Taverns were important public places in the eighteenth century Common and prominent alike came to eat, drink, and socialize, and just as often to discuss urgent concerns of business or politics. This was certainly true of Stoodley's Tavern, which now stands on Hancock Street at Strawbery Banke Museum.

During the 1750s James Stoodley served in the French and Indian War with major Robert Rogers as one of his Rangers. When the British levied special taxes on their colonists in America to pay for this defense, public opinion split. Rogers,who had married the daughter of Portsmouth's Anglican minister, remained loyal to the crown and eventually went to England, while Stoodley sided with the Revolutionaries.

Throughout this period Stoodley kept a tavern, the King's Arms, built about 1753. In the 1930s, novelist Kenneth Roberts would set some of the scenes of his semi-fictional novel of the French and Indian wars, Northwest Passage, in Stoodley's tavern. This tavern burned to the ground in 1761 and Stoodley immediately built a new one which survives today.

Stoodley's new tavern is one of a cluster of mid-eighteenth-century gambrel-roofed buildings in Portsmouth whose construction is attributed to Hopestill March (or Cheswill), a mulatto housewright from Dover and Newmarket. March erected at least one other gambrel-roofed tavern, the Bell on Congress Street in 1743.

The new tavern was home to James Stoodley and his wife, a daughter Elizabeth, a son William, and two enslaved Africans Frank and Flora. The building contained four rooms on the first floor, four more on the second, two rooms and a long ballroom on the third floor. A two-story back ell, demolished long ago, was added at an early date.

The tavern was the scene of many community activities. The local lodge of Masons met here at times. Both Stoodley's taverns were a favored meeting place of a group of merchants who had tracked down and bought out the heirs of the seventeenth-century land grant which founded New Hampshire, and gradually verified titles to towns and founded new towns within sixty miles of Portsmouth. Stoodley hosted auctions in this building, among which enslaved Africans were sold in 1762 and 1767, along with barrels of rum and bags of cotton.

In the 1770s, Stoodley's Tavern became important as a gathering place for those disaffected from British rule in America. In December 1774 Paul Revere delivered a warning to Portsmouth that British troops were on their way to secure the arms at Fort William and Mary. Local patriots immediately raided the fort on two consecutive days, seized it, and carried away its powder and cannon. The only overt Revolutionary action on New Hampshire soil, this small event has acquired a powerful place in the iconography and self-perception of New Hampshire citizens who are quick to point out that it preceded the battle at Lexington and Concord by four months. James Stoodley's son-in-law Elijah Hall, eventually inherited the tavern and lived in it until his death in 1830. During the Revolution, Hall had served as a lieutenant under John Paul Jones aboard the Portsmouth-built Ranger named for Rogers Rangers.

Subsequently the building remained residential into the early twentieth-century, after which it housed a series of commercial functions including a restaurant and then an appliance store on the ground floor and apartments upstairs. These functions gutted the ground floor, removed the chimneys, and moved some second floor partitions. Nonetheless, much evidence for details survives on the second floor and most on the third floor. Though built as a commercial building it surpassed most houses in Portsmouth. Panelled wainscot, arched window on stair landing, six-panel doors, boldly-scaled cornices with a jog above each window and door, shuttered windows and wallpapered rooms made it equal to the town's finest mansions.

In 1964 plans to demolish Stoodley's Tavern were announced, to make way for a new federal office building and post office. In 1966 it was moved to Strawbery Banke and placed with other rescued buildings clustered a little removed from the historic buildings which stand in situ.
In 1996 Strawbery Banke undertook a combination restoration and adaptation of the building to serve as a youth learning center. Original features were maintained, all evidence of early details was documented, and some lost features like the windows were re-created. A modest new back wing houses contemporary needs. The adaptation was funded in great part by a gift from the Lou and Lutza Smith Foundation.