Strolling through downtown Portsmouth, New Hampshire, last weekend, I came across a little reminder of home.
The Hartford Building, at the corner of Congress and Chestnut Streets, was built in the 1920s and renovated and expanded in 2012 to deliberately incorporate a more contemporary look.
The building, which currently houses a branch of the music and video game store Bull Moose, was not named for the city of Hartford but for Fernando Wood Hartford, reporter, newspaper publisher, and mayor of Portsmouth. Here's how the New Hampshire Gazette, which Hartford once owned, tells his - and their own - story:
Fernando Wood Hartford first arrived in Portsmouth some time before 1890 as a very young stringer for the Manchester Morning Union, a predecessor to the Union Leader. About 1891, beer baron and railroad tycoon Frank Jones probably put up the money for Hartford to acquire a local daily newspaper called the Penny Post, which Hartford renamed the Portsmouth Herald.
The major Portsmouth dailies at the time were the Journal and the Chronicle. The Gazette was being published weekly in tandem with the Chronicle, having been acquired by its owner thirty years earlier.
Frank Jones may have taken a liking to young Fernando, but affection was not universal. The Chronicle declared in 1892 that Hartford had "a lump of diseased tissue which serves him as a brain." In fairly short order, though, Hartford managed to acquire the Chronicle and the Gazette. He then set about eliminating his competition.
At that time the Herald and Gazette shared offices on Pleasant Street...some time in 1925, they moved into the Hartford Building, at 84 Congress.
Emblazoning your name on a building in foot-high letters might seem a bit outre, at least for those pre-Trump days, but consider: Hartford was not just the town's sole source of news - he was also the Mayor. First elected in 1920, he served seven non-consecutive terms.
Hartford died in 1938, and his son continued as publisher of the Gazette until 1963. The Gazette occupied the Hartford building for "about forty years." Today, it is "an eight page newspaper published 26 times a year, on alternating Fridays." Founded in 1756, it calls itself "The Nation's Oldest Newspaper."
The nation's oldest continually published newspaper (since 1764) is, of course, the Hartford Courant.
And in case you were wondering, there appears to be no connection between Fernando Wood Hartford and Connecticut's capital city. Although his namesake, New York politician Fernando Wood, once spent two weeks stumping in the Constitution State, culminating in what a 1990 biography of Wood called "a monster rally in Hartford."