WHEN Washington visited Portsmouth in 1789 he was not much impressed by
the architecture of the little town that had stood by him so stoutly in
the struggle for independence. “There are some good houses,” he
writes, in a diary kept that year during a tour through Connecticut,
Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, “among which Colonel Langdon’s may
be esteemed the first; but in general they are indifferent, and almost
entirely of wood. On wondering at this, as the country is full of stone
and good clay for bricks, I was told that on account of the fogs and
damp they deemed them wholesomer, and for that reason preferred wood
buildings.”
The house of Colonel Langdon, on Pleasant Street, is an excellent sample
of the solid and dignified abodes which our great-grandsires had the
sense to build. The art of their construction seems to have been a lost
art these fifty years. Here Governor John Langdon resided from 1782
until the time of his death in 1819--a period during which many an
illustrious man passed between those two white pillars that support the
little balcony over the front door; among the rest Louis Philippe and
his brothers, the Ducs de Montpensier and Beaujolais, and the Marquis de
Chastellus, a major-general in the French army, serving under the Count
de Rochambeau, whom he accompanied from France to the States in 1780.
The journal of the marquis contains this reference to his host: “After
dinner we went to drink tea with Mr. Langdon. He is a handsome man, and
of noble carriage; he has been a member of Congress, and is now one
of the first people of the country; his house is elegant and well
furnished, and the apartments admirably well wainscoted” (this reads
like Mr. Samuel Pepys); “and he has a good manuscript chart of the
harbor of Portsmouth. Mrs. Langdon, his wife, is young, fair, and
tolerably handsome, but I conversed less with her than her husband, in
whose favor I was prejudiced from knowing that he had displayed great
courage and patriotism at the time of Burgoynes’s expedition.”
It was at the height of the French Revolution that the three sons of the
Due d’Orleans were entertained at the Langdon mansion. Years afterward,
when Louis Philippe was on the throne of France, he inquired of a
Portsmouth lady presented at his court if the mansion of ce brave
Gouverneur Langdon was still in existence.
The house stands back a decorous distance from the street, under
the shadows of some gigantic oaks or elms, and presents an imposing
appearance as you approach it over the tessellated marble walk. A
hundred or two feet on either side of the gate, and abutting on
the street, is a small square building of brick, one story in
height--probably the porter’s lodge and tool-house of former days. There
is a large fruit garden attached to the house, which is in excellent
condition, taking life comfortably, and having the complacent air of a
well-preserved beau of the ancien regime. The Langdon mansion was
owned and long occupied by the late Rev. Dr. Burroughs, for a period of
forty-seven years the esteemed rector or St. John’s Church.
At the other end of Pleasant Street is another notable house, to which
we shall come by and by. Though President Washington found Portsmouth
but moderately attractive from an architectural point of view, the
visitor of to-day, if he have an antiquarian taste, will find himself
embarrassed by the number of localities and buildings that appeal to his
interest. Many of these buildings were new and undoubtedly commonplace
enough at the date of Washington’s visit; time and association have
given them a quaintness and a significance which now make their
architecture a question of secondary importance.
One might spend a fortnight in Portsmouth exploring the nooks and
corners over which history has thrown a charm, and by no means exhaust
the list. I cannot do more than attempt to describe--and that very
briefly--a few of the typical old houses. On this same Pleasant Street
there are several which we must leave unnoted, with their spacious
halls and carven staircases, their antiquated furniture and old silver
tankards and choice Copleys. Numerous examples of this artist’s best
manner are to be found here. To live in Portsmouth without possessing a
family portrait done by Copley is like living in Boston without having
an ancestor in the old Granary Burying-Ground. You can exist, but you
cannot be said to flourish. To make this statement smooth, I will remark
that every one in Portsmouth has a Copley--or would have if a fair
division were made.
In the better sections of the town the houses are kept in such excellent
repair, and have so smart an appearance with their bright green blinds
and freshly painted woodwork, that you are likely to pass many an old
landmark without suspecting it. Whenever you see a house with a gambrel
roof, you may be almost positive that the house is at least a
hundred years old, for the gambrel roof went out of fashion after the
Revolution.
On the corner of Daniel and Chapel streets stands the oldest brick
building in Portsmouth--the Warner House. It was built in 1718 by
Captain Archibald Macpheadris, a Scotchman, as his name indicates, a
wealthy merchant, and a member of the King’s Council. He was the chief
projector of one of the earliest iron-works established in America.
