Just Wild About Hairy Ancestors

The ink was scarcely dry on last week’s column when I was confronted by an 1863-era albumen print of a bearded man in the streets of Portsmouth. The man is sitting in a one-horse carriage downtown at the corner of State and Pleasant streets. In the background is a chunk of the wooden building we all call the State Street Saloon that burned in April.

I had never seen that photo before. It’s in a private collection. And it does not show the brick “Daily Times” building next door that is still standing. So it doesn’t officially change my prediction that the surviving building was constructed around 1870, rather than 1850, as newspaper reports often suggest. But it gave me pause. We can now be pretty certain, assuming the date on the photo is correct, that the shorter, wooden, flat-roofed, Italianate buildings that became the saloon were built by the Civil War, even though they do not show up in an 1853 illustration.

Which got me thinking, first, how much fun it is, sometimes, to be a history detective. But also, it can be stressful. A rediscovered picture or letter or archaeological artifact can knock the best theory off its legs. My second thought was – who is the bearded guy in the carriage? And because I don’t want to go down another research rabbit hole, I decided to play it safe this week.

So I dug into my weird collection of unknown bearded men. Each of these dudes had his picture taken in downtown Portsmouth in the second half of the 19th century. The mutton chop man in the middle sat for Lafayette Newell. The others posed at the studio of the Davis Brothers. Early photos of anonymous people sell cheap, and I tend to pick them up at flea markets the way some people adopt stray cats.

Once in a rare while, I get lucky and can identify a lost soul through research. Astute readers may recall from an earlier article that the elder fellow in the upper right, the one with the turtle-neck beard, turned out to be Capt. Heman Eldredge, founder of Eldredge Brewery of Portsmouth. Okay, I’m pretty sure it’s him. But five minutes from now, I could change my mind.

Copyright J. Dennis Robinson