Wentworth–Coolidge Mansion is a 40-room clapboard house which was built as the home, offices and working farm of colonial Governor Benning Wentworth of New Hampshire. It is located on the water at 375 Little Harbor Road, about two miles southeast of the center of Portsmouth. It is one of the few royal governors' residences to survive almost unchanged. The site is a New Hampshire state park, declared a National Historic Landmark in 1968. and Today, the New Hampshire Bureau of Historic Sites manages the site with the assistance of the Wentworth-Coolidge Commission, a group of volunteer civic and business leaders appointed by the Governor.
History of the house and ownership In 1741, the governorship of the province of New Hampshire was separated from that of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, and Benning Wentworth, son of former Lieutenant-Governor John Wentworth, was appointed its royal governor. He requested that the General Court erect a capitol in Portsmouth, but was refused.
In 1741 Wentworth rented a brick mansion in Portsmouth from his sister Sarah Wentworth Macpheadris Jaffrey, the house now known as the Warner House. That house effectually served as the governor's mansion for about seventeen years.
Wentworth petitioned the legislature to purchase the brick house as an official residence he termed a "Provincial House" in one of his petitions of April 26, 1753,Building Portsmouth: The Neighborhoods & Architecture of New Hampshire's Oldest City, Richard Candee, ed. but their offering price was below the owner's asking price, and the purchase was never made.
Since circa 1750 Wentworth's son Major John Wentworth had been assembling a rural property in the area on the outskirts of Portsmouth along a back channel of the Piscataqua River known as Little Harbor.Garvin, James (New Hampshire State Architectural Historian). "Outline of a Tour of the Wentworth-Coolidge Mansion, Portsmouth, New Hampshire" (1992). It included a working farm, and residential space. Acquisition of outlying country farms was characteristic of Portsmouth's urban mercantile elite.
The structure was made from existing buildings moved to the site and cobbled together with new sections, giving the house its eccentric asymmetrical appearance. Analysis shows it to be an assemblage of at least four, and possibly five, preexisting buildings.
Wentworth's waterside country seat seems to have been comfortable for residence by 1753, when in a petition to the legislature to purchase the in-town brick house, he explains that he has provided himself a house to move his furniture into so it would not be in the way of workmen who would remodel the brick house: "This being the most advantageous season to make Provisions for a Provincial House, I am hoping you will Embrace it, that neither myself or the Government may be put to any further inconvenience on that account. For this end, I have Provided a house to remove my furniture into, that the workmen may have no interruption from me if the Brick House should be thought most convenient."
Wentworth gave up rental of the brick house in 1759, the presumed year of a permanent move to the Little Harbor mansion, whence he likely continued to sign charters creating new towns across New Hampshire and Vermont. The practice of making land grants continued, presumably from the new house, until the crown imposed a moratorium in 1764.
Today, the house is approached via a roundabout land route, including through a stretch of forest, accentuating a sense of remoteness. However, this route was likely cleared farmland at the time. More significantly, the house is closer to Portsmouth via water than via the land route. Numerous in-town wharves and extant wharves at the Little Harbor mansion suggest a quick and easy water route. The main channel of the Piscataqua River, a tidal estuary, has notoriously fierce currents.Bolster, W. Jeffrey, Cross-Grained and Wiley Waters: A Guide to the Piscataqua Maritime Region, passim Even a back-channel route passing behind the various islands that dot the southwest edges of the river have deceptively swift currents, including the small and seemingly still tidal harbor at which the house is situated, as illustrated in an announcement in the New Hampshire Gazette, May 12, 1758: "Last Tuesday a very likely young Negro Man, belonging to his Excellency our Governor, in wading into the Water, at Little Harbour, in order to bring a small Float ashore, was, by the strength of the Tide, carried off into deep Water, and so drowned."
Wentworth continued to own the property until his death in 1766, when it passed to his second wife, Martha Hilton. She subsequently married a distant British relation of Benning's, Michael Wentworth. Because of the direct property transfer from Governor to widow by will, the contents of the house were not probated or inventoried at the time of his death. The house was inventoried upon Michael's death in 1795. The contents of the house were sold at auction in 1806, with publicity that listed some items in the mansion. Together, these documents provide a glimpse of the contents, that may have been an undifferentiated mix of Martha's furnishings and items surviving from the governor's era.
In 1803 the house and land were advertised for sale in the local newspapers, first in the New Hampshire Gazette on May 17, 1803, and a few days later in the Portsmouth Oracle on May 21, 1803. Martha died in 1805 and willed the property to her daughter, Martha. The younger Martha had married Sir John Wentworth in 1802, and his name is identified on a map of 1812. This map was made by a British-trained cartographer then in Portsmouth, J. G. Hale. The map is titled "A Plan of Wentworth Farm in the Town of Portsmouth and State of New Hampshire Belonging to John Wentworth, Esq. 1812."