Captain Macpheadris married Sarah Wentworth, one of the sixteen children
of Governor John Wentworth, and died in 1729, leaving a daughter, Mary,
whose portrait, with that of her mother, painted by the ubiquitous
Copley, still hangs in the parlor of this house, which is not known by
the name of Captain Macpheadris, but by that of his son-in-law, Hon.
Jonathan Warner, a member of the King’s Council until the revolt of the
colonies. “We well recollect Mr. Warner,” says Mr. Brewster, writing in
1858, “as one of the last of the cocked hats. As in a vision of early
childhood he is still before us, in all the dignity of the aristocratic
crown officers. That broad-backed, long-skirted brown coat, those
small-clothes and silk stockings, those silver buckles, and that
cane--we see them still, although the life that filled and moved them
ceased half a century ago.”
The Warner House, a three-story building with gambrel roof and luthern
windows, is as fine and substantial an exponent of the architecture of
the period as you are likely to meet with anywhere in New England. The
eighteen-inch walls are of brick brought from Holland, as were also many
of the materials used in the building--the hearth-stones, tiles,
etc. Hewn-stone underpinnings were seldom adopted in those days; the
brick-work rests directly upon the solid walls of the cellar. The
interior is rich in paneling and wood carvings about the mantel-shelves,
the deep-set windows, and along the cornices. The halls are wide and
long, after a by-gone fashion, with handsome staircases, set at an easy
angle, and not standing nearly upright, like those ladders by which one
reaches the upper chambers of a modern house. The principal rooms are
paneled to the ceiling, and have large open chimney-places, adorned with
the quaintest of Dutch files. In one of the parlors of the Warner House
there is a choice store of family relics--china, silver-plate, costumes,
old clocks, and the like. There are some interesting paintings, too--not
by Copley this time. On a broad space each side of the hall windows, at
the head of the staircase, are pictures of two Indians, life size. They
are probably portraits of some of the numerous chiefs with whom Captain
Macphaedris had dealings, for the captain was engaged in the fur as
well as in the iron business. Some enormous elk antlers, presented to
Macpheadris by his red friends, are hanging in the lower hall.
By mere chance, thirty or forty years ago, some long-hidden paintings
on the walls of this lower hall were brought to light. In repairing the
front entry it became necessary to remove the paper, of which four or
five layers had accumulated. A one place, where several coats had peeled
off cleanly, a horse’s hoof was observed by a little girl of the family.
The workman then began removing the paper carefully; first the legs,
then the body of a horse with a rider were revealed, and the astonished
paper-hanger presently stood before a life-size representation of
Governor Phipps on his charger. The workman called other persons to
his assistance, and the remaining portions of the wall were speedily
stripped, laying bare four or five hundred square feet covered with
sketches in color, landscapes, views of unknown cities, Biblical scenes,
and modern figure-pieces, among which was a lady at a spinning-wheel.
Until then no person in the land of the living had had any knowledge
of those hidden pictures. An old dame of eighty, who had visited at the
house intimately ever since her childhood, all but refused to believe
her spectacles (though Supply Ham made them(1.)) when brought face to
face with the frescoes. (1. In the early part of this century, Supply
Ham was the leading optician and watchmaker of Portsmouth.)
The place is rich in bricabrac, but there is nothing more curious that
these incongruous printings, clearly the work of a practiced hand.
Even the outside of the old edifice is not without its interest for an
antiquarian. The lightening-rod which protects the Warner House to-day
was put up under Benjamin Franklin’s own supervision in 1762--such at
all events is the credited tradition--and is supposed to be the first
rod put up in New Hampshire. A lightening-rod “personally conducted”
by Benjamin Franklin ought to be an attractive object to even the least
susceptible electricity. The Warner House has another imperative claim
on the good-will of the visitor--it is not positively known that George
Washington ever slept there.
The same assertion cannot be made on connection with the old yellow
barracks situated in the southwest corner of Court and Atkinson streets.
Famous old houses seem to have an intuitive perception of the value of
corner lots. If it is a possible thing, they always set themselves down
on the most desirable spots. It is beyond a doubt that Washington slept
not only one night, but several nights, under this roof; for this was
a celebrated tavern previous and subsequent to the War of Independence,
and Washington made it his headquarters during his visit to Portsmouth
in 1797. When I was a boy I knew an old lady--not one of the
preposterous old ladies in the newspapers, who have all their faculties
unimpaired, but a real old lady, whose ninety-nine years were beginning
to tell on her--who had known Washington very well. She was a girl in
her teens when he came to Portsmouth. The President was the staple of
her conversation during the last ten years of her life, which she passed
in the Stavers House, bedridden; and I think those ten years were in a
manner rendered short and pleasant to the old gentlewoman by the memory
of a compliment to her complexion which Washington probably never paid
to it.
