Between 1918 and 1949 staff members of the Portsmouth Public Library clipped articles from The Portsmouth Herald and other newspapers and glued them into 42 scrapbooks. The articles they selected for these scrapbooks covered such world changing events as WWI and WWII, as well as local concerns, such as news of an upcoming garden tour, a new movie by Louis DeRochemont, layoffs at the Navy Yard, or the election of the first city manager in Portsmouth. In short, these scrapbooks provide us with a…

This collection contains photographs that have been mounted on cardboard and may include cartes de visite, cabinet cards, and stereoviews, among other types. These photographs were pulled from the library’s vertical files, donations, and general photograph collection. Additions and their exact provenance are noted in the container listing of the finding aid. These images were scanned by library page Isabelle Kirwin in February 2020.

The NH Seacoast LGBT History Project was founded by Tom Kaufhold in 2015. Tom had been collecting papers, ephemera, and artifacts related to or created by the LGBTQ+ community on the Seacoast region of New Hampshire. To tell the story more fully, Holly Cashman, a professor at the University of New Hampshire, began collecting oral histories from the same community. With the assistance of interns and student workers, Dr. Cashman conducted ten interviews over a six-year period. The team processed…

This collection of 97 black-and-white photographs was added to the Portsmouth Public Library’s Special Collections in 1995. The photos were taken between June 25, 1968 to September 29, 1969 and show the progression of work during the construction of the Piscataqua River Bridge, also known as the I-95 Bridge. Construction of the I-95 bridge, a significant landmark in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was initiated in the late 1960s as part of the Vaughan Street Urban Renewal Project, which also…