The Cushing family acquired the property in 1816, and operated it as a farm. By the 1840s they began showing the old mansion, one of America's first historic houses open to the public. This was a significant signal of what would become, toward the end of the century, a growing interest among Americans in their own history as represented in surviving historic buildings and the stories of people associated with them, as exemplified in the 1850s by efforts to save George Washington's home in Virginia.
From the Cushing family, the property was purchased with about in 1886 by John Templeman Coolidge III and his wife. They renovated, restored and expanded the mansion with the assistance of Sumner Appleton, founder of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities. That society's interest in preserving colonial architecture was a characteristic expression of the Colonial Revival movement. The society acquired, preserved and opened a number of historic properties in the Piscataqua River area.Today these cumulative acquisitions include the Jackson House, Langdon mansion, and Rundlet-May House in Portsmouth, and, on the Maine side of the river, the Sayward-Wheeler House, Hamilton House, and Sarah Orne Jewett House. Historic New England list of properties.
Photos from as late as 1937 show the house furnished with an assortment of antiques, arranged to satisfy late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century taste and sense of comfort,Howells, William Mead, The Architectural Heritage of the Piscataqua (1937), Figures 111, 112, 113 characteristic of Colonial Revival interiors.
Coolidge's widow, his second wife, Mary Abigail Parsons Coolidge, donated the Wentworth–Coolidge Mansion to the state in 1954.
Organization of the house
Externally, the house is a radical divergence from the symmetry preferred for grand houses of the mid eighteenth-century, especially those of the power elite of the place and time. Typical of these are the Governor's in-town house, the brick Warner House, that introduced to Portsmouth the symmetry favored by British William-and-Mary style or Queen Anne style architecture. Locally, the British neo-PalladianHarris, John, The Palladians, published in association with the Royal Institute of British Architects Drawing Collection, Rizzoli, 1982, passim influence was being felt, perhaps first in the interior of the governor's country mansion (see below), and seen in many Portsmouth houses built by the mercantile elite, such as the John Paul Jones House built by Gregory Purcell in 1758, roughly contemporary with the governor's mansion, and in many subsequent houses that survive in Portsmouth, culminating in the Moffatt-Ladd House built 1760-64 by Michael Whidden II, Richard Mills and Ebenezer Dearing for British immigrant Captain John Moffatt for the use of his son Samuel.
The mansion's odd appearance was a result of its construction by moving and joining preexisting buildings and adding new wings, to make a single composite building.
Some unity of appearance was given with a uniform cladding of the exterior with clapboards, and the interior is finished throughout with plaster and woodwork characteristic of contemporary local high-end domestic architecture. This was accomplished by a joiner or finish-carpenter named Neal who lived in the house as a servant from 1759 onward for at least six years.
Within the house, the visual chaos of the exterior gives way to a maze of rooms that is nonetheless clearly hierarchical in function. The status of each space is readily identified by both size and finish of rooms, and are distributed in three wings, that appear to be intended, respectively, for formal entertaining, family life, and servants' work. Each of these sections has its own entrance and staircase.
Hierarchical organization of large houses stems from seventeenth-century French prototypes as filtered through post-restoration British examples.Girouard, Mark. Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History. Yale University Press, 1978. pp 120-162 How Wentworth knew about this is unclear. Wentworth's father Lieutenant Governor John Wentworth was a distant relation of Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham. Benning may have been aware of that distant relation's neo-Palladian expansion of his family's country seat in the 1730s and '40s at Wentworth Woodhouse in Yorkshire, transforming it into one of the largest mansions in Europe. Benning Wentworth himself seems to have been in London in the 1730s to deal with a mercantile affair that, through a complex chain of events involving creditors and royal petitions, both drove him into bankruptcy and elevated him to the governorship of New Hampshire. Also, Wentworth was an Anglican in a predominantly Calvinist/Congregationalist region, furthering his ties to British culture, and differentiating himself from the locals among whom he was born and raised. Those who disliked him, referred to him as a Spanish grandee, associating his imperious self-presentation with his exposure to European culture through his trade with Spain back in the 1720s.
The formal style Wentworth mimicked characteristically had public areas including an impressive hall and a grand salon, known in Britain as a saloon. Lesser in scale but typically more opulent in finish were semi-private drawing rooms, and still smaller and more opulent were bedrooms and small studies called cabinets (by the French) or closets (by the English). These were usually housed in a symmetrical Baroque or neo-Palladian shell. At Little Harbor, Wentworth followed this interior hierarchical social organization, in a visually haphazard way that adjusted pre-existing frames to an awkwardly sloped landscape.
The Formal Wing
The wing nearest the water appears to be assembled from yet another recycled frame. It consists of a tall vestibule, a grand saloon, and a long room with two small ancillary rooms, plus attics.