Houses once on or near Deer Street were moved to make the Portsmouth Parade Historic District, the New Hampshire pocket everyone calls The Hill. This is a tight cluster of closely spaced historic houses, bounded on the north by Deer Street and on the east by High Street at the northern edge of downtown Portsmouth. What you see here is not an accidental neighborhood but a grouping created by a road-widening project: houses originally on or near Deer Street were moved to form this small parade of homes.
The district was nominated for the National Register of Historic Places in February 1972 as local authorities were submitting funding requests to HUD, for which National Register status is a criterion, and it was added to the Register on March 24, 1972. Contemporary descriptions called it "an artificial entity created by the relocation of all but four of its fourteen buildings. That registered identity shifted: in June 1975 the nomination was returned by the Keeper of the Register, who recommended that the buildings be nominated individually, and in December 1975 thirteen of the fourteen buildings were slated for sale at auction after a breach of mortgage conditions.
Notice Deer Street and High Street nearby, and picture the slow migrations that made this Hill.