Butts Hill Fort Restoration

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Annual Report 2025

- Paul Murphy-Chair, Butts Hill Fort Restoration Committee (BHFRC), BoRIA Director

Butts Hill Fort Restoration Committee (BHFRC) is pleased to report the current physical status of the fort site is excellent in all areas we have cleared and improved over the past three years. The full southern half of the fort adjacent to Portsmouth High is in wonderful shape and in use daily as an easily walkable, pathway-connected piece of Portsmouth’s Butts Hill neighborhood. In calendar year 2025 our volunteers consolidated and maintained the major progress made in our 2023 and 2024 “Phase I” the Southern Earthworks Improvement Project.

Working in concert with Department of Public Works, we continued to keep the multi-acre site maintained, the grounds mowed, uncluttered, and litter free. We worked weekly to ensure the newly cleared southern seven segments of the 250-year-old earthworks remained carefully cultivated with the protective desired grasses intended to replace the prior out-of-control invasive vegetation varieties removed in 2024’s Phase I execution. Further, we continued to enhance the many dozens of “keeper trees”—those with optimum shade and the most aesthetic value–selected with the approval of Town Tree Warden and Commissioner during Phase I planning. BHFRC continues to perform weekly routine maintenance where needed. We also continue to enhance and maintain the Southern Battery Green and the BHF Fort Green between Dyer, Earl and Butts Streets at the fort’s main entrance. We take pride in demonstrating effective land and earthwork stewardship, as we provide a living history backdrop to our educational outreach and historical tour teams. BHFRC maintains Butts Hill Fort as always in a “visitor-ready” state.

Phase II Plans. The operative plan for completing BHF’s northern half encompasses stabilizing and maintaining the final seven of fourteen earthwork segments and is reflected in the graphic below: Phase II. Northern Earthworks Improvement Project. This second phase is intended to mirror the methodology and official coordination/approval processes followed to realize Phase I, the physical restoration project generously underwritten by van Beuren Charitable Foundation. For Phase II we also intend to use the same combination of professional grade tree removal contractor and equipment augmented with our own organic BHFRC 100% volunteer labor to maximize efficiency and to make every single grant dollar count. The work concept is also straightforward: To selectively remove all unwanted trees, invasives, shrubs and debris from the northern half of the fort’s interior and exterior slopes, the surrounding trenches and adjacent path system in order to arrest deterioration and erosion. It will culminate with the hydroseed of all cleared earthworks with select grass varieties in order permanently stabilize and maintain their structural integrity, while simultaneously transforming the all new “fort campus” into a more accessible and desirable national heritage site.

Read the Full 2025 BHF Annual Report

Our Mission

Our overarching primary mission at the Butts Hill Fort Restoration Committee (BHFRC) has always been saving the historic Butts Hill earthwork complex from the ravages of invasives and overgrowth threatening to destroy them. Since late 2021 we have been steadily accomplishing this goal in a methodical way.

For 2024, The BHFRC set the ambitious goal of clearing, improving and stabilizing the entire multi-acre southern hemisphere of Butts Hill Fort, essentially accomplishing an “extreme makeover”, transforming the thickly-tangled brush and invasives-ridden site into a truly open historic campus with complete access and visibility of the 250-year-old earthworks.