Strawbery Banke’s Newest Historical House is a House Party from a Distant Past

With lobster cooking on the kitchen stove and 1930s hits floating through the apartment from the living room, Penhallow-Cousins House, Strawbery Banke’s newest historical home, feels like you’re arriving early to a house party.  

The Cousins’ living room displays family photos shared with the museum and features a restored 1930s radio playing jazz music. Photography by David J. Murray, ClearEyePhoto.com

That’s exactly the energy the museum was hoping to replicate, because that’s how Geraldine “Jeri” Cousins remembered her childhood home. Through her memory, oral history and heirlooms, from 2016 until her passing in 2020, Jeri Cousins was able to work with the museum to help lay the groundwork to recreate her childhood home and tell her family’s story.

“Everything happened concurrently,” says Elizabeth Farish, Strawbery Banke’s chief curator. 

Farish gives the breakdown: Penhallow House, which had been used as a bathroom and then as storage for decades, needed foundational repairs after a major storm flooded the house. Before those repairs could be made, an archeological dig headed by Dr. Alix Martin, Strawbery Banke’s archeologist, needed to take place. The museum had already decided to convert Penhallow House into a historic home, and knew they wanted the house to be interpreted during the 1930s, when it was subdivided into three apartments, and focus on the Cousins family, specifically, Jeri’s uncle, Kenneth Richardson.

Farish and Jeri already knew each other through Jeri’s involvement with the Seacoast African Cultural Center, but they were formally introduced through Valerie Cunningham, founder of the then Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail. 

“I want to meet all former Puddle Dock residents,” Farish says. “Valerie knew Jeri’s parents, and had professionally connected with the museum in the 1990s while developing the Abbott House and Store. She collected a lot of oral histories from the Black community about what it was like to be here in Portsmouth in the 1940s, when the Abbott Store was interpreted. One of those interviews was with Jeri’s mother … and she also did an oral history for that project with Jeri herself.”

In 2024, the house was lifted to build a new foundation that will protect the circa 1750 house frame from stormwater. Photography by David J. Murray, ClearEyePhoto.com

While sitting down with Jeri to interview her about her family and her uncle, who was a supervisor at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and part of the Equal Opportunity Employment Organization, it became apparent that Jeri’s occupation of the house was significant.

“Our period of interpretation is a tiny little sliver that we don’t already talk about,” Farish says. “We talk about World War II in the Abbott Store, and we go a little bit earlier to 1919 to talk about the Shapiros. We don’t talk about this period that is the Great Depression and the Great Migration. If we jump to Kenneth’s storyline, that would be right in the midst of World War II — it wasn’t a complete story.”

But Jeri’s story was.

“Jeri was very much a curator of her own life,” Farish says. “She wanted her story told in this way.”

From her conversations with Jeri, Farish learned the ins and outs of the Cousins’ lives — how there was always lobster boiling on the stove because she and her dad would fish together and catch them for free (because potato chips cost money); how fastidious her father was and how much he cared about how he presented himself; how she and her friends were always losing marbles in the backyard; and how her young parents were always entertaining company.

During Martin’s excavation, as Jeri’s stories about her childhood were unearthed, she found a “surprising” number of 20th century artifacts — fragmented bottles of perfume and soap and dozens of marbles, which are now reunited with the home in medicine cabinets and in Jeri’s recreated bedroom. If you think about it, it feels mind-blowing, but to Martin, it’s the natural order of life. 

Before the house was rehabilitated, it was used for storage. Photography by David J. Murray, ClearEyePhoto.com

“It feels perfectly natural,” Martin says. “I can see the mind-blowing part, but it’s full circle. It makes sense. They lived here. They were here, and now here’s all the different evidence of why we can tell this authentic story.”

“We have all this stuff from the 1930s and 1940s while Jeri was living there,” Martin says. “It really added support to the oral history. She was telling us the information that we could gather from the house itself, but then the things left behind added to the story.”

Over the four years they spent together, the trio became friends and their relationship became more personal. Farish and Jeri became particularly fast friends, because Jeri saw a lot of similarities between her daughter, Judith Baumann, and Farish (including a shared birthday).

“I was telling her personal stories. It’s not like a superficial interpretation. It’s sort of the closest as you can get,” Farish says. “Jeri was sort of like my partner. We did it together in a certain way.”

“I think the relationship that (Jeri and Elizabeth) formed also is what was so important and essential to what we have today,” Martin says. “Because Jeri trusted (Elizabeth), it meant that after she passed away and we started working with her other family members, that they trusted Elizabeth in particular and Strawbery Banke as an institution.”

