An Old Town by the Sea by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

WHEN Washington visited Portsmouth in 1789 he was not much impressed by / the architecture of the little town that had stood by him so stoutly in / the struggle for independence. "There are some good houses," he / writes, in a diary kept that year during a tour through Connecticut, / Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, "among which Colonel Langdon's may / be esteemed the first; but in general they are indifferent, and almost / entirely of wood. On wondering at this, as the country is full of stone / and good clay for bricks, I was told that on account of the fogs and / damp they deemed them wholesomer, and for that reason preferred wood / buildings."

The house of Colonel Langdon, on Pleasant Street, is an excellent sample / of the solid and dignified abodes which our great-grandsires had the / sense to build. The art of their construction seems to have been a lost / art these fifty years. Here Governor John Langdon resided from 1782 / until the time of his death in 1819 -- a period during which many an / illustrious man passed between those two white pillars that support the / little balcony over the front door; among the rest Louis Philippe and / his brothers, the Ducs de Montpensier and Beaujolais, and the Marquis de / Chastellus, a major-general in the French army, serving under the Count / de Rochambeau, whom he accompanied from France to the States in 1780. / The journal of the marquis contains this reference to his host: "After / dinner we went to drink tea with Mr. Langdon. He is a handsome man, and / of noble carriage; he has been a member of Congress, and is now one / of the first people of the country; his house is elegant and well / furnished, and the apartments admirably well wainscoted" (this reads / like Mr. Samuel Pepys); "and he has a good manuscript chart of the / harbor of Portsmouth. Mrs. Langdon, his wife, is young, fair, and / tolerably handsome, but I conversed less with her than her husband, in / whose favor I was prejudiced from knowing that he had displayed great / courage and patriotism at the time of Burgoynes's expedition."