By J. Dennis Robinson
Since the auction website appeared 30 years ago, I’ve purchased about 700 items on eBay, the auction website. Almost all were for research on my articles and books about local history. Back then, I got a few treasures–an 1847 letter written by 12-year-old Celia Thaxter, a dor-sized poster for a Louis de Rochemont movie, and a hand-painted tin sign for John Paul Jones cigars.
My budget cap is around $25 and I don’t resell artifacts. All of my purchases will be gifted to history groups someday. I still get a daily email update listing newly posted items related to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. And boy, have the choices gone downhill. Did we buy all the good stuff when it was cheaper?
Today, for example, 36 new Portsmouth-related items are up for auction. Most of the offers are for postcards. The group pictured here all come from a pack of early 20th-century cards. They illustrate exhibition rooms from the opening of the city’s first history museum. The Thomas Bailey Aldrich Memorial on Court Street opened in 1908 to honor the then-famous poet and novelist who had lived there briefly as a boy with his grandparents. That was in the 1840s.
In 1870, Aldrich published his best-known book, The Story of a Bad Boy. The novel, a thinly-veiled memoir, recounts the youthful adventures of Tom Bailey during his time in Portsmouth. Largely ignored by his aging Grampa Nutter, Tom got into trouble with gunpowder, cannons, fire, arrows, and firecrackers. He ran away from home, got into fights, and joined in epic snowball battles. Aldrich’s friend Mark Twain was in town for the dedication.
The museum recreated the Nutter House as it appeared in the novel. It was a big hit back when most New England kids read the book. But while bad boys Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn thrived, Tom Bailey faded from emory. Today the Aldrich House is among preserved buildings on the 10-acre Strawbery Banke Museum campus.
But back to eBay. The postcards pictured here came in a souvenir pack of 12 colorized cards, each depicting a space in the museum. I paid $5 for a pack back around 1998 and posted them all on my history website. Back in the 20th century, the auction site was a daily excitement of rare books, posters, souvenir items, strange artifacts, early newspapers, photo albums, vintage toys, curious documents, you name it. Once I bid on a cluster of human hairs reportedly clipped from the corpse of John Paul Jones when his mummified body was exhumed in Paris in 1905. I bid $25. They went for $1,500. I won a farmer’s diary that mentioned the Smuttynose Island murders of 1873 and a photo of Louis Wagner the killer. I got the locking mechanism from an old Portsmouth jail cell and a signed photograph of James Earl Jones who played alien abductee Barney Hill in the 1975 movie “The UFO Incident.” All kinds of cool stuff.
But those treasures, as you can see, are as rare as hen’s teeth these days. Prices are up, interest is down, and the inventory is meh. But I keep watching. Somewhere there’s an untouched attic with a trunk full of who-knows-what, and I’ve got another $25 burning a hole in my pocket.
© 2025 J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved.
