John Paul Jones House, Portsmouth

Just off the old streets of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, stands a gambrel-roofed colonial house that once sheltered the most daring naval officer the young United States ever produced. The John Paul Jones House, built in seventeen fifty-eight by master housewright Hopestill Cheswell, one of colonial New Hampshire's most accomplished African American craftsmen, was built for Captain Gregory Purcell and became a boarding house run by his widow Sarah.

John Paul Jones arrived here twice during the Revolutionary War, lodging on Middle Street while he supervised the outfitting of his warships in Portsmouth Harbor. Jones was born plain John Paul in Scotland in seventeen forty-seven, the son of a gardener on a country estate. He went to sea at thirteen, made his way to Virginia, added "Jones" to his name to escape a murder charge stemming from a shipboard dispute, and threw his lot in with the American rebellion.

From this Portsmouth boarding house he commanded the Ranger, the first American warship to receive a formal salute from a foreign nation when French Admiral La Motte-Picquet dipped his flag in Quiberon Bay in seventeen seventy-eight. But the moment that made him immortal came the following year. In September of seventeen seventy-nine, his repurposed French merchant vessel, rechristened Bonhomme Richard in honor of Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack, squared off in darkness against the forty-four-gun Royal Navy frigate Serapis off the Yorkshire coast.

The Richard was burning and sinking when the British captain demanded Jones's surrender. His reply echoed across the water and then across history: "I have not yet begun to fight." Three and a half hours later, Serapis struck her colors. Jones transferred his flag to the captured British ship and sailed away.

He died in Paris in seventeen ninety-two, largely forgotten. More than a century later, President Theodore Roosevelt had his body exhumed and returned to the United States. John Paul Jones now rests in a marble sarcophagus beneath the chapel at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. The Portsmouth house where his legend was partly forged has been a museum since nineteen twenty and remains a National Historic Landmark.