Harriet Kimball, the daughter of a local pharmacist, drove the founding of Portsmouth Cottage Hospital, the city's first, in 1884. Imagine the civic impulse that birthed it — an outgrowth of charitable work here that included almshouses for the poor and care for wounded veterans of the American Civil War. The driving force behind that effort was Harriet Kimball, the daughter of a local pharmacist.
The hospital’s beginnings were humble: it first occupied a large house at 51 Court Street, a building you can now find in the Strawbery Banke museum complex. That house proved inadequate, and in 1889 fundraising began for a proper facility. By 1895 a new campus stood where you now find city offices, the police station, and a senior living facility.
For a full century the Cottage Hospital served as Portsmouth’s primary hospital until 1986, when Portsmouth Regional Hospital opened. The oldest portion of the 1895 campus was recognized with listing on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996. Notice the buildings around this block — the repurposed 1895 hospital campus that still anchors this corner of the city.