The old hotel--now a very unsavory tenement-house--was built by John
Tavers, innkeeper, in 1770, who planted in front of the door a tall
post, from which swung the sign of the Earl of Halifax. Stavers had
previously kept an inn of the same name on Queen, now State Street.
It is a square three-story building, shabby and dejected, giving no hint
of the really important historical associations that cluster about it.
At the time of its erection it was no doubt considered a rather grand
structure, for buildings of three stories were rare in Portsmouth. Even
in 1798, of the six hundred and twenty-six dwelling houses of which the
town boasted, eighty-six were of one story, five hundred and twenty-four
were of two stories, and only sixteen of three stories. The Stavers inn
has the regulation gambrel roof, but is lacking in those wood ornaments
which are usually seen over the doors and windows of the more prominent
houses of that epoch. It was, however, the hotel of the period.
That same worn doorstep upon which Mr. O’Shaughnessy now stretches
himself of a summer afternoon, with a short clay pipe stuck between
his lips, and his hat crushed down on his brows, revolving the sad
vicissitude of things--that same doorstep has been pressed by the feet
of generals and marquises and grave dignitaries upon whom depended the
destiny of the States--officers in gold lace and scarlet cloth, and
high-heeled belles in patch, powder, and paduasoy. At this door the
Flying Stage Coach, which crept from Boston, once a week set down its
load of passengers--and distinguished passengers they often were. Most
of the chief celebrities of the land, before and after the secession of
the colonies, were the guests of Master Stavers, at the sign of the Earl
of Halifax.
While the storm was brewing between the colonies and the mother country,
it was in a back room of the tavern that the adherents of the crown met
to discuss matters. The landlord himself was a amateur loyalist,
and when the full cloud was on the eve of breaking he had an early
intimation of the coming tornado. The Sons of Liberty had long watched
with sullen eyes the secret sessions of the Tories in Master Stavers’s
tavern, and one morning the patriots quietly began cutting down the post
which supported the obnoxious emblem. Mr. Stavers, who seems not to have
been belligerent himself, but the cause of belligerence in others, sent
out his black slave with orders to stop proceedings. The negro, who was
armed with an axe, struck but a single blow and disappeared. This blow
fell upon the head of Mark Noble; it did not kill him, but left him an
insane man till the day of his death, forty years afterward. A furious
mob at once collected, and made an attack on the tavern, bursting in
the doors and shattering every pane of glass in the windows. It was only
through the intervention of Captain John Langdon, a warm and popular
patriot, that the hotel was saved from destruction.
In the mean while Master Stavers had escaped through the stables in
the rear. He fled to Stratham, where he was given refuge by his friend
William Pottle, a most appropriately named gentleman, who had supplied
the hotel with ale. The excitement blew over after a time, and Stavers
was induced to return to Portsmouth. He was seized by the Committee of
Safety, and lodged in Exeter jail, when his loyalty, which had really
never been very high, went down below zero; he took the oath of
allegiance, and shortly after his released reopened the hotel. The
honest face of William Pitt appeared on the repentant sign, vice Earl
of Halifax, ignominiously removed, and Stavers was himself again. In the
state records is the following letter from poor Noble begging for the
enlargement of John Stavers:--
PORTSMOUTH, February 3, 1777. To the Committee of Safety of the Town of
Exeter: GENTLEMEN,--As I am informed that Mr. Stivers is in confinement
in gaol upon my account contrary to my desire, for when I was at Mr.
Stivers a fast day I had no ill nor ment none against the Gentleman but
by bad luck or misfortune I have received a bad Blow but it is so well
that I hope to go out in a day or two. So by this gentlemen of the
Committee I hope you will release the gentleman upon my account. I am
yours to serve. MARK NOBLE, A friend to my country.
From that period until I know not what year the Stavers House prospered.
It was at the sign of the William Pitt that the officers of the French
fleet boarded in 1782, and hither came the Marquis Lafayette, all
the way from Providence, to visit them. John Hancock, Elbridge Gerry,
Rutledge, and other signers of the Declaration sojourned here at various
times. It was here General Knox--“that stalwart man, two officers
in size and three in lungs”--was wont to order his dinner, and in a
stentorian voice compliment Master Stavers on the excellence of his
larder. One day--it was at the time of the French Revolution--Louis
Philippe and his two brothers applied at the door of the William Pitt
for lodgings; but the tavern was full, and the future king, with his
companions, found comfortable quarters under the hospitable roof of
Governor Langdon in Pleasant Street.
