Tour Note: Mark Wentworth House, 29 October 2011

As part of  exhibition "Money, Revolution and Books...." the Portsmouth Athenaeum offers tour of the Mark Wentworth Home, October 29, Saturday – once the home of John and Anna Fisher, who rented it to Anna’s brother, Governor John Wentworth. 10 a.m. meeting at the Mark Wentworth Home. Please RSPV by calling 431-2538 x2 for reservations.  For information on the exhibition, see blog archive; for brief background on the Mark Wentworth Home, see excerpt below. A Revolutionary History A prominent piece of Portsmouth's history, the Mark Wentworth Home's Pleasant Street mansion was believed to have been built in 1763.   The Residence was the home of Governor John Wentworth, the last Royal Governor, who lived there until just before the start of the Revolution.  Governor Wentworth described the home as a "a small hut with little comfortable apartments." This "small hut" is now registered on the National Register of Historic Places and is considered to be one of the finest architecturally built homes in the region, during the eighteenth century. Although he was a Portsmouth native and generally well liked, the loyalist Governor Wentworth often ignited fierce opposition.  Portsmouth was the site of many Revolutionary War incidents, and on one particularly explosive occasion in the summer of 1775, a mob of patriots gathered outside the mansion and demanded the surrender of Governor Wentworth's associate, Colonel John Fenton. Before Fenton gave himself up, shots were fired and the evidence remains to this day with bullet holes in the plaster above the fireplace of the mansion's front room. http://markwentworth.org/about-us/history In preparation for "Transatlantic Transformations: Georgian Architecture in Salem, Massachusetts and Portsmouth, New Hampshire" for the upcoming Historic Deerfield Forum "Balance and Beauty: Georgian Design in America," I am looking forward to seeing the inside of this important c. 1763 home. (www.historic-deerfield.org)