Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and the Strawberry Bank Petition

Portsmouth, New Hampshire, used to be Strawberry Bank, and in 1653 its settlers asked for a new name because the town sat at “the river’s mouth.” Some later histories give the credit to Captain John Mason and his ties to Portsmouth, England, but the petition is the oldest paper we found that explains the name, and it doesn’t mention him.

A bank full of strawberries

The first name was about as literal as names get. Nathaniel Adams, in his Annals of Portsmouth (1825), says the riverbank above the Great House “produced a large quantity of strawberries, on which account it was called Strawberry-bank.” People in the towns around kept calling Portsmouth “The Bank,” he adds, until the middle of the 1700s.

The settlers themselves treated the old name as a bit of an accident. In their petition, they call it “Strabery Banke, accidentally soe called, by reason of a banke where straberries was found in this place.”

The petition of May 1653

Charles W. Brewster printed the whole petition in his Rambles about Portsmouth in 1859, from a copy found among the early Massachusetts documents. It’s addressed to the General Court in Boston from “the Inhabits of the Towne at present called Strabery Banke.” They had between 50 and 60 families, they wrote, and the land they lived on was “soe badd, its incredible to beleeve except those who have seen it.” They wanted a proper township.

Then comes the line about the name: “now we humbly desire to have it called Portsmouth, being a name most suitable for this place, it being the river’s mouth, and good as any in this land.” Brian Pendleton and four others signed it “In behalf of the rest.”

The court first wanted to put it off “because of Mr. Mason’s claim on the land,” Brewster says, but on May 28, 1653, it allowed the town “to be called Portsmouth.” If you want to read the petition in all its wild spelling, Brewster’s book is the place to find it.

Henry Gannett’s 1905 place-name bulletin sums it up as a name chosen “because situated at the river mouth and a good harbor,” and the federal place-name database repeats his words. The petition itself says “good as any in this land,” without the word harbor.

The John Mason version

That’s where it gets messy. Adams, writing in 1825, tells it another way: “Captain John Mason, the original proprietor of the province, gave the name of Portsmouth to this place from Portsmouth in England, of which town he was Governor.” Alonzo Fogg’s 1874 gazetteer quotes the petition and then adds that Portsmouth “was also the name of the English City in which John Mason was born.”

Charles Wesley Tuttle’s 1887 book on Mason doesn’t back up either detail. Tuttle says Mason was born in King’s Lynn, in Norfolk, though he did live in Portsmouth, England, for years. And Mason died in 1635, eighteen years before the petition. He’s the man who named New Hampshire, but he wasn’t around when this name was asked for, and in 1653 the settlers still called the place Strabery Banke.

So the record points to the settlers. The name they asked for also belonged to what Tuttle calls England’s “chief naval station,” and the petition doesn’t say whether that played a part. When you say Portsmouth today, you’re using the name the settlers asked for, and the only reason they put on paper is the river.

Sources & further reading

• Charles W. Brewster, Rambles about Portsmouth (1859), pp. 22–23. The full text of the May 1653 petition from “Strabery Banke,” the court’s delay over “Mr. Mason’s claim,” and the grant of May 28, 1653.
• Nathaniel Adams, Annals of Portsmouth (1825), pp. 21, 387. The strawberries on the riverbank and “The Bank” as a nickname (p. 21); the claim that Mason named the town after Portsmouth, England, “of which town he was Governor” (p. 387).
• Alonzo J. Fogg, The Statistics and Gazetteer of New-Hampshire (1874), p. 311. The petition quoted again, plus the claim that Mason was born in Portsmouth, England.
• Charles Wesley Tuttle, Capt. John Mason, the Founder of New Hampshire (1887), pp. 7, 21–22, 29. Mason’s birth in King’s Lynn, his years in Portsmouth, England, and his death in December 1635.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 251. Strawberry Banke renamed “because situated at the river mouth and a good harbor.”
• GNIS feature 869312 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Portsmouth, which repeats Gannett’s line.