The Portsmouth Circle Farm: Samuel Whidden’s Enduring Legacy

On May 8, 1985, a check for $34,879.23 was issued by the New Hampshire State Treasurer to the University of New Hampshire (UNH). It was used to help purchase a nearby farm and was the last piece of a bequest, a generous gift of land to the university, made seven. Today, the gift's benefit to UNH and agriculture and forestry in New Hampshire has likely surpassed anything that Samuel Whidden, the donor, could have conceived of more than 110 years ago.

All day every day, the Portsmouth, N.H. traffic circle is a whirl of traffic and activity. And whether one enters or exits it on Route 4, Route 16, the Route 1 Bypass, the Spaulding Turnpike or I-95, it involves driving in a busy, highly developed area. It may therefore be difficult to imagine the surroundings as they were more than 100 years ago: quiet farmland that was the scene of UNH agricultural and forestry education and research for nearly half a century.

Samuel Whidden, a Portsmouth farmer, wanted to promote agriculture in New Hampshire. In 1914, Whidden bequeathed his farm to the New Hampshire College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, as UNH was known at the time. The more than 300 acres were to be used for forestry and agriculture education, with any profits and income from the land going to the college. Whidden's will explicitly forbade the sale of any part of

the real estate, so UNH retained it after his death in 1917 despite its distance from the main Durham campus. And it did indeed use some of the six different plots of land for education and research for more than four decades. One plot hosted horticultural research with grapes, apples, pears and what were described as "cane fruits," while woodlot management and forestry activities occurred mostly on two other plots.

Development and change in Portsmouth

By 1960, however, the Portsmouth area was changing rapidly. Commercial development encroached on the Whidden Farm land, limiting its usefulness to the university. The problems had progressed far beyond the inconvenience of reaching the site from the UNH campus. Agricultural work became more difficult when human and vehicular traffic, real estate development, and industry encroached, and the property became less practical for meeting the teaching and research missions. A report prepared at the time succinctly characterized the situation at the research site: "Too many people around and too far away." The report recommended harvesting and selling any timber remaining on the former farm and selling the land, and willing buyers had come forward. But this recommendation presented challenges if UNH were to honor the intent of the original will.

The university came up with a clever solution. It petitioned the New Hampshire Superior Court in 1961 to permit the sale of the Whidden Farm land and have the money from the sale held by the New Hampshire State Treasurer's office. UNH would subsequently be able to request funds for the sole purpose of purchasing agricultural land closer to the Durham campus for its research and educational needs. The court granted the request, the land was sold1 and developed, and the "Whidden Farm Proceeds" entered the UNH balance sheet.

Multiplying the philanthropic impact

The Whidden Farm's sale helped UNH establish two highly valuable agricultural facilities. Soon after the court decision in 1961, it purchased a large farm historically known as the Laton Farm located only three miles from campus in Madbury. Now known as the UNH Kingman Research Farm, its 360 acres have been used for horticultural, agronomic, forestry, wildlife management and aquaculture research, serves as an important site for producing hay and corn for feeding UNH's dairy and equine herds, and provides recreation for the public at large. The Kingman Research Farm is also the primary site of the UNH cucurbits breeding program, a program that has spanned nearly 80 years and has produced more than 100 varieties of melons, squashes and pumpkins grown locally and around the globe.

Eight years later, UNH used most of the remaining funds to buy the 200-acre Burley-Demeritt Farm and Mariotti Homestead in Lee. The last of the funds contributed to the purchase of the approximately 100-acre Dudley Farm, also in Lee, in 1985. Adjacent to the Burley-Demeritt Farm, it has both forested and open areas as well as frontage along the Lamprey River. In 2005, these sites were transformed from primarily swine research, and UNH became the first land-grant university in the nation to establish an organic dairy research farm.

The Organic Dairy Research Farm is now home to about 100 Jersey cows, heifers and calves. Areas of study include improving dairy herd health, with research into nutrition and the use of organic supplements to complement pasture feeding and mitigate methane emissions, as well as innovative work with sensor-based monitoring of cow biometrics. Other projects focus on the management of the associated pastures, streams, soils and other natural resources. The Organic Dairy's woodlot is multi-use land and, along with wooded portions of the former Burley-Demeritt Farm, is open to the public for hiking, fishing and other non-motorized recreation.

The next 108 years

Today, 108 years after Samuel Whidden's death and 40 years after the last remnant of his gift was used, UNH is one of the United States' leading agricultural and forestry research institutions. Although somewhat removed geographically from the original Whidden Farm site, UNH was able to leverage the gift to nearly double the amount of land to support its land-grant research and education missions, and the Kingman Research Farm and the Organic Dairy Research Farm are now world-class facilities where innovation, discovery and hands-on workforce development for New Hampshire are at the core of their functionOne can imagine that after a trip to UNH's research farms today, Mr. Whidden would be proud of the legacy he created through his generosity. And the next time you make the somewhat harrowing circumnavigation of the Portsmouth traffic circle, it could provide a reminder of the connection the land has to the history and future of agricultural and forestry research and education at the Granite State's land-grant university.