A record of the scenes, tragic and humorous, that have been enacted
within this old yellow house on the corner would fill a volume. A vivid
picture of the social and public life of the old time might be painted
by a skillful hand, using the two Earl of Halifax inns for a background.
The painter would find gay and sombre pigments ready mixed for his
palette, and a hundred romantic incidents waiting for his canvas. One
of these romantic episodes has been turned to very pretty account
by Longfellow in the last series of The Tales of a Wayside Inn--the
marriage of Governor Benning Wentworth with Martha Hilton, a sort of
second edition of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid.
Martha Hilton was a poor girl, whose bare feet and ankles and scant
drapery when she was a child, and even after she was well in the bloom
of her teens, used to scandalize good Dame Stavers, the innkeeper’s
wife. Standing one afternoon in the doorway of the Earl of Halifax, (1.
The first of the two hotels bearing that title. Mr. Brewster commits
a slight anachronism in locating the scene of this incident in Jaffrey
Street, now Court. The Stavers House was not built until the year of
Governor Benning Wentworth’s death. Mr. Longfellow, in the poem, does
not fall into the same error.
“One hundred years ago, and something more,
In Queen Street, Portsmouth, at her tavern door,
Neat as a pin, and blooming as a rose,
Stood Mistress Stavers in her furbelows.”)
Dame Stavers took occasion to remonstrate with the sleek-limbed and
lightly draped Martha, who chanced to be passing the tavern, carrying a
pail of water, in which, as the poet neatly says, “the shifting sunbeam
danced.”
“You Pat! you Pat!” cried Mrs. Stavers severely; “why do you go looking
so? You should be ashamed to be seen in the street.”
“Never mind how I look,” says Miss Martha, with a merry laugh, letting
slip a saucy brown shoulder out of her dress; “I shall ride in my
chariot yet, ma’am.”
Fortunate prophecy! Martha went to live as servant with Governor
Wentworth at his mansion at Little Harbor, looking out to sea. Seven
years passed, and the “thin slip of a girl,” who promised to be no great
beauty, had flowered into the loveliest of women, with a lip like a
cherry and a cheek like a tea-rose--a lady by instinct, one of Nature’s
own ladies. The governor, a lonely widower, and not too young, fell in
love with his fair handmaid. Without stating his purpose to any one,
Governor Wentworth invited a number of friends (among others the Rev.
Arthur Brown) to dine with him at Little Harbor on his birthday. After
the dinner, which was a very elaborate one, was at an end, and the
guests were discussing their tobacco-pipes, Martha Hilton glided into
the room, and stood blushing in front of the chimney-place. She was
exquisitely dressed, as you may conceive, and wore her hair three
stories high. The guests stared at each other, and particularly at her,
and wondered. Then the governor, rising from his seat,
“Played slightly with his ruffles, then looked down,
And said unto the Reverend Arthur Brown:
‘This is my birthday; it shall likewise be
My wedding-day; and you shall marry me!’”
The rector was dumfounded, knowing the humble footing Martha had held
in the house, and could think of nothing cleverer to say than, “To whom,
your excellency?” which was not cleaver at all.
“To this lady,” replied the governor, taking Martha Hilton by the
hand. The Rev. Arthur Brown hesitated. “As the Chief Magistrate of New
Hampshire I command you to marry me!” cried the choleric old governor.
And so it was done; and the pretty kitchen-maid became Lady Wentworth,
and did ride in her own chariot. She would not have been a woman if she
had not taken an early opportunity to drive by Staver’s hotel!
Lady Wentworth had a keen appreciation of the dignity of her new
station, and became a grand lady at once. A few days after her marriage,
dropping her ring on the floor, she languidly ordered her servant to
pick it up. The servant, who appears to have had a fair sense of humor,
grew suddenly near-sighted, and was unable to the ring until Lady
Wentworth stooped and placed her ladyship’s finger upon it. She turned
out a faultless wife, however; and Governor Wentworth at his death,
which occurred in 1770, signified his approval of her by leaving her his
entire estate. She married again without changing name, accepting the
hand, and what there was of the heart, of Michael Wentworth, a retired
colonel of the British army, who came to this country in 1767. Colonel
Wentworth (not connected, I think, with the Portsmouth branch of
Wentworths) seems to have been of a convivial turn of mind. He shortly
dissipated his wife’s fortune in high living, and died abruptly in New
York--it was supposed by his own hand. His last words--a quite unique
contribution to the literature of last words--were, “I have had my
cake, and ate it,” which showed that the colonel within his own modest
limitations was a philosopher.
