^=<-.^C-^?P^»?SS«! 



104 



®I)c Jtirmer's ittcmttyto Visitor. 



leave no comfortable "curtained sleep" to us, if 

 curtains and downy feather beds liad been fash- 

 ionable at the present day. The Rockingham 

 house was erected by Judge Woodbury Lang- 

 don, the brother of the " long-tried patriot, Col. 

 John," for whose early patriotism and high bear- 

 ing from the early dawn of the revolution down 

 to the last moments of his public life pending 

 the war of 1812, every true son of the Granite 

 Stale will do him the highest reverence: the 

 bricks were brought from Philadelphia, as being 

 of better clay and better made than any bricks 

 in this part of the country — the house is said to 

 have cost $30,000. The Langdons were not 

 professional men ; yet this Woodbury was one 

 of the first judges of the superior court after the 

 State government changed from the rule of the 

 King of England to that of the people. The 

 brothers were merchants and ship-owners, arti- 

 ficers of their own fortunes. Business and 

 trade must have been good in Portsmouth at 

 that time to enable these brothers to erect what 

 would be considered splendid dwellings at the 

 present day. John Langdon's mansion, a wood- 

 en structure, the present elegant residence of the 

 Rev. Mr. Burroughs, is by no means an inferior 

 bouse to the most expensive of modern days; 

 but Woodbury Langdon's house of brick, as 

 durable to all appearance and as comely now as 

 when ihey were laid nearly sixty years ago, may 

 be regarded, as the most commodious and beau- 

 tiful private dwelling yet erected in New Hamp- 

 shire. Within the last twenty years the erection 

 of an extended wing and exterior additions has 

 converted this handsome ancient structure into 

 the best arranged and most comfortable hotel 

 and public boarding house that can be found in 

 the northern States. With the most ample 

 market, especially of fish fresh from the salt 

 water, an extremely quiet and orderly town. 

 cleanly and neat — a better and more choice set 

 of inhabitants, from the intelligent, wealthy and 

 cay, down to the humblest of the poor, will not 

 probably be found in any town or city along the 

 seaboard, than is to be met with in the ancient 

 commercial capital and seaport of the Granite 

 State. This town, isolated by railways passing 

 either rapidly through or around it, has lost the 

 animation and enterprise which trade with the 

 interior had formerly given it. Real estate, ex- 

 cellent well-constructed houses with ample lots 

 for yards and gardens, have been sold at prices 

 incredibly low for such a healthy and desirable 

 location near the seaboard. Of such estate re- 

 cently bought at a price not one-fourth its cost 

 and value, the elegant mansion late the property 

 of Edward Cults, senior, just out of town on 

 the Newington road, may be named. This 

 estate has become the property of the widow 

 and second wife of the late John B. Wheeler, a 

 man of wealth gained by enterprise, whose 

 generosity and public spirit in a long residence 

 at Orford upon the always flourishing banks of 

 the Connecticut river valley, will be long re- 

 membered. It is a compliment to Portsmouth 

 that Mrs. Wheeler should, as a choice of posi- 

 tion, have exchanged one of the most beautiful 

 and charming residences on the one side of the 

 State for that which she has selected near its 

 confines upon the other. 



The great business to be speedily brought to 

 Portsmouth must within a few years change 

 the aspect of things there materially. Willi a 

 safe harbor always accessible, where navies of 

 public armed ships and private merchantmen 

 can be better built in security than in almost any 



other harbor of the country, what may not the 

 seat of British royal governors and mandamus 

 counsellors one and two hundred years ago he- 

 come when opened nearest to the trade of coun- 

 tries of ihe west extending into the interior over 

 inland seas, not simply hundreds, but thousands 

 of miles ? 



The country around Portsmouth, the quality 

 of its soil, its indentation with arms and bays of 

 the sea and the three streams which form the 

 prongs of the Piscataqua, is well adapted for any 

 improvement which taste or enterprise may 

 choose. A ride towards the Gushing place, 

 formerly the residence of one of the Went- 

 worths, who was governor of the colony prior 

 to the revolution, gave us a view from Little 

 Harbor in the rear of the island which composes 

 the town of New Castle, of both the Navy Yard 

 on the Maine side and islands within the har- 

 bor — of Fort McClary on the Kiltery side with 

 the Whale's back light house off the south-west 

 point of the State of Maine — of Fort Constitu- 

 tion with the New Castle light house near upon 

 the island. Further out at sea, the eye catches 

 the famous isles of Shoals which two centuries 

 ago had more habitable houses and inhabitants 

 than now live upon them. 



The retired chosen residence of the Hon. 

 Abner Greenleaf is upon another hay of Saga- 

 more creek. Voluntarily leaving his place of 

 Post Master and disposing of the interest which 

 himself and sons had several years continued in 

 the New Hampshire Gazette, now the oldest 

 newspaper in the Union, that has been published 

 without interruption over ninety years, Mr. 

