At the north end of Horse Lane, facing Court Street, stands Shapley Town House, which today serves as Strawbery Banke's administrative and curatorial offices. The building is two individual adjoining houses. With their narrow frontage to the street and considerable depth from front to back, they are typical of city row houses or "town houses." This building, however, is unique. It apparently is the only such brick double structure in Portsmouth deliberately designed to appear as a freestanding single dwelling. It was built as an investment property by Reuben Shapley a successful merchant and sea captain, not long after he bought the lot in 1814.

Shapley owned all the property along Court (then Pitt) Street from Horse Lane west to Atkinson Street. His ships tied up at Shapley's Wharf, which jutted into the Piscataqua at the foot of Court Street. His own large gambrel-roofed mansion stood on land just west of the town house, now the site of a parking lot. He also converted the building west of the parking lot into the house that now stands there. It is ironic that the two houses Shapley built on either side of his own are still extant, but that his own home is gone.

Shapley almost lost his own house in the great city fire of 1813. Fortunately enough people came to his aid to save it. He had not been so lucky in 1811 when one of his ships, the Wonolanset, put in at his wharf laden with molasses, cotton, hemp, flour, and naval stores, probably from the Carolinas. Within the hour the ship was a blazing inferno. One of the sailors had carelessly struck a light near the hemp in the steerage. All efforts to save her were futile and she finally was cut adrift to sink on the rocks, a $12,000 loss for Reuben Shapley.

The specter of fire thus was vivid in Shapley's mind when he built this town house. A brick firewall, invisible from the outside, separates the two sides without interruption from cellar to roof. The well-proportioned windows and doors and the fanlights over the doors are typical of town houses in the Federal period.