Strawbery Banke Museum
14 Hancock Street
Portsmouth, NH
A real Portsmouth neighborhood preserved in place, where restored houses and costumed role-players carry you through three centuries of a working seaport.
Strawbery Banke is not a collection of buildings moved together to look old; it is an actual Portsmouth neighborhood, preserved on the very ground where its people lived. On a ten-acre block in the city's South End stand dozens of historic houses, most of them on their original foundations, restored and furnished to represent life across more than three hundred years of a real, changing seaport community.
The name comes from the wild strawberries the earliest English settlers found along the riverbank, and their settlement, Strawbery Banke, grew into Portsmouth. Rather than freeze the block at a single moment, the museum interprets many eras at once, so one house may be set in colonial times and another in the twentieth century, with costumed role-players, working gardens, and craftspeople filling in the daily texture of each.
What Guests Love
- Costumed role-players who bring each house and era to life
- Homes furnished to different centuries, all on their original block
- Heritage gardens and craftspeople working the way earlier residents did
- Winter ice skating on the pond at the heart of the neighborhood
Worth Knowing
- It is an outdoor museum, so dress for the weather and plan to walk
- The main season runs spring through fall, with special winter programs and skating
- A ticket is good all day, so you can move through the houses at your own pace
- It sits in a walkable part of Portsmouth, easy to combine with the downtown and waterfront
Details
Portsmouth, NH
Learn about Strawbery Banke Museum
A neighborhood saved from the wrecking ball
By the middle of the twentieth century the old waterfront neighborhood, long known as Puddle Dock, had fallen on hard times, and an urban-renewal plan called for clearing it away. Local residents, led by a determined librarian and her allies, fought to save the historic houses instead, and in 1958 the effort took shape as an outdoor history museum.
That fight is part of the museum's meaning. Instead of demolishing the neighborhood, the community chose to preserve it in place and tell the story of the ordinary families who had lived there, which is why Strawbery Banke feels less like a monument to the wealthy and more like the biography of a whole working community.
Many centuries on one block
What sets Strawbery Banke apart from many historic sites is that it does not pick one date. The houses are furnished and interpreted to different periods, from the colonial and Revolutionary eras through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, so a walk across the block is a walk through time. One home might show the world of a colonial merchant, another the apartment of an immigrant family, another a store set during World War II.
Costumed role-players inhabit many of the houses, speaking with visitors and demonstrating the tasks of their era, while other buildings are staged as exhibits. Heritage gardens planted with period-appropriate crops and flowers, and craftspeople practicing trades like coopering and boatbuilding, round out a picture of daily life rather than grand events.
The seaport around it
Strawbery Banke sits in the heart of Portsmouth, one of the oldest and best-preserved seaports in the country. Founded in the early 1600s at the mouth of the Piscataqua River, Portsmouth grew rich on shipping, shipbuilding, and trade, and its streets are lined with fine colonial and Federal architecture that survives to this day.
The museum is woven into that living city. Just beyond its gates are the brick blocks of downtown, the tugboats and traffic of a working harbor, and other historic house museums, so a visit to Strawbery Banke naturally spills out into the wider seaport that grew from the same riverbank strawberries.
Closest Boutels
The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.
Things to Do Near Portsmouth
Portsmouth downtown and waterfront
Steps away
A walkable brick district of shops, restaurants, and tugboats, with Prescott Park and its gardens along the river.
Isles of Shoals cruises
From the Portsmouth waterfront
Boat tours to the storied cluster of islands offshore, rich with fishing and colonial history.
Odiorne Point State Park
About 5 miles, a 15 minute drive
The largest undeveloped stretch of the New Hampshire shore, with tide pools and a hidden World War II fort.