History
on tour: September 18th
by Doris
Sherrow, September 1999
On September
18th (1999), there will be a historical walking tour of downtown
Portland. We will start at 2 PM in front of the Town Hall. Between 1852
and 1894, Town Hall was a private home. At that time, the block from Freestone
Avenue to Marlborough Street held three large, elegant homes set on tree-shaded
lots, each belonging to a member of the influential Hall family.
Main Street is old. It was probably created
by native Americans for their own extensive trade and travel networks.
But Commerce Street is also over 300 years old. Today, it may be a sleepy
little dead-end street, but Portland's first two settlers, James Stanclift
and John Gill, chose to live on it, plus it led to the town
quarry, Stanclift's quarry, and the graveyard, established in 1713.
Unfortunately, it would be impossible to
plaque these historically significant sites: they hang in thin air out
over the deep, flood-filled quarry hole beyond the end of the street.
In 1870, a few leading quarry owners convinced the town to sell them the
old cemetery - the cemetery! - a because its soil covered good, marketable
deposits of brownstone. Consequently, the sloping hill from the current
end of Commerce Street down to the Connecticut River was minded away to
produce profits for the quarry owners (handsomely represented by some
of Portland's finer architecture) and the fantastic quarry holes, which
may soon become a local tourist attraction.
In 1995, a walking tour of downtown Portland
was mentioning in promotional literature for that year's Downtown Festival.
I called around to try to get information. I had worked on the Greater
Middletown Preservation Trust's Portland book, but we had given short
schrift to downtown, because the architecture had been so altered ("transmogrified"
was the word we employed; I'm not proud of it, but there it is). After
several calls, I learned there would be no such walking tour, because
no none knew much history about downtown Portland. So, during the next
year, I researched the properties from 141 Main Street, which was a gable-to-street
house demolished by Standard Knapp about 20 years ago, to 318 Main,
the Post Office.
What I found was fascinating. The center
had been home to some very influential people in the 19th century, less
Puritan than the late 17th, early 18th century settlers had been. Their
stories seem to have been largely forgotten, although their fortunes were
large, and they held considerable power in town. Their houses, most of
which no longer stand, had been large and beautiful. The downtown area
had a much more "residential" feeling to it, although small
shops have always been spliced into the street-scape, near their owners'
houses. I suspect that their stories wer forgotten largely because their
neighborhood was destroyed. Sometimes we talk about the landscape we have
lost, as we look at old photographs of gingerbread trimmed houses, perhaps.
But we have lost several: there have actually been several waves of development,
each of which has plowed under the settlement before it. The Wangunk occupancy
was the earliest (unless they were preceded by other tribes). Their land
was taken over and reshaped by the incoming English of the colonial period.
(Back then, "we" were the "English;" that threw me
for a loop when I first read it in an old petition, asking that the "English"
be allowed to settle some Wangunk area).
The earliest developments would have been rather stark colonial houses.
I know of one partial remnant, one possible ancient ell, and one possible
survivor from that period in the downtown area. That settlement (by the
"English") was wiped out without a thought by forward-thinking
19th century Americans. As theirs is the architecture that we admire in
the downtown, solid buildings with graceful trim, fancy woodwork, or stonework,
that would cost a fortune to duplicate today. Federal, Greek Revival,
Italianate, Queen Anne - downtown Portland has a few of all these styles.
So join us at 2 PM in front of the Town
Hall on Saturday, September 18th, for the walking tour. I can't show you
any downtown Wangunk sites, but I can point out the three very
old house survivals, and tell you a bit about the lives of people who
built the buildings you drive or walk past every day.
When you know some of the old stories, it
becomes a much richer landscape!
