Rambles about Portsmouth. Sketches of persons, localities, and incidents of two centuries: principally from tradition and unpublished documents. By Charles W. Brewster.

24 RAMBLES ABOUT PORTSMOUTH.
Portsmouth Pier Company was incorporated. Their block
of fourteen stores, three hundred twenty feet long and
three stories high, was said to have no equal in New England. Seventeen vessels for foreign trade were built here
in the year 1801. It was in 17,99 that this spirit of enterprise brought the Aqueduct into Portsmouth; and our
home enterprise was also the means of building Piscataqua
Bridge about the same time. It was then, too, that the
Salt works were constructed on our river.
It was in this ague of enterprise, nearly seventy years
ago, that our fathers came to the conclusion that a second
public Market House was needed in a more central position; and in 1794 the town purchased of John Fisher, of
London, for the sum of ~450, the land on which the Brick
Market House now stands. The condition of the sale was,
that the land shall be "used and occupied for a public market place for the town of Portsmouth forever." Fisher
purchased this'lot with a house upon it, of Josiah Moulton,
in 1744.
Previous to 1744, the whole of the land now occupied
by the Exchange Buildings, and about 100 feet deep, was
owned by Capt. Nathaniel Adams, the father of the late
Nathaniel Adams, Annalist of Portsmouth. In 1744, John
Fisher bought of the'heirs of Adams about two-thirds of
their land on the north side. Up to 1813, the Fisher main
sion stood on the site of the Rockingham Bank; was a
gambrel-roofed house very nearly resembling the residence
of Samuel Lord on Middle street, and like that house its
end was toward the street, within an open fence, and
facing a garden on the south. There was then no house
between Fisher's and Adams's. The latter was of two
stories, on the corner of State-street; outside of the present corner, 19 feet on Pleasant, and 12 feet on State street.
A row of large elms grew on the outside of the unpaved
side-walk between the two houses. Under these trees was