While Jeri died before she could see the completed project, when Penhallow-Cousins House was cleared and cleaned, she was able to return to her childhood home for the first time in decades and tell Farish and Martin about the layout of their kitchen and living room. While walking through the first floor, she told them about her parents’ furniture, and where her dad used to like to sit after work and sip on a glass of whiskey.

A dresser in Jeri’s recreated bedroom displays Jeri’s own ceramic cat figurine, a jar full of marbles, and a photo of Jeri alongside her recreated dance recital costume. Photography by David J. Murray, ClearEyePhoto.com

“That was sort of surreal,” Farish says. “She left as a teenager and now she’s coming back as a woman in her 80s… I think that was a really big deal for her. It was a pretty moving experience to be in that building, because Jeri did want it. Jeri could see (the exhibit) clear as day. She was like, ‘Of course, this is the story you should be telling. Me and my parents lived in this house and that’s the story.’ ”

After Jeri’s passing in March 2020, Farish and the museum connected with Jeri’s daughter to help see the project through to the end. A resident of San Diego, Baumann would visit her mom four times a year, so she knew about the project at Strawbery Banke and had met Elizabeth during one of her visits home and was happy to help.  

“It made me feel good that I could do that,” Baumann says. “After my mom passed, I had to wait a few weeks even to get a flight to New Hampshire to empty out her apartment. I put everything in storage, which sat there for two years, and then I came back in 2024. Elizabeth and I had stayed in touch after we met, so I got in touch with her and told her I was flying out there to empty out the storage unit and she can go through things and take whatever she wants for the house.”

For days, Baumann and Farish went through the storage unit together, sorting through photos and furniture for things to bring back to the museum. 

“I felt good about letting her have original stuff from back in the day, like my great-grandmother’s clock,” Baumann says. 

“To have physical objects with Jeri’s notes written all over them started to make it a joyful experience for both me and Judith,” Farish says. “It was feeling much more real.”

When it was time for the grand opening, 10 years after Jeri’s first interviews, Baumann and other members of Jeri’s family were invited to see the house for the first time. Standing in her mother’s restored childhood home that she had only heard of, seeing recreations of her grandmother’s green satin party dress and her mother’s feathered tap costume, Baumann was overwhelmed.

A family tree painted by Alex Edgerly includes four generations, all of whom lived in the Penhallow- Cousins House at some point between 1916 and 1949. Photography by David J. Murray, ClearEyePhoto.com

“It’s just so real… my family would be very proud — my grandparents, my mom — this is amazing and it’s real. It’s very beautiful. It’s just a beautiful thing that they’ve done,” Baumann says.

Friends of the family have had a similar response.

“A friend of mine went with me to the open house. She used to work for my mom and she was very close with my mom, and would visit my mom all the time,” Baumann says. “We did a private tour of the house and she just kept saying, ‘Oh my gosh, I remember that, that was in your mom’s kitchen! That’s your grandmother’s clock!’ There’s like so much stuff in here from my mom’s that she has held on to for years that was her mother’s, her great-grandmother’s. It’s just amazing. I’m so glad that it’s got put to some good use.”

Jeri is also a part of the house — her photo hangs on the wall on the second floor above a button visitors can press that plays recordings from her conversations with Farish.

“I love listening to my mom’s voice,” Baumann says. “I actually recorded each one on my phone. (Strawbery Banke) doing that, I think really puts the icing on the cake for me.”

“I feel pretty proud of it,” Farish says. “It’s an important story to tell, and the way we were able to use so many different avenues of interpretation is the ideal. And the family’s joy in seeing it is definitely good enough for me.”

Martin added that she’s heard Farish say a few times that this is the most important thing she’ll ever do, to which Farish agrees.

“So we can probably retire,” Martin joked. “But we won’t, because we want to bring this same model and braided lines of evidence to our next project.”

Jeri’s parents’ recreated bedroom. On the dresser are family belongings donated by Judith Baumann alongside objects chosen by staff based on archeological research. Photography by David J. Murray, ClearEyePhoto.com

Without the dedication of community partners at the Seacoast African Cultural Center, Sandi Clark Kaddy, the Black Heritage Trail, Baumann and, of course, Jeri, this project couldn’t have been completed this way.

“They really did (a good job),” Baumann says. “I mean things they (replicated), like my mom’s old dancing outfit? They created things to be like they’re supposed to be. It’s very personal, and they did a really good job. I’m thrilled!”

Baumann, Farish and Martin all agree that Jeri would be too.

Visit strawberybanke.org for hours and information on the Penhallow-Cousins House. Also, keep an eye out for Alix Martin’s book about the Penhallow-Cousins House dig, to be published at the beginning of 2027, and more.