Strawbery Banke Museum

The place that is today called Strawbery Banke has a long and rich history, stretching back three and a half centuries to the earliest years of English settlement in New England. In 1630 Englishmen chose the site for a plantation called Strawbery Banke, named for the profusion of wild berries they had found near the river. By the eighteenth century the site was a thriving waterfront neighborhood in an important seaport called Portsmouth; in the nineteenth century it changed into an immigrant neighborhood named Puddle Dock; and by the latter half of the twentieth century it had recaptured its original name as an outdoor history museum. Throughout these centuries of change people lived and worked there, experiencing in a small, personal way, the major events and currents of America's history. Strawbery Banke, the museum, is dedicated to the study of the lives of these people and others who left their mark on Portsmouth's history.