Portsmouth has been described as a city whose soul is bigger than its square footage, and few places illustrate Portsmouth’s historic heritage as well as Strawbery Banke Museum. This year, Strawbery Banke celebrates its 50th anniversary. Over the decades, the museum has grown and evolved to present a more complete history of Portsmouth at its 10-acre site. But, while Strawbery Banke is a crowning jewel of the city, the story of the museum’s evolution isn’t as shiny as some people might believe. 

On Jan. 30, roughly 50 people gathered in the carriage house of the Wentworth-Coolidge Mansion to hear J. Dennis Robinson speak. The writer, historian and creator of SeacoastNH.com was there to talk about his new book, “Strawbery Banke: A Seaport Museum 400 Years in the Making.” The book chronicles the history of Portsmouth and offers a thorough investigation of the controversial founding of Strawbery Banke Museum.

Robinson was there as part of a dinner lecture series hosted by the Wentworth-Coolidge Commission. Prior to the talk, “Colonial” beef stew and seasoned trout were served to guests, who paid $25 a plate, with proceeds going to support the Wentworth-Coolidge Mansion. 

Robinson’s long study of the Seacoast, his writing and his passion for preservation have made him a credible source on Seacoast history. Still, he is quick to remind people that he is not a professional historian. He is more of a storyteller with an encyclopedic knowledge of local history.

Robinson was introduced as guests finished off their coffee and pie. The Portsmouth resident is probably best known for his Web site, his recently discontinued column in the New Hampshire Gazette and as the author of several books on local history. He has also been referred to as New Hampshire’s funniest historian.

“What’s funny is how serious we take ourselves. This is the new America, in which it’s OK to be embarrassed,” he said in a recent interview with The Wire.

Portsmouth is home to several qualified historians, all of whom could have written a book about the history of Portsmouth and Strawbery Banke. The Seacoast enjoys a brain trust in that regard, Robinson said. So why did he, an English major, get commissioned by Strawbery Banke to write such a book? Even some of the museum’s employees were doubtful he would get the job. According to Robinson, one employee called him the last person in the world that would write a book like the one he was pitching. 

But Robinson persisted all the way to the top until he met with Larry Yerdon, president of Strawbery Banke Museum, who gave him the green light.

Soon, Robinson was engulfed in historical sources, including private letters, unpublished records, personal interviews, photographs and public documents. He started to piece together a story told through the voices of “Puritans and Royalists, patriots and enslaved Africans, shipbuilders and murderers, daytrippers and ladies of the night.”

During the three years it took him to write the book, Robinson took a journalistic approach by trying to represent as many sides of the story as possible. In that way, it could be considered a social history of Strawbery Banke.

“People refer to it as revisionist history, but I don’t think I’m a revisionist historian,” Robinson said. In fact, he believes that past historians created a new version of history by only telling one side. “I’m out there taking the revisionist history and putting it back into place,” he said.

At the Wentworth-Coolidge Mansion, the first topic that got deconstructed was the story of librarian Dorothy Vaughan, whose rousing 1957 speech to the Portsmouth Rotary Club is remembered as the spark that ignited a preservation movement, which eventually led to the founding of Strawbery Banke. Her famous speech makes for a great story but, unfortunately, it’s not entirely true. While Vaughan deserves credit for helping to found the museum, Robinson pointed out that several other people spoke to the Rotary Club about the need for historic preservation. Over the years, the myth of Vaughan’s singular speech has been accepted as truth.

Traditional history has also dubbed Cappy Stewart, who destroyed several historic buildings, a villain. But, in Robinson’s view, there are no heroes or villains in the story of Strawbery Banke, just as there are no heroes or villains in American history. The real version of history is always more nuanced than simple extremes can explain.

“History is a complicated thing that happens and then gets reduced to a bumper sticker, and the bumper sticker is always wrong,” Robinson said during the lecture.

“We call it a ‘warts and all’ book, or unrelentingly honest, but to me, how could you write history without mentioning the things that were bad?” he later added in an interview.

