As a teenager growing up in Portsmouth, Valerie Cunningham was proud of her family’s African American heritage, but she was also curious about local Black history. While working at Portsmouth Public Library, she discovered Brewster’s Rambles About Portsmouth. From Brewster’s stories about local Blacks, Valerie found clues to a history that until then had been invisible. She began a quest that would consume the rest of her life as researcher, historian and chronicler of Black Portsmouth from 1645 to present day.
Timothy Blanchard, born in Wilton, New Hampshire, in 1791, the eighth of ten children, was not yet 21 when his father, George Blanchard, turned over to him management of his veterinary practice and land holdings.
Although his father was still alive at the time of the 1820 federal census, “Timo Blanchard” was listed as head of the household of six, including a number of “free people other than Indians.” Blanchard property had for many years served as a place of refuge for a small rural community of free African Americans.
Inez Glenn Bishop was born in Florida in 1927. But it wasn’t until she moved North that she realized her skin color made her feel like a second-class citizen.
She and her husband, Frank Bishop, moved to Manchester, NH, in 1947, following her mother, Bertha Evans, and her brother-in-law. The Bishops found not many people were willing to rent to Blacks. And then there was work.
Prince Hastings is recorded as living in Warner by the 1820 census. His small home was high in the Mink Hills next to a small wetland now known as “Chocolate Swamp.” Prince probably worked as a laborer for local farms. It is not known what brought him to Warner or where he came from but the 1820 census indicates several other African-American families in Warner (Clark, Haskell, Cary, and Jackson). Perhaps Prince traveled to Warner with them.
Rosary Broxay Cooper, daughter of a Baptist minister, was born in 1913 and grew up in Eatonville, FL, one of the oldest Black towns in America. She graduated from the all-Black Florida Normal School with certification as a children’s nurse.
Hired to care for the children of the Merrill family, she traveled with them to New England, where the family owned a resort in Maine about 15 minutes from Portsmouth. It was there, in 1938, that she met and married Owen Finnigan Cooper and moved to Portsmouth. They lived with his mother and sister.
As young teenager Katie Brown rose to read the Emancipation Proclamation before a crowded South Meeting House celebration in 1882, she drew her courage from her grandmother, Annette Brown.
Katie lived with her grandmother on Portsmouth’s waterfront, where Mrs. Brown is believed to have taken in strangers seeking shelter as they escaped from slavery in the 1840s. Her husband was from Pennsylvania, where ships often embarked for northern ports carrying fugitives. Katie’s father and her uncle both served as sailors in the Civil War. By 1883, the household included only Katie and her grandmother.
Anthony Clark may have been small of stature (5’3″) but he loomed large with his ability to play fiddle and call a dance. He ran week-long dancing classes at various halls and inns in western Merrimack County and was called a “dancing master.” Theresa Harvey, writing in 1823, recalls Clark at a muster, followed by a party at her Uncle Jonathan’s Musterfield Farm in Sutton:
“…As soon as possible after the dinner tables were cleared away, the hall was made ready for the dancers…Anthony Clark, the fiddler and dancing master, probably did more toward instructing the young people in the arts and graces of politeness and good manners than any other man of his day and generation…”
