Sherburne House is the only documented seventeenth century building remaining at Strawbery Banke. Certain distinctive features give it a haunting post medieval countenance: the steeply pitched roof, large plastered center chimney, small leaded diamond-paned windows, and the two gables on the front roof. In general appearance this house might have been as at home in late sixteenth-century East Anglia as in seventeenth-century New Hampshire. Sherburne House thus tells us much about the early people who settled Portsmouth.

First and foremost they were English. In this new and often strange land so distant from their home, they reproduced what was familiar and reassuring. When Captain John Sherburne built his home in 1695 more than sixty years after the first settlement on the Piscataqua, he built in wood, which earlier Englishmen could do before timber was depleted there, and continued to frame and decorate the house in ways his English grandfather might have recognized.

Even though these people thought of themselves as English and clung tenaciously to English ways, a subtle process of change had already begun, and by the late seventeenth-century it was well underway. The framing members were not made from the traditional oak, but from pine which was plentiful in this region. The exterior of the house was sheathed with wood clapboards at a time when English builders were resorting almost exclusively to masonry. Because of this the vertical studs between the corner posts, which in England were exposed to hold wattle and daub, in America became smaller and further apart to hold exterior clapboards.

These changes were closely related to the new environment in America, in particular to the seemingly inexhaustible forests. The development of a timber trading economy that made use of an extensive sawmill technology was especially important. After sixty years of settlement, the habits and methods of people along the Piscataqua had begun to change. They no longer were carbon copies of their English relatives. As habits changed, new ideas were formed. Out of this a new culture was emerging. In these small beginnings, in these seemingly inconsequential structural innovations of Sherburne House, we see the emergence in Portsmouth of the slow yet definite process of Americanization.

Sherburne bought the lot in 1698 when he died. The house then had only two rooms (one up and one down) and an attic. The chimney was on the east end. By the time John's widow, Mary deeded the house to their son Joseph in 1703, the east side had been added.

Inside, in the west room, the seventeenth century timber frame can be seen. The bottom edges of the massive summer beam running through the middle of the room from the west wall to the chimney have been planed. This is a chamfer, a purely decorative device dating from the seventeenth century when ceiling frames were exposed. The particular chamfer on this beam is a quarter-round which transforms first into flat bevels and then graceful "lamb's tongues" on either end. The floor joists and boards of the ceiling were white washed and the walls plastered. This helped relieve the darkness produced by low ceilings and small windows.

The later date of the east room can be seen in the somewhat smaller size of the framing members. Other differences can also be seen. The elaborate chamfer of the earlier room has been replaced by a simple bevel. Both above and below the large chimney girt running from the back to the front of the house, are shadows which indicate where wood moldings were nailed. The moldings represent a step toward the more elaborate paneling that soon completely covered the interior frames of Georgian houses in the eighteenth century. On the ceiling there are spots that produce a polka dot effect. This was called "sponge painting" a decoration from the early eighteenth century The brightly colored spots created a cheerful room belying a common stereotype of early colonists as dour, somber people.

Sherburne House underwent many other alterations during the thirty years following completion of its east end in 1703. These changes came in response to status-conscious desires of the eighteenth century occupants for a more up-to-date style (see the Georgian model inside the house). Further alterations were dictated by the different needs for living space of the many generations that lived here throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. All of these changes are important in illustrating the history of Portsmouth and Puddle Dock. The greatest significance of Sherburne House remains, however, that it is one of our last physical links with the earliest period of history at Strawbery Banke, the seventeenth century.

The restoration of Sherburne House was a gift of the Board of Overseers of Strawbery Banke and today contains an exhibit funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.