During the mid to late 20th century, Portsmouth, NH, underwent vast changes to the structure and urbanity of the city. Family homes were lifted and removed from their foundations and relocated to make for highways and commercial buildings. Communities, including the primarily-Italian North End, were torn down to make room for offices, restaurants, parking, hotels, and condos. In these photographs, taken by Marion A. Hanson and donated by Beverly McCann, one can see the process of some of the…

The Portsmouth Public Library is endeavoring to historically document this unusual time in our shared Portsmouth, New Hampshire History. As always, staff of the Special Collections Room are physically collecting printed accounts, articles, and documents for the history files.To further our mission to document and make accessible Portsmouth history, we have started this diary project to capture the social, economic and personal accounts of the impact this pandemic has had on our residents and…

The Cold War was a 45-year standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies. In the years following WWII, the US and the USSR began building and testing atomic weapons and the threat of nuclear annihilation was never far from anyone’s mind. Thus began a nuclear stalemate that would last until the 1990s. Arguably, it was the 1950s that experienced the strongest impact of the standoff. America had just survived WWII and now had to watch an arms race escalate on…

Portsmouth's historic cemeteries serve as gateways to the past. The records in this collection will be useful to genealogists, historians, and family members of the deceased. Our collection includes information about the following cemeteries, including maps and plot locations: Cotton Cemetery, Elmwood Cemetery, Harmony Grove Cemetery, North Cemetery, Proprietor's Cemetery, Sagamore Cemetery, and Union Cemetery.To view a complete record book or to see a map in more detail, click the PDF name…

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.

“Eastbound Limited” was a scripted, weekly radio drama that aired on WHEB, a station owned by Granite State Broadcasting Corp. and operated out of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Each episode functioned as a show-within-a-show with the program guided by the conductor of the Eastbound Limited, a train that traversed the tracks of New England, heavily favoring New Hampshire. The conductor would introduce a stand-alone drama based on the location of the train. The radio show had a cast and crew that…