Authors:
Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
December 1995 | Volume 46, Issue 8
Authors:
Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
December 1995 | Volume 46, Issue 8
The days leading up to Christmas in the old New Hampshire coastal town of Portsmouth have a refreshing quality, even an astringent one at times. And on a weekend’s visit you won’t be forced back into a specific—and sentimentalized—era. At the annual Candlelight Stroll hosted by Strawbery Banke, Portsmouth’s thriving restoration, three hundred years tend to bump up against one another. This is by design, as the curators work to demonstrate the varying ways in which New Englanders of many centuries experienced Christmas.
The holiday we now tend to envelop in song and glitter and an abundance of gifts dates back no farther than the mid-nineteenth century. The Puritans (later called Congregationalists) actively disapproved of Christmas, or at best ignored it. Several of the earliest houses at Strawbery Banke show that their inhabitants saw December 25 as simply a day for business as usual, as a gathering of quotations found at the 1780s Wheelwright House makes clear. “Happened to think that this day is Christmas,” a teacher wrote in his diary in 1828, “but seeing none of my scholars take note of it, I thought if I did, I should appear rather odd, & so I let it pass.”
Strawbery Banke is the name the first English settlers gave this place in 1630, honoring its lush and fruitful setting along the Piscataqua River (the town took its present name in 1653). The restoration’s ten acres overlooking the waterfront occupy this oldest section, with forty-two buildings (most built between 1695 to 1810) clustered around Puddle Dock, now a central green but until well into this century an inlet of the river that bristled with wharves and storehouses. About a dozen houses remain open for special winter events; some contain period furnishings, while others function as galleries and crafts shops.
The events, held two weekends in December, begin on Friday afternoons and end each evening at nine. As night falls, the grounds are lit by flickering candles encased in 1100 glass lanterns set along dirt paths. Bonfires flare on Puddle Dock common, and visitors tour the grounds in horse-drawn carriages or scurry from the cold night air into the welcome of ancient houses still warm with the lives of their first owners. Some of these early inhabitants were extremely rich merchants and lawyers; others were artisans and laborers. All lived in egalitarian proximity. Now, a century or two later, the gentle notes of a dulcimer drift from the window of the pre-Revolutionary Pitt Tavern and then are momentarily lost when a helmeted air-raid warden shouts, “Lights out! Don’t you people know there’s a blackout?” At that moment, over the rooftops of Strawbery Banke, 1800 and 1942 meet.
Today’s meticulous restoration was a long time building. It is celebrated now as a triumph of the nascent preservation movement of the 1950s, but at first it had to endure all the perils and near disasters of any pioneer effort. The city that had grown around Strawbery Banke