The house of Colonel Langdon, on Pleasant Street, is an excellent sample of the solid and 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 less with her than her husband, in whose favor I was prejudiced from knowing that he had displayed great courage and 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 . Years , 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 appearance as you approach it over the tessellated marble walk. A hundred or two feet on either side of the gate, and on the street, is a small square building of brick, one story in height—probably the porter’s 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 air of a well-preserved beau of the ancien regime. The Langdon mansion was owned and long occupied by the late . 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 commonplace enough at the date of Washington’s visit; time and association have given them a 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 halls and carven staircases, their 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 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 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 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 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 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 , 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 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 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 nearly upright, like those ladders by which one reaches the upper of a modern house. The principal rooms are paneled to the ceiling, and have large open chimney-places, with the of Dutch files. In one of the 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 antlers, presented to Macpheadris by his red friends, are hanging in the lower hall.
By 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 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 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 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 . (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 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 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 electricity. The Warner House has another claim on the good-will of the visitor—it is not known that George Washington ever slept there.
The same assertion cannot be made on connection with the old yellow barracks 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 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 old ladies in the newspapers, who have all their 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 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 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 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 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 which are usually seen over the doors and windows of the more prominent houses of that . 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, the sad 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 cloth, and high-heeled 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 passengers they often were. Most of the chief 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 between the colonies and the mother country, it was in a back room of the tavern that the 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 . The Sons of Liberty had long watched with eyes the secret sessions of the Tories in Master Stavers’s tavern, and one morning the quietly began cutting down the post which supported the . Mr. Stavers, who seems not to have been himself, but the cause of
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