An Old Town By the Sea | Page 8

writes Mr.
Brewster, (1. Mr. Charles W. Brewster, for nearly fifty years the editor
of the Portsmouth Journal, and the author of two volumes of local
sketches to which the writer of these pages here acknowledges his
indebtedness.) "occupies a space of perhaps one hundred feet by ninety,
and is well walled in. The western side is now used as a burial-place for
the family, but two thirds of it is filled with perhaps forty graves,
indicated by rough head and foot stones. Who there rest no one now
living knows. But the same care is taken of their quiet beds as if they
were of the proprietor's own family. In 1631 Mason sent over about
eighty emigrants many of whom died in a few years, and here they
were probably buried. Here too, doubtless, rest the remains of several
of those whose names stand conspicuous in our early state records."

IV. A STROLL ABOUT TOWN (continued)
WHEN Washington visited Portsmouth in 1789 he was not much
impressed by the architecture of the little town that had stood by him so
stoutly in the struggle for independence. "There are some good
houses," he writes, in a diary kept that year during a tour through
Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, "among which
Colonel Langdon's may be esteemed the first; but in general they are
indifferent, and almost entirely of wood. On wondering at this, as the

country is full of stone and good clay for bricks, I was told that on
account of the fogs and damp they deemed them wholesomer, and for
that reason preferred wood buildings."
The house of Colonel Langdon, on Pleasant Street, is an excellent
sample of the solid and dignified abodes which our great-grandsires
had the sense to build. The art of their construction seems to have been
a lost art these fifty years. Here Governor John Langdon resided from
1782 until the time of his death in 1819--a period during which many
an illustrious man passed between those two white pillars that support
the little balcony over the front door; among the rest Louis Philippe and
his brothers, the Ducs de Montpensier and Beaujolais, and the Marquis
de Chastellus, a major-general in the French army, serving under the
Count de Rochambeau, whom he accompanied from France to the
States in 1780. The journal of the marquis contains this reference to his
host: "After dinner we went to drink tea with Mr. Langdon. He is a
handsome man, and of noble carriage; he has been a member of
Congress, and is now one of the first people of the country; his house is
elegant and well furnished, and the apartments admirably well
wainscoted" (this reads like Mr. Samuel Pepys); "and he has a good
manuscript chart of the harbor of Portsmouth. Mrs. Langdon, his wife,
is young, fair, and tolerably handsome, but I conversed less with her
than her husband, in whose favor I was prejudiced from knowing that
he had displayed great courage and patriotism at the time of
Burgoynes's expedition."
It was at the height of the French Revolution that the three sons of the
Due d'Orleans were entertained at the Langdon mansion. Years
afterward, when Louis Philippe was on the throne of France, he
inquired of a Portsmouth lady presented at his court if the mansion of
ce brave Gouverneur Langdon was still in existence.
The house stands back a decorous distance from the street, under the
shadows of some gigantic oaks or elms, and presents an imposing
appearance as you approach it over the tessellated marble walk. A
hundred or two feet on either side of the gate, and abutting on the street,
is a small square building of brick, one story in height--probably the

porter's lodge and tool-house of former days. There is a large fruit
garden attached to the house, which is in excellent condition, taking life
comfortably, and having the complacent air of a well-preserved beau of
the ancien regime. The Langdon mansion was owned and long
occupied by the late Rev. Dr. Burroughs, for a period of forty-seven
years the esteemed rector or St. John's Church.
At the other end of Pleasant Street is another notable house, to which
we shall come by and by. Though President Washington found
Portsmouth but moderately attractive from an architectural point of
view, the visitor of to-day, if he have an antiquarian taste, will find
himself embarrassed by the number of localities and buildings that
appeal to his interest. Many of these buildings were new and
undoubtedly commonplace enough at the date of Washington's visit;
time and association have given them a quaintness and a significance
which now make their architecture a question of secondary importance.
One might spend a fortnight in Portsmouth exploring the nooks and
corners over which history has thrown