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.
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Related events
- · World War I
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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