MacPheadris–Warner House

In 1737, Sarah Wentworth Macpheadris married George Jaffrey, a wealthy Portsmouth merchant and business associate of Archibald Macpheadris. Sarah and her 14-year-old daughter, Mary, moved to the Jaffrey Mansion, a few houses up Daniel Street. Sarah's brother Royal Governor Benning Wentworth of the Province of New Hampshire then occupied the Warner House for nearly 20 years and used it as the Governor's Mansion. Eventually, Benning removed to his country estate in Little Harbor now known as the Wentworth-Coolidge Mansion. Reportedly, he left a few broken windows at the Warner House and never paid his sister rent. ==Family occupancy==

Macpheadris's only surviving child was Mary Macpheadris Osborne. In 1760, the recently widowed heiress married Jonathan Warner, a Portsmouth merchant and widower of her deceased cousin, Mary Nelson Warner. Jonathan Warner brought eleven-year-old daughter Mary "Polly" Warner, his only child, to live in the house. The house was remodeled to suit the fashionable tastes of Jonathan Warner. Until 1932, the house remained in the hands of Warner's family descendants. From the 1880s until the late 1920s the descendants used the Warner House as a summer residence. ==Warner House Association==

When offered for sale in the early 1930s by descendants, the house was threatened with demolition when an oil company offered to buy the property to erect a gas station. A group of local early preservationists led by Edith Greenough Wendell set out to stop the destruction. In 1931, the Warner House Association was established, and during the Great Depression, the Association was able to accomplish an extraordinary feat and raise the necessary funds ($10,000) to purchase the house in March 1932. A few months later, the historic house museum opened with little to no furnishings. Over time, many of the original family furnishings have returned to the house. Although the early Association originally sought to interpret the property from the Macpheadris era to its original Georgian height (c. 1762), the modern Association details its earliest to its latest days of private ownership up to and including the early Association interpretation. ==See also==