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Portsmouth Company

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 31, 2026
Entity authorityQ22059383 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Portsmouth Company was a cotton mill established in 1832 in South Berwick, Maine, UA, one of several in the area. It was operated for many years under the control of the Portsmouth, New Hampshire-based Hale family.

Its counting house is now a museum operated by the Old Berwick Historical Society.

History

The Portsmouth Company cotton mill was incorporated in 1831. It operated a large mill in South Berwick, Maine.

The Counting House museum

The Counting House is a historic industrial building at Main and Liberty Streets in South Berwick, the only company structure to survive. Although it is traditionally given a construction date of 1832, architectural evidence suggests a later one around 1850. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, and is now home to the Old Berwick Historical Society, which operates it as the Counting House Museum.

Description

The Portsmouth Company Counting House is a 2½ story brick structure set at the southern corner of Liberty Street and Main Street (Maine State Route 4), on the eastern bank of the Salmon Falls River. It sits on a granite foundation and is topped by a steeply pitched gabled roof.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Portsmouth Company” as open-knowledge reference entry. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Portsmouth, Company and Open-knowledge.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1832, 1831, 1850, 1975—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Portsmouth, Company and Open-knowledge providing the first useful test.
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A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Portsmouth Company”, the useful work is to connect “open-knowledge reference entry” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q22059383. Authority coordinates are 43.227, -70.811. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1832, 1831, 1850 and 1975.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Portsmouth Company” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.