"[6]: 175–6 Wentworth gave up rental of the brick house in 1759, the presumed year of a permanent move to the Little Harbor mansion,[7] whence he likely continued to sign charters creating new towns across New Hampshire and Vermont.

[11] Even a back-channel route passing behind the various islands that dot the southwest edges of the river have deceptively swift currents, including the small and seemingly still tidal harbor at which the house is situated, as illustrated in an announcement in the New Hampshire Gazette, May 12, 1758: "Last Tuesday a very likely young Negro Man, belonging to his Excellency our Governor, in wading into the Water, at Little Harbour, in order to bring a small Float ashore, was, by the strength of the Tide, carried off into deep Water, and so drowned."

This was a significant signal of what would become, toward the end of the century, a growing interest among Americans in their own history as represented in surviving historic buildings and the stories of people associated with them, as exemplified in the 1850s by efforts to save George Washington's home in Virginia.

[13] Photos from as late as 1937 show the house furnished with an assortment of antiques, arranged to satisfy late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century taste and sense of comfort,[14] characteristic of Colonial Revival interiors.

Some unity of appearance was given with a uniform cladding of the exterior with clapboards, and the interior is finished throughout with plaster and woodwork characteristic of contemporary local high-end domestic architecture.

The status of each space is readily identified by both size and finish of rooms, and are distributed in three wings, that appear to be intended, respectively, for formal entertaining, family life, and servants' work.

Benning may have been aware of that distant relation's neo-Palladian expansion of his family's country seat in the 1730s and '40s at Wentworth Woodhouse in Yorkshire, transforming it into one of the largest mansions in Europe.

Benning Wentworth himself seems to have been in London in the 1730s to deal with a mercantile affair that, through a complex chain of events involving creditors and royal petitions, both drove him into bankruptcy and elevated him to the governorship of New Hampshire.

Those who disliked him, referred to him as a Spanish grandee, associating his imperious self-presentation with his exposure to European culture through his trade with Spain back in the 1720s.

[19] The formal style Wentworth mimicked characteristically had public areas including an impressive hall and a grand salon, known in Britain as a saloon.

[18] At Little Harbor, Wentworth followed this interior hierarchical social organization, in a visually haphazard way that adjusted pre-existing frames to an awkwardly sloped landscape.

The tight space in this vestibule does not allow room for the Windsor chairs enumerated in inventories of the front halls of many larger New England houses of this era.

As late as the Coolidge ownership, these racks were filled with ten flintlock muskets with bayonets, marked, in French, "Manufactury of the King at Ste.

Preceded by the gun rack in the vestibule, the political theme continues in a large full-length portrait of Benning Wentworth, painted by Joseph Blackburn in 1760, that originally hung in this room.

Replication of the mantelpiece from that house, one among many to choose from in a pattern book, suggest that Wentworth was consciously connecting himself with the hierarchy of British government.

Its long shape and two small auxiliary rooms suggest its possible use as a ballroom, suited to the long-ways or contradancing that prevailed in this region at the time.

In Benning's day, specially-dedicated dining rooms were only just emerging in Britain,[18]: 203  and would be unknown in New England until the very end of the eighteenth or beginning of the nineteenth century.

The room is outfitted with reproduction yellow wool damask bed canopy, curtains, chair upholstery and dressing table cover en suite in an extremely high-end fashion of the era.

[8]: 7 The stew kitchen is presumed to be associated with John King, who was described in a 1773 newspaper account as "a Frenchman born, dark complexion, thick-sett, about Five feet six or seven Inches high, wears his own Hair, and talks broken English."

King was a Portsmouth tavern keeper whom Benning Wentworth employed to visit the Little Harbor mansion two or three times a week to shave him, dress him, and cook.

[8]: 6  The combination of large fireplace with broad hearth, two ovens, and French stew kitchen, dairy or pantry, gave the house ample support space for ambitious entertainment.

This arrangement also meant the comings and goings of hired hands and slaves from adjacent barns, orchards, fields and wharves need not intersect the spaces used by family members or even appear in their view.

The north end of the larger garden, nearest the house, was lawn by the twentieth-century and disrupted in the late twentieth century by the construction of a septic field.

[8] This view equates with the ideals of the emerging landscape garden movement in Britain,[30] and provides a tantalizing possibility that Wentworth or his guests may have been cognizant of it.

It is the earliest known example of such a roof deck in New England, though evidence of others from later periods exists, as at the circa 1797 Rider Tavern in Charlton, Massachusetts.

[31] In a shipbuilding city like Portsmouth, it was probably a simple matter to find workmen familiar with working with tar and hemp cordage, to build and maintain this deck.

But, eventually, the harsh New England weather prevailed, and at an unknown date the roof deck was built over with a gabled attic to shed snow and rain.

– The above containing about one hundred acres of Tillage, Mowing and Pasture Land, together with two excellent Orchards, the whole enclosed with a strong and well built stone Wall.

An Edwardian era barn on the historic site property was adapted in the late 1990s by the state as a suite for a visitor center, function rooms and offices.

[32] The gallery has also formed an educational component and is working on a weeklong, day residency as an homage to the late 19th-century artist colony established by John Templeton Coolidge.