 GreeuleafJ much of it as the work of his own 

 hands, has brought into profitable cultivation a 

 most beautiful niche or corner out of sight by 

 land on the side of the town, and yet in an am- 

 phitheatre which " opens enchantment lo the 

 view." Unexpectedly in the way to this retired 

 seclusion, riding through the long lanes which 

 lead to some of the first opened seats and villas 

 of the ancient "Strawberry bank," with ihe 

 same object of curiosity to overlook the harbor 

 with its promontories, bays and inlets, we met 

 with Mr. G. that brother of Massachusetts nine- 

 teen years older than himself, who more than 

 fifty years ago advanced in (he orders of Free- 

 masonry to the highest position of a knight 

 templar of the order of Malta: he came to 

 Portsmouth for the purpose, in addition to that 

 of affection for a remaining relative, of seeing 

 and assisting in the ceremonies of installation of 

 a lodge consequent to a revival of an order 

 which in the State before the abduction of Mor- 

 gan in western New York fifty down to twenty- 

 five years ago, had done its share of all ihe 

 human institutions calculated to increase the 

 moral and social virtues, while it enlightened the 

 intelligence of a community which, in its pristine 

 purity and simplicity, thought and taught that 

 the example and fruit of inbred individual good 

 works and secret individual charities were far 

 better than the dogmas of that preaching whose 

 charity and good works are concentrated for dis- 

 play in the distance. The younger Mr. Green- 

 leaf came to Portsmouth thirty years ago as a 

 common mechanic, an artificer in metals, we be- 

 lieve: he has since made himself of eminence 

 as a political writer ; and if he has at any time 

 erred, it was on the side of democracy, which is 

 always to be pardoned. The hard and the 

 healthy hand of the laboring farmer of sixty- 

 three years, after a young family of different 

 callings and occupations has left him and settled 



elsewhere in life, not less than the bronzed 

 face, bespeaks at the same time the physical and 

 moral advantages resulting from the labor which 

 benefits others while it enriches him in more 

 than one way who exercises it. We had no 

 time or strength to go over Mr. Greeuleaf's little 

 farm, which, within the space often years, gives 

 as one item apples of his own grafting valued at 

 hundreds of dollars: his farm is made to pro- 

 duce in abundance every thing that ought be 

 experted from it for the amount of labor. His 

 cottage residence is a sample of comfort at the 

 expense of hundreds greater than might be 

 given in the palace that costs thousands. In the 

 pillowed easy lolling couch which female indus- 

 try bad piepared within, surrounded with food, 

 as hooks and maps, to the intellect which in- 

 vites and arrests the attention returning from the 

 field as in welcoming the visitor — with no pledge 

 to that mawkish hypocritical abstinence which 

 den use "before folks" the good things of this 

 world as the mere pretence of the hypocrite — we 

 tarried long enough to partake of n cool glass of 

 bottled juice of the apple from Mr. Greenleafs 

 own orchard — heller than the best bottled Cham- 

 paigne juice of the grape, because at home it 

 was produced, as at home it was enjoyed. Of 

 the useful improvements made on these pre- 

 mises intended as well for protection as to 

 lighten labor, we recommend Mr. Greenleafs 

 well hung and painted gates as substitutes for 

 post and rail bars at the entrance of his lanes 

 and fields: they are better ihan any we have 

 elsewhere seen. You must go out of the way 

 in Portsmouth to see the retired senator and 

 public servant; but the scenery and the im- 

 provements there will pay any body for the 

 time and trouble which such a visit shall give 

 hi ui. Any man doing as much with his own 

 hands to increase the product of earth's com- 

 forts as Mr. G. has done, may be regarded as a 

 public benefactor. 



Occupying so much space in our first day's 

 reflections in a stage journey to Portsmouth and 

 a lido about town, we must be more brief in 

 what shall follow of nine days afterwards spent 

 mainly in Maine in the counties of Penobscot, 

 Waldo, Lincoln and Kennebeck, below Portland. 

 Indeed so rapid was our way on the forenoon of 

 Friday the last day of June, over the Piscataqua 

 through Yoik and a part of Cumberland, with 

 shutters down as a protection against the un- 

 comfortable east wind, that we should have to 

 draw on the imagination for things unseen to us 

 to describe what might have been there. Our 

 opinion would be that the proprietors of the 

 Maine railroad missed a figure, when they avoid- 

 ed Kittery and old York in their most interesting 

 business villages: Wells too with its growing 

 agriculture and ships, the busy town and village 

 of Kennebunk, and the more commercial 

 estuary of" the sea at Kennebunk port — Bidde- 

 ford growing into, and Saco with its romantic 

 island and falls already grown, to the size of a 

 large eastern manufacturing city, are all shunned 

 more or less to the left while facing eastward, by 

 this "go-between" railroad leading to the great 

 lumber State of Maine, destined in its whole di- 

 mensions to become the State of greatest wealth 

 and commerce along ihe Atlantic coast of the 

 Union. The go-between railway to Maine, liko 

 some party men we have known entertaining no 

 fixed opinions, is eminently one-sided ; for only 

 on the right, at distances shortening from ten 

 miles down to one mile, do we find the places 

 for depot nearest the towns and villages above 