The seat of Governor Wentworth at Little Harbor--a pleasant walk from
Market Square--is well worth a visit. Time and change have laid their
hands more lightly on this rambling old pile than on any other of the
old homes in Portsmouth. When you cross the threshold of the door
you step into the colonial period. Here the Past seems to have halted
courteously, waiting for you to catch up with it. Inside and outside the
Wentworth mansion remains nearly as the old governor left it; and though
it is no longer in the possession of the family, the present owners, in
their willingness to gratify the decent curiosity of strangers, show a
hospitality which has always characterized the place.
The house is an architectural freak. The main building--if it is the
main building--is generally two stories in height, with irregular wings
forming three sides of a square which opens in the water. It is, in
brief, a cluster of whimsical extensions that look as if they had
been built at different periods, which I believe was not the case. The
mansion was completed in 1750. It originally contained fifty-two rooms;
a portion of the structure was removed about half a century ago, leaving
forty-five apartments. The chambers were connected in the oddest manner,
by unexpected steps leading up or down, and capricious little passages
that seem to have been the unhappy afterthoughts of the architect. But
it is a mansion on a grand scale, and with a grand air. The cellar was
arranged for the stabling of a troop of thirty horse in times of
danger. The council-chamber, where for many years all questions of vital
importance to the State were discussed, is a spacious, high-studded
room, finished in the richest style of the last century. It is said that
the ornamentation of the huge mantel, carved with knife and chisel,
cost the workman a year’s constant labor. At the entrance to the
council-chamber are still the racks for the twelve muskets of the
governor’s guard--so long ago dismissed!
Some valuable family portraits adorn the walls here, among which is a
fine painting-yes, by our friend Copley--of the lovely Dorothy Quincy,
who married John Hancock, and afterward became Madam Scott. This lady
was a niece of Dr. Holme’s “Dorothy Q.” Opening on the council-chamber
is a large billiard-room; the billiard-table is gone, but an ancient
spinnet, with the prim air of an ancient maiden lady, and of a wheezy
voice, is there; and in one corner stands a claw-footed buffet, near
which the imaginative nostril may still detect a faint and tantalizing
odor of colonial punch. Opening also on the council-chamber are several
tiny apartments, empty and silent now, in which many a close rubber has
been played by illustrious hands. The stillness and loneliness of the
old house seem saddest here. The jeweled fingers are dust, the merry
laughs have turned themselves into silent, sorrowful phantoms, stealing
from chamber to chamber. It is easy to believe in the traditional ghost
that haunts the place--
“A jolly place in times of old,
But something ails it now!”
The mansion at Little Harbor is not the only historic house that bears
the name of Wentworth. On Pleasant Street, at the head of Washington
Street, stands the abode of another colonial worthy, Governor John
Wentworth, who held office from 1767 down to the moment when the
colonies dropped the British yoke as if it had been the letter H. For
the moment the good gentleman’s occupation was gone. He was a royalist
of the most florid complexion. In 1775, a man named John Fenton, and
ex-captain in the British army, who had managed to offend the Sons of
Liberty, was given sanctuary in this house by the governor, who refused
to deliver the fugitive to the people. The mob planted a small cannon
(unloaded) in front of the doorstep and threatened to open fire if
Fenton were not forthcoming. He forth-with came. The family vacated
the premises via the back-yard, and the mob entered, doing considerable
damage. The broken marble chimney-place still remains, mutely protesting
against the uncalled-for violence. Shortly after this event the governor
made his way to England, where his loyalty was rewarded first with a
governorship and then with a pension of L500. He was governor of Nova
Scotia from 1792 to 1800, and died in Halifax in 1820. This house is
one of the handsomest old dwellings in the town, and promises to
outlive many of its newest neighbors. The parlor has undergone no change
whatever since the populace rushed into it over a century ago. The
furniture and adornments occupy their original positions and the plush
on the walls has not been replaced by other hangings. In the hall--deep
enough for the traditional duel of baronial romance--are full-length
portraits of the several governors and sundry of their kinsfolk.
There is yet a third Wentworth house, also decorated with the shade of
a colonial governor--there were three Governors Wentworth--but we shall
pass it by, though out of no lack of respect for that high official
personage whose commission was signed by Joseph Addison, Esq., Secretary
of State under George I.