We Tried to Save the Murals

SEE the Gladys Brannigan WPA Mural feature

According to the late Harold “Whitey” Whitehouse, Jr. a Portsmouth resident from 1928, the four lost WPA-era murals at the Middle School were destroyed in the mid-1970s. As a member of the school board, Whitehouse was on the Joint Building Committee that elected, after much deliberation, to demolish the 1930s auditorium to make way for 13 new classrooms.

“We were upset, but there was no way we could save them,” Whitehouse said about the murals in 2017. “We had to do something. The building was bulging at the seams.” John Sullivan, who was on the school board for 20 years, says the pictures by Gladys Brannigan were painted on the wall, not on canvas as her WPA commission states. Although neither Sullivan nor Whitehouse actually witnessed the demolition, they were certain the murals could not have been salvaged. Readers who believe they have seen the murals in recent years, they say, must be mistaken. 

“I assure you that, being on the school board, if there was any way of storing or preserving those murals, we would have done it,” Sullivan said. Both men attended the Middle School in the 1930s and remember the murals vividly. 

Whitehouse was a boy scout at the time as shown in the Depression-era photo above. The second photo shows Whitehouse as a baby with his mother and grandmother. These photos appear in his 2008 memoir of growing up in Portsmouth entitled Home by Nine: The Real South End. Whitehouse joined the Navy at 17, worked 25 years at the Portsmouth Herald and served 12 years on the city council. According to Whitehouse, only 75 copies of his book remain on sale in local bookstores, and he currently has no plans to reprint. (Photos courtesy Harold Whitehouse) 

The neverending mural legend

In a recent feature, we focused on the four large murals that once hung in the auditorium of the Portsmouth Middle School. Painted on canvas by Gladys Brannigan as a WPA federal art project in 1936, the murals were later rolled up and removed. They are, at this writing, missing and considered lost. 
Portsmouth Herald readers suggested that the murals were stored in the New Franklin School and later burned in a fire. Two readers, however, say that the late florist and collector Leslie Clough somehow obtained the murals. Witnesses say Clough showed them large painted murals depicting George Washington and an “Indian raid.” Here are the other two murals. The first is Brannigan’s vision of John Paul Jones launching the sloop of war Ranger in 1777. The second shows Lafayette in Market Square in 1824. Have you seen these pictures? (Courtesy of Portsmouth Public Library)