PORTSMOUTH — In a town as old as Portsmouth, there are houses that remember things. There are fields that remember things. There are even, if you stand quietly enough near the water, pilings that seem to remember the weight of ferries long gone. For more than 40 years, if you wanted to know precisely what they remembered — and in what year, and under whose ownership — you went to Jim Garman.

Garman, Portsmouth’s town historian, died Sunday night at Newport Hospital. He was 87. Rebecca Sattel, a fellow board member of the Portsmouth Historical Society, shared the sad news in an e-mail sent Monday to several friends and town officials.

“Jim’s dedication to preserving and sharing Portsmouth’s history leaves a lasting legacy in our community. His leadership and knowledge will be deeply missed,” Sattel wrote. “We will share information about services and arrangements as soon as they are available. Please keep Jim’s family and loved ones in your thoughts during this difficult time.”

Garman had the patient, deliberate manner of a man accustomed to listening to the dead. Not in any mystical sense. He listened to them in ledgers, in brittle newspaper clippings, in postcards tinted the color of weak tea. 

One of his books, “Early Twentieth Century Sakonnet: The Postcard Photography of O.E. Dubois,” lingered lovingly over images most people would flip past. In another, “A History of the Gentlemen’s Farms of Portsmouth, RI,” he gave acreage and architecture the kind of attention usually reserved for royalty.

He wrote about how people got around Aquidneck Island when travel meant something slower and more uncertain. He wrote and spoke about historic houses, rum-runners in the Sakonnet River during prohibition, about coal mines and trolleys and bridges and ferries. He delivered lectures on the Portsmouth Compact of 1638 as if the ink had not yet dried.

Garman was a lieutenant, junior grade, in the U.S. Navy. For 39 years he taught history at Portsmouth Abbey School, and also held court inside Salve Regina University’s classrooms.

One of his students, former town council member J. Mark Ryan, once recalled sitting among what he described as “intellectually unmotivated boys” in a damp, un-air-conditioned classroom. And yet, Ryan said, his teacher’s face would come alive while describing musty old log books from the China trade — the buying, the selling, the long-ago reckonings. “These people were all dead a long time ago,” Ryan remembered thinking, “and yet this is really interesting.”

Garman had that effect. He did not so much argue for the importance of history as embody it. In 2022 he received The Portsmouth Award for professional and community leadership. He was former president of the Portsmouth Historical Society and was a key member of the steering committee for the town’s 375th celebration in 2013, delivering a series of lectures that filled meeting houses and libraries.

Although he was appointed town historian in 2014, Garman had been doing the job long before anyone made it official.

Even in his final weeks, he was still tending the garden of memory. A master gardener trained at the University of Rhode Island, he understood cultivation. His last Facebook post, dated Jan. 16, showed a photograph of the old Bristol Ferry Inn, shared with the Rhode Island Historical Photo Club — one more artifact lifted gently into the light.

His beloved wife, Dorothy Ann “Dotti” Garman, died in 2021. Last fall, he shared on social media a photograph of the two of them in the back seat of a car on their wedding day in September 1964, just as they were beginning to make their own history. In recent months, he had been reminiscing more — not sentimentally, but precisely, as was his way.

In Portsmouth, the houses will go on remembering. The fields will, too. But for a long time, if you wanted to be certain of what they were trying to tell you, you asked Jim.