name sounds.

Sturgis described Portsmouth as having a “dual life” represented by two types of architecture. The first type was the “old life” of the city, a long-dead era of grand homes and walled-in gardens. Sturgis had little to say about “primitive” early architecture, exemplified by the surviving 1664 Jackson House. He preferred the grand homes of wealthy merchants from the 1700s. The mansions that followed in the 1800s, Sturgis complained, were extravagant to the point of vulgarity.

For Sturgis, the other half of downtown Portsmouth was the “modern life.” This was the architecture of hotels, stables, schools, factories, commercial and multi-family buildings. Modern Portsmouth, he wrote in 1899, was “little in touch with the old, having scant sympathy with its point of view.”

Sturgis, like so many of us, was drawn to the Seacoast, both for scenery, history and architecture. He was among the Boston artists and intellectuals who summered in Portsmouth’s Little Harbor area. He eventually purchased and redesigned the 1700-era Martine Cottage. The booklet above is from the library of his son, Richard Clipston Sturgis Jr., also an architect, very likely designed by his sister, Dorothy Sturgis Harding.

Copyright J. Dennis Robinson