The Children’s Museum of Portsmouth ended its eight-year search for a new location last week when museum directors announced the facility was entering into negotiations with Dover to move to the Garrison City.

Museum board of directors chairman Sean O’Connell said the museum and the city are still discussing the terms of the lease but, “there’s a very significant likelihood we’re coming,” he said.
O’Connell said the museum hopes to move into what is currently the Butterfield Gym building, at 6 Washington St., in downtown Dover sometime in the next two years. After the terms of the lease are ironed out, O’Connell said the 20,000-square-foot building will be renovated. The museum plans to start a capital campaign to raise money for renovations.

The Children’s Museum has been looking to move to a larger facility for almost a decade. The 22-year Portsmouth resident has faced significant space limitations that have made it difficult to expand programming, according to Denny Doleac, the museum’s director. Most recently, the board of trustees had planned to build a new facility at the corner of Woodbury Avenue and Dennett Street in Portsmouth. However, the project was held up when neighbors appealed a zoning variance that would have allowed construction of the museum. They also filed a lawsuit against the city.

O’Connell believes the new location in Dover will work out well.

“It’s an attractive spot,” he said. “It’s on the river, it’s big, it’s bigger than what we can build in Portsmouth, and there’s the obvious uncertainties of litigation that continue in Portsmouth.”
Doleac said Dover approached the museum’s board of directors about a year ago with an invitation to move to the city. Earlier this spring, the city offered to let the museum reside in the city-owned Butterfield building.

A study of the museum’s demographics found that 86 percent of the museum’s visitors come from Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, with only 5 percent of that number coming from Portsmouth.
“We evaluated our purpose and looked at our mission and realized that it would be possible to provide the service we’re designed to provide outside of Portsmouth,” Doleac said.
Doleac said the eight years spent searching for a site in Portsmouth with no luck contributed to the decision to move to Dover.

“I think Dover’s proposal to us was very attractive, and the more we spoke with city officials and business leaders, the more we researched the area and looked at the site, the location and all it had to offer, the more we realized it made a great deal of sense for our growth as an institution,” she said.
Doleac said Portsmouth residents and city officials have been calling her, trying to convince the museum to stay in town.

“We’ve gotten e-mails and calls from members and friends and supporters who are very saddened to hear that we would be leaving Portsmouth,” she said. “Everyone…has said that they can understand our decision because we’ve been looking for so long and we’ve been so cramped.”