However, delivering the truth, in all its complexity, doesn’t always make you the most popular person. A number of people, especially those who knew some of the historical actors involved, are more comfortable with the sterilized version of Strawbery Banke’s history. Some members of the older generation do not want to air their dirty laundry.

“Twenty years ago, what I wrote would have gotten a lot of people upset,” Robinson said. Today, more people understand that, to get at the truth, you can’t just look to one source. The truth is derived from understanding an event from as many points of view as possible. “You’re not trying to offend people, you’re trying to relieve them of misconceptions,” Robinson said. “If you can’t talk about what happened in the past, you can’t move forward, and America has to start looking at its past again. We don’t need the myths anymore. Now we need the truth. We’re now finding out the myths are dangerous.”

Robinson frequently talks about Portsmouth and Strawbery Banke as if they are a microcosm of American history.

“Isn’t this really the story of America? Is America about war and pilgrims? No, it’s about companies, corporations, people making a living, folks, political intrigue, red light districts. It’s about the dynamic progression of history,” he said. “Portsmouth is as good a place to tell that story as Gettysburg, Washington, D.C., or the Plymouth Plantation.”

In addition to educating the public about the founding of Strawbery Banke, Robinson wrote his book to help the museum understand its own past. For the last 50 years, the institution has been constantly growing, and no one ever stopped to take stock of its origins.

“Strawbery Banke has yet to come to terms with its traumatic founding years,” Robinson said. He hopes the book will help Strawbery Banke better define its future. “That was the whole purpose, to give their next 50 years a break and relieve them of the past 50 years.”

Such a break would allow the museum to concentrate more on fundraising. While it may appear that Strawbery Banke is doing well financially, it struggles to pay the bills like any other historic home or cultural museum. These nonprofits hardly ever receive city, state or federal assistance. And, according to Robinson, the entry fee at most museums is hardly enough to cover staff salaries.

“We need to start funding its survival in a new way,” Robinson said. He would like to start by tapping into the pool of tourism money that floods downtown Portsmouth each year. He believes the historic buildings give people a sense of place in an otherwise constantly shifting world. “The built environment makes them feel that way, they feel the echo of generations,” he said. The problem is that most visitors are satisfied with seeing the exterior of old buildings. It is enough to give them a sense of history without paying the $5 entry fee.

“Where does the money go? It goes to restaurants, hotels and shops. They are the recipients of the tourist dollars,” Robinson said. “It really falls to a small group of benevolent people who understand that without these historic buildings, Portsmouth would fall apart.”

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, a Colonial revival movement swept across the United States. Anything built before the Revolutionary War was considered hallowed ground. “America needed a mythology. It needed a past,” Robinson said. In Portsmouth, a number of wealthy outsiders invested considerable amounts of money to save structures associated with pre-revolutionary times.

If those same historic buildings are to survive the 21st century, it will require the same kind of benevolence. “We have to find more benefactors. We have to convince more and more people from farther and farther away that Portsmouth does matter,” Robinson said.

A proposed cultural center at the former library building at the intersection of Islington and Middle streets would be a clearinghouse of local history and culture. It would be the site where Portsmouth history gets packaged, branded and delivered to visitors and residents, Robinson said.

“Its entire purpose will be to inform you and to push you towards the stuff that interests you the most. It will be a gateway to everything else,” he said.

The cultural center would also help the history community connect younger generations to their local heritage. But the cultural center, Strawbery Banke and other sources of history will only appeal to younger people if they feel that local history is relevant to their lives. That can’t be done by talking about a few wealthy, white males who lived in Portsmouth hundreds of years ago, Robinson said. It will be done by talking about the seedy side of history, the intrigue, the drama and the recent past.

“I have great hope that a new generation will get it, but they’re not going to get it based on how it has affected previous generations. We need to tell them how it affects them. But I think we’re going to find out that the torch will be passed,” Robinson said. “It’s going to be some sort of wireless, electronic torch that has a GPS built in.”

A hundred years from now, how will history judge the preservation movement of 2008? “This is going to be the point when they stopped caring whether Portsmouth was the most perfect town in the world and they started humanizing history,” Robinson said.