Constructing Historic Perception: Restoration in the Face of Climate Change

Abstract

The Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, New Hampshire is an outdoor, waterfront history museum on the site of what was once the original English colonial settlement and the neighborhood of Puddle Dock established in 1623. Today’s museum occupies the infilled colonial dock neighborhood, much of which was bulldozed as part of the urban renewal project from which the museum was born, and represents an eclectic collection of preserved historic buildings from the colonial period which have, for one reason or another, been deemed important to the local culture. Issues of creation and control of cultural significance, memory, and perception lie at the heart of the historic preservation at Strawbery Banke. This has in turn allowed the museum to mobilize the surrounding community to its benefit on several occasions, both for its initial creation and today to combat the threat of rising sea levels at the constructed site of the museum and historic Puddle Dock neighborhood. The museum’s unusual origins in an urban renewal project make it noteworthy. In addition, the threats facing this museum represent an increasingly common consequence of climate change within vulnerable coastal communities, and as such make this case study generally applicable to development of future preservation practices.