New Hampshire World War I Memorial
Portsmouth, Rockingham County, New Hampshire
Marker Inscription
Memorial to the Sailors and Soldiers of / New Hampshire / Who Participated in the World War 1917-1919
The Story
When the United States entered the Great War in 1917, New Hampshire sent thousands of its young men into the trenches of France and onto the decks of a wartime navy, and roughly 700 of them never came home. This monument in Portsmouth — long a Navy town anchored by the historic Portsmouth Naval Shipyard — was raised by a grateful state to honor everyone who served between America's 1917 entry and the peace that followed in 1919. It belongs to the wave of memorials that communities across the country built in the 1920s and 1930s to fix the war's sacrifice in bronze and granite before living memory faded.
Why it matters
World War I was America's violent debut as a global power, and monuments like this one record how even small states poured a generation of their sons into that first modern, industrialized war.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the spring of 1917, the United States stopped watching the Great War from across the ocean and joined it. For nearly three years, Americans had read about the trenches of France as someone else's catastrophe. Then the country declared war, and towns from the seacoast to the mountains began saying goodbye to their young men.
New Hampshire was a small state doing an outsized share of the work. Its mills and factories were part of the Progressive-era industrial machine that the war suddenly turned toward rifles, uniforms, and ships, and its people were asked to buy bonds, ration food, and send their sons.
Portsmouth felt all of this with a particular intensity, because Portsmouth has always been a Navy town. The seacoast city and its historic naval shipyard on the Piscataqua River gave the region a direct, daily stake in a war fought as much on and under the water as in the mud of the Western Front.
People & events
This memorial is dedicated, in its own words, to the sailors and soldiers of New Hampshire who took part in the World War between 1917 and 1919 — the span from America's entry to the formal peace that followed the fighting.
Behind that simple dedication are thousands of individual stories. New Hampshire men shipped out to training camps and then to France, where they served in the enormous American force that reached the front in the war's final year. Others served afloat, a fitting path for young men from a state whose identity is tied to the sea and to the shipbuilding trade on the Piscataqua.
Many did not come home. Hundreds of the state's sons died in the war and the influenza epidemic that swept through the crowded camps and troopships alongside it. Memorials like this one were the community's answer to that grief: a way to gather countless private losses into a single public act of remembrance, and to make sure the names and the sacrifice would not fade as the survivors aged.
Its place in the American story
World War I was America's violent debut as a modern global power. It was the first time the country sent a mass army across the Atlantic, and the first war fought with the full weight of industry — machine guns, artillery, submarines, and mass production — behind it.
This Portsmouth memorial is one small piece of a national impulse. In the 1920s and 1930s, communities across the United States raised monuments in bronze and granite to fix the war's cost in place before living memory faded. Together they form a quiet map of how deeply the war reached into ordinary American life, down to the smallest states.
Portsmouth's naval setting adds another layer to that story. The war accelerated American shipbuilding and submarine work, and a seacoast city with a naval shipyard sat close to the industrial heart of the effort. A memorial here honors not only those who served in uniform but the wider community that built and supplied a wartime fleet.
If you visit
Come to this memorial the way you would to any war monument — slowly, and ready to read. The dedication is plain and direct, honoring the state's sailors and soldiers and marking the war by the years the United States was in it, 1917 to 1919. Let that phrasing sink in before you move on.
Take a moment to picture the scale behind the stone. Every figure it stands for was a family in a New Hampshire town waiting for letters, and for many of them the letter that came was the worst kind. A memorial turns that private waiting into something a whole community can share.
Portsmouth rewards the visitor who lingers. This is a walkable, historic seacoast city with a deep naval past, and the memorial fits naturally into a day spent exploring the waterfront and the old streets. If you're planning a New England road trip, let this stop be the moment you trade sightseeing for reflection — a short, grounding pause before the harbor, the shops, and the sea air pull you onward.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related events
- · World War I
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
William A. Fenlason Square
Franklin, NH
This square in Franklin honors a young New Hampshire soldier who served with the Machine Gun Company of the 103rd Infantry, part of the 26th 'Yankee' Division — a New England National Guard division that was among the first American units sent to France in World War I. Wounded in action on July 22, 1918, during the summer when Allied and American forces launched the counteroffensives that finally turned the war, he lingered for three months before dying of his wounds that October, just weeks before the Armistice. Naming a public square for one local man was a common way American towns turned private grief into permanent civic memory after the Great War.
Swasey Parkway — Gift of Ambrose Swasey
Exeter, NH
This riverside parkway along the Squamscott River was a 1931 gift to the town of Exeter from Ambrose Swasey, a New Hampshire-born mechanical engineer and industrialist who rose from a Northfield farm to co-found the Warner & Swasey Company of Cleveland. That firm became famous for precision machine tools and for building some of the era's great astronomical telescopes, and Swasey channeled the fortune he earned into philanthropy for his native state. In dedicating the parkway he gave Exeter a lasting stretch of public green space where the town could gather along the water.
Swasey Parkway
Exeter, NH
Swasey Parkway runs along the tidal Squamscott River in Exeter, the gift of native son Ambrose Swasey, an inventor and machine-tool maker who was born here in 1846 before making his fortune building precision instruments and astronomical telescope mounts. Dedicated in 1930, the riverside promenade was his way of giving something lasting back to the New Hampshire town of his childhood. More than ninety years on, it endures as a green civic space where residents still stroll, gather, and watch the river slip past.
Merrill-DeSilvio House
Exeter, NH
This plaque marks a home built around 1820, when Exeter was a settled and prospering New England town well past its colonial and Revolutionary beginnings. In the Federal era, substantial wood-frame houses like this one lined the streets of southern New Hampshire's river towns, their dignified proportions reflecting the confidence of the young republic. The hyphenated name records two families who shaped the house's long life — the Merrills who are associated with its early years and the DeSilvios of a later generation — a common New England way of remembering a home through the people who kept it.