[In early May,
with the lockdown closing in around us a bit, my sons and I took a daytrip up
to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where we walked around the historic
waterfront area (masked and at a social distance from fellow visitors,
natch). This week I’ll highlight a handful of histories from this multi-layered
New England community, leading up to a special post on other NE historic
daytrips!]
On the
importance of remembering material culture histories, and why we also need to
go beyond them.
A few years
back, in this
post on the (then) newly christened Blackstone River Valley National
Historical Park, I highlighted for comparison another exemplary such park—the Salem (MA) Maritime National Historic
Site. The centerpiece of Salem Maritime is the Derby
(pronounced DAR-by) Wharf, a long walk out into Salem Harbor which features
a reconstructed
ship, numerous historic markers, exhibits, and other information for
visitors. Yet across all those wonderful interpretative areas, there is (or was
as of the last time I was there, anyway) just one brief mention of slavery, a
corner of a historic marker that highlights the so-called triangular
trade which brought goods to Salem in direct relationship to bringing
enslaved people to the Caribbean. Yet in truth, not only was the triangular
trade far more central to Salem’s industries than the Wharf indicates, but the
trade also brought enslaved
people to Salem, where their work was similarly instrumental to every
aspect of the town’s commerce for much of the 17th and 18th
centuries. Slavery isn’t the overt focus of Salem Maritime NHS, and I’m not
arguing that it has to be—but it has always seemed to me that minimizing such
human histories in favor of material culture exhibits (which is mostly what the
recreated Derby Wharf features) means at best telling only a piece of the
story, if not indeed separating pieces that are ultimately, entirely
interconnected.
I had a similar reaction
to the historic
marker along the Portsmouth waterfront which highlights the Portsmouth
Marine Railway. To quote from the marker’s intro, “In 1833 a group of prominent
Portsmouth merchants organized The Marine Railway Company and installed a set
of tracks from the water to the brick machine house still standing today near
this site. When coupled with two horses, the machinery could, as the owners
proclaimed, ‘draw vessels of 500 tons and upwards, entirely out of water,
placing them in a situation where any part of their hulls can be inspected or repaired
with great dispatch.’ The Portsmouth Marine Railway Company continued to
operate until the mid-1850s. Thereafter the wealthy merchant Leonard Cotton
bought it and ran it as a private venture.” The remainder of the marker
includes H.F. Walling’s map of the waterfront in 1850, a recent photo of the
building that served as the Railway’s Headhouse, an etching of a “careened”
ship being worked on, and two paintings of ships, including one by yesterday’s
blog subject Thomas P. Moses. Taken together, the text and images certainly
create a multi-layered portrait of both the Railway and its historical and
economic contexts, offering a lens into a part of the waterfront’s material culture
that has largely disappeared (the Headhouse remains, but the tracks and
everything else are no more).
I appreciate all
those aspects of the marker and what it adds to my knowledge and understanding,
but I can’t help but feel that something is missing from it: people! The intro
text does feature those “prominent merchants” and later that “wealthy merchant,”
so I suppose I mean something more specific: the working people who operated
the Railway, repaired the careened ships, made this material and commercial
enterprise happen. Even the caption for the careened ship image uses the
passive voice to elide those workers: “ships were ‘careened,’” “This was done
by attaching lines to their masts and rolling the vessels…” We learn about the
two horses (and I don’t mean to downplay their role and labor in any way), but
nothing about the human power that drove this Portsmouth innovation. By the
1830s and 40s those workers were
not enslaved, so to be clear I’m not directly paralleling this to the Salem
Maritime elision. But who were they? What do we know about their identities,
communities, backgrounds, training, lives? Did any of them reflect upon either
their work or this part of the waterfront commercial world? Were any injured or
killed when a ship careened the wrong way? Those and many similar questions
wouldn’t just add more of a human side to this marker—they are fundamental to
the material culture and economic histories being highlighted there, and
require much more awareness and engagement than they too often receive.
Last Portsmouth
post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other historic sites or daytrips you’d highlight?
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