Sherburne House
Historic Homes
Investigating History
Strawbery Banke Museum Celebrates 50 Years with New Exhibits that Engage the Senses


Wheelwright House


Mrs. Goodwin in her greenhouse


Young roleplayers


Goodwin House gardens


Inside the Wheelwright House: 18th-century scents exhibit.


Period clothing for children to try on.


Cooking at the Wheelwright hearth.

Stepping into the Wheelwright House, you can hear the crackling of the fire and the tolling of ships’ bells from nearby Puddle dock, while sweet aromas drift in from the kitchen.

It is the domestic scene that Martha Wheelwright had to forfeit after her husband, Captain John Wheelwright, perished at sea in 1784. Nothing more is known today about the circumstances of his death, but we do know that when he died Wheelwright owed more than £400. His widow, Martha, who would have learned about her husband’s death many months after the event, was forced to sell his possessions and the house he owned in Portsmouth’s Strawbery Banke neighborhood.

Martha’s home, lost so long ago, is restored to the way it looked, smelled, and sounded while she waited for a letter to find out her husband’s fate. This year, Strawbery Banke Museum has opened a new interactive exhibit at the Wheelwright House, furnishing it with reproductions based on the Captain’s estate inventory and enhancing it with sounds and smells that would have been familiar to the house’s 18th-century occupants. Visitors can hear boots walking on the wharf, smell brackish seawater, sit in a woven cane chair, try on period clothing that would have belonged to the couple’s children, Elizabeth and Jack, and stop by the kitchen for a lesson in colonial cooking.
Most of us are not accustomed to picking up glassware and plates and sitting in chairs when visiting historic houses. But because everything in the house is a reproduction, they can be—should be—handled, according to curator Kimberly Alexander.

“Basically this whole building is designed to package the senses,” says Kimberly. “It gives people the chance to feel they’re making their own investigations.” She explains that the museum, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this summer, is working to make its neighborhood of historic house and garden exhibits a more interactive experience for its 21st-century visitors, a theme that can be found in several exhibits new for 2008.

At Leonard Cotton’s tenant house, for example, the museum invites visitors to help decide the best way to restore the interior. Though the unadorned house is restored on the outside to its original 1835 time period and pumpkin orange paint color, the inside is a restoration in process with artifacts from an archeological dig at the site two years ago.

“People will have a chance to look at the guts of the building,” says Kimberly. “We’re asking visitors to look at everything we’ve uncovered and make their own assessment.”

The museum tells the story of the home’s landlord in a separate exhibit in the Carter Collections Center, a 5,500 square-foot building designed by JSA, Inc. of Portsmouth, and built by Pine Brook Corp. of Kittery, Maine. Leonard Cotton trained as cooper then went into the mercantile trade. While at sea, his ship Success had an accident stranding its crew in Cuba. While there, Cotton won a lottery for $10,000 and returned to his hometown a wealthy man. By 1850, he was the town’s largest landowner, building what we might call “workforce housing” for a major part of Portsmouth’s population.

“He understood what Portsmouth needed coming from a modest background,” says Kimberly. “He would buy houses, rehabilitate them and rent to working families and individuals, particularly widows with children.”

The new interactive exhibits are also designed to make the museum more fun for children too. The Discovery Center features a game room with toys children would have played with from the different periods the museum covers. The kitchen is divided down the middle with one side set up as a 1790s kitchen and the other one from the 1940s. A store is also divided, with each side selling goods from those periods. Kids can also use outside toys from the past, including a 1940s metal fire truck and a pogo stick.

“It’s really for families to interact with one another, just really discovering things about one another that they might not have before,” says Director of Education Michelle Moon.

Kids are also invited to stop and smell the roses—literally—in the Victorian children’s garden next to the Goodwin House. Like every garden at the museum, it is based on an original garden in the neighborhood. Walking down a path around the hothouse, young visitors can read signs at their level inviting them to smell the fragrant blooms of the perfume garden, go on a bug hunt, use plants to tell time, listen to a tale at the storytelling stump, climb the elaborate Victorian tree house, and explore a butterfly and fairy garden. Kids’ tours run every afternoon from May to October. 

The museum’s curator of historic landscapes, John Forti, remembers a family whose father was home on leave from Iraq. They chose to spend their brief time together in the gardens at Strawbery Banke.

“It’s a fun educational experience that brings your family together in an outdoor setting,” says John.
 
Birthday Celebration

On Saturday, August 2, Strawbery Banke celebrates its 50th Anniversary with a 1950s themed party. Admission is just $1—the cost of admission when the museum first opened. As part of the celebration, each exhibit house will display cakes themed to historic cake recipes for the period of the house. Cakes include a Portsmouth orange cake at the Civil War-era Goodwin Mansion, Ukrainian poppy seed cake, which immigrant Mrs. Shapiro would have made for her family in the early 1900s, and a War Cake made from rationed goods during World War II. You can bake your own by purchasing recipe cards from the museum store. For a sample, try out this circa 1850 Nutter House applesauce cake on display in the Thomas Bailey Aldrich House.

Click here for the recipe for Nutter House Applesauce Cake