Architecture

John Paul Jones House, Portsmouth, NH

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The John Paul Jones House at the corner of Middle and State Streets in Portsmouth, around 1907. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

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The house in 2015:

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Like the nearby Buckminster House, this historic house is named for someone who only lived here for a few years, in this case Revolutionary War naval hero John Paul Jones.  Jones never actually owned the house, but he lived here as a boarder from 1781 to 1782.  The house was built in 1758 by Hopestill Cheswell, an African-American housewright who was responsible for constructing several other buildings in Portsmouth.  The original owners were Captain Gregory and Sarah Purcell, and following Gregory’s death in 1776, Sarah rented rooms to boarders until she died in 1783.

John Paul Jones rented the room on the second floor on the right-hand side of the building, living here while supervising construction of the USS America on nearby Badger’s Island.  The America was to be the US Navy’s first ship of the line, and the largest warship built in the United States to that point, and Jones was in line to be her first commanding officer.  However, shortly before the America was launched, the French ship of the line Magnifique was wrecked off the coast of Boston, so Congress voted to give the America to France as compensation, and as a gesture of appreciation.  Jones stayed in Portsmouth until the ship was completed, and although he never got to take command, it was probably a good thing, because she was in the French navy for just over three years before being scrapped, due to extensive dry rot caused by using green wood in the ship’s hurried construction.

Unlike the ship that he almost commanded, the house that he lived in still survives, over 250 years after the Purcells first moved in.  The house has a “For Sale” sign in the 1907 photo, and it would change hands at least one more time in 1919, when it was sold to the Portsmouth Historical Society.  Today, it is still owned by the Historical Society, and is open to the public for tours.

Buckminster House, Portsmouth, NH

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The Buckminster House, at the corner of Bridge and Islington Streets in Portsmouth, around 1907. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

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The house in 2015:

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It’s a little strange for a nearly 300-year-old house to be named after someone who lived in it for just two years, but this 1720 Georgian home is named for Revered Joseph Buckminster, the pastor of Portsmouth’s North Church from 1779 until his death in 1812.  When he moved in here in 1810, the house was already almost 100 years old; it had been built in 1720 by Daniel Warner, and later went through a series of owners before being purchased by Colonel Eliphalet Ladd in 1792.

Ladd died in 1806, and in 1810 his widow married Reverend Buckminster, thus giving the house its ultimate name.  It was later used as a boarding house, and sometime by the mid 19th century was the subject of an early form of historic preservation.  According to Rambles About Portsmouth, published in 1859, the then-current owner George Thomson “has shown excellent taste in carefully preserving its original exterior appearance.”  Thomson’s efforts seem to have paid off, because the 1907 photo shows a beautifully restored house that still continues to be well-preserved to this day, with minimal exterior changes.

County Jail, Lowell, Mass

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The Middlesex County Jail on Thorndike Street in Lowell, around 1908. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

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The building in 2015:

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It’s hard to find too many buildings with a more unusual combination of uses, but this building has seen it all over the past 159 years.  Opened as a jail in 1856, it could house just over 100 inmates, most of whom were serving relatively short sentences for minor crimes.  Architecturally, it is an early example of Romanesque Revival, a style that was popularized several decades later by Henry Hobson Richardson, and can be seen in many public buildings of the late 19th century.  The building was in use as a jail until 1919, when dwindling numbers of inmates meant the county couldn’t justify keeping it open.

Concerned that they might once again need it, Middlesex County held off on selling it until 1926, when the Catholic Church purchased it and converted it into a prep school, Keith Academy.  Since the interior layout of a jail is generally not effective for schools, the entire building was gutted in the conversion to Keith Academy, leaving the exterior mostly untouched but completely changing everything else.  The school closed in 1970, and the building later underwent another conversion, to condominiums.  Today, it houses 56 condominium units, and although the jail turned school turned housing complex has gone through a lot of changes in over a century and a half, from the outside it doesn’t look much different from when the first inmates arrived in 1856.

Old Grafton County Courthouse, Plymouth, NH

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The Old Grafton County Courthouse on Court Street in Plymouth, around 1900-1910 during its use as a library. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

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The building in 2018:

Over the years, this building has served a variety of purposes in several different locations.  It was built in 1774 as one of two courthouses in Grafton County, and was located at the corner of Russell and Pleasant Streets, less than a quarter mile from where it is today.  During its time as a courthouse, 24 year old New Hampshire native Daniel Webster argued one of his first court cases here in 1806.  He lost, and his client was hanged, but he would nonetheless go on to be a successful lawyer and one of the country’s most powerful politicians of the pre-Civil War era.

While Webster’s career was just beginning, the old courthouse was becoming obsolete, and in 1823 it was replaced by a more substantial brick building.  The old building was moved south of the main village and used as a wheelwright shop, as seen in the photo below, which was taken in 1860 and published in History of Plymouth, New Hampshire (1906):

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By the 1870s, the century-old building had been abandoned and was in disrepair, but its connection to Daniel Webster’s early career brought it to the attention of Henry W. Blair, a Congressman and future Senator who purchased it in 1876.  After moving it to its present location and renovating it, Blair gave the building to the Young Ladies’ Library Association to use as a public library.  The small building was home to Plymouth’s library until 1991, when the present-day Pease Public Library was built.  Since then, the historic building has been home to the Plymouth Historical Museum.

William King House, Suffield Connecticut (2)

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The William King House in Suffield, seen on February 17, 1938. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey collection.

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The house in 2015:

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Taken from a slightly different angle from the earlier photo in this post, the 1938 view here shows the house as it appeared when it was documented as part of the Historic American Buildings Survey.  Begun in 1933, the project was intended to provide work for unemployed photographers and architects during the Great Depression, in order to document some of the country’s historic properties.  These images and documents are now available online through the Library of Congress, and more photographs of the King House, along with detailed architectural drawings, can be found here.  The house hasn’t changed much in its exterior appearance in the past 77 years, and today it is used as a bed and breakfast, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

William King House, Suffield Connecticut (1)

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The William King House on North Street in Suffield, around 1920. Image from Celebration of the Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Settlement of Suffield, Connecticut (1921).

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The house in 2015:

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I have found conflicting sources on exactly when this house was built and who built it; apparently there were two William Kings who were living in Suffield at the time, one of whom was known as “Ensign” and the other as “Lieutenant.”  However, according to the book that I got the first photo from, the house was owned by Ensign William King, who was born in 1722 and built the house around 1750.  King’s first wife, Sarah Fuller, died in 1744, just seven months after their marriage, and in 1747 he married Lucy Hathaway.  They had nine children, and their son Seth inherited the property after William’s death in 1791.  It remained in the King family for two more generations, until it was sold in 1883.  Today, the historic house is one of Suffield’s many well-preserved 18th century houses.  It is on the National Register of Historic Places, and it is currently the Kingsfield Bed & Breakfast.