Tag Archives: Samuel McIntire

May 19, 2013

Two Churches and a Park

By daseger

Apologies for posting multiple pictures of the park across from my house in the space of a few weeks, but the flowering trees have been particularly beautiful this year. Since this space is constantly within my view, I am always trying to picture what it looked like in the past, when not just one but two churches successively occupied the space. Even though I’m a great admirer of the built landscape (when it is well-built), I think I prefer the empty space, especially in the midst of densely-settled Salem. Although if Samuel McIntire’s majestic first South Congregational Church was still standing, I might change my mind—but its 166-foot-high steeple would certainly dwarf my house! That’s the main effect that I’m constantly trying to conjure up–I may ask my husband to make a rendering one day.

The park today and the two churches: Samuel McIntire’s Church was built in 1804-5 and destroyed by fire in 1903, and quickly replaced by the Gothic Revival structure that you see below, which itself burned down in 1950. Quite the contrast! The word on the street is that there were hopes of erecting a third church on the site (this time by a Greek Orthodox congregation), but one prominent resident foiled those plans by purchasing it himself and donating it to the neighborhood association. All the householders on Chestnut Street now pay dues to maintain the park, which is open to everyone.

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McIntire Park South Church 1891

McIntire Park South Congregational Church 1910

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I think I’ve shown these images of the churches as well (The amazing Frank Cousins photograph is from 1891; the postcard of the “new” church is from 1910) before as well (I’m nearly reblogging here!), but I do have some interior shots of both churches which I just found, and a salvaged capital from McIntire’s church:  can you imagine the struggle to salvage precious pieces of wood while the fire raged? It might have been someone from my house that ran over there and grabbed this! That’s a moment (not so pleasant) that I try to imagine: what it must have been like to wake up in the middle of the night and see this blazing inferno just outside my bedroom window; no doubt there was real fear that the fire would spread and the famous spire would collapse onto the house–my house. What a scary, horrible night that must have been. 110 years later, all is calm over there this morning.

McIntire Park interior of South Church Peabody & Tilton

McIntire Park Urn

McIntire Park South Congregational Church interior 1920s

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All historic photographs from the New York Public Library Digital Gallery, with the exception of the last one, which is from the Estey Organ Company in Vermont, which maintains a virtual museum and an archive of all of its organs.

10 comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in History, Houses, Nature, Salem

February 1, 2013

Rumford Roasters

By daseger

We live right next door to Hamilton Hall, an elegant Federal-era assembly hall attributed to Salem’s famous architect and woodcarver Samuel McIntire. I wake up every morning and look out my bedroom window at McIntire’s carved eagle and swags on the exterior, and I’ve posted about most of its interior spaces here as well.  The Hall’s grand ballroom, with its spring dance floor, Palladian windows, gilt mirrors, and musician’s balcony, always gets a lot of attention, but today I want to feature a more utilitarian room below the stairs:  the “brick hearth room” with its Rumford Roaster, the cutting-edge culinary technology of the early nineteenth century. Here it is, built into the large hearth that dominates the room, in my photographs and a doctored drawing from the very charming 1947 Hamilton Hall Cook Book (containing recipes for “Afternoon Tea Dainties”, “Shrimp Wiggle”, and many puddings).

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Rumford Roaster Drawing

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The Rumford Roaster transferred cooking from the open fire to an enclosed oven (the round opening, lined with metal inside), which was heated by the small square firebox directly below. There are openings in the sides of the oven to control the temperature, and the entire device was vented through the central chimney. The Rumford Roaster at Hamilton Hall is characteristic of the earliest examples in that it was built into the hearth (also see the roasters at the Gardner-Pingree House here in Salem and the Rundlet-May House in Portsmouth, below) but freestanding models developed a bit later. Its evolution seems to run parallel to the evolution of the American kitchen.

Rumford Roaster Gardner Pingree Salem

Rumford Roaster NE Home 2009 Geoffrey Gross photo Rundlett-May House

Rumford Roasters in the kitchens of the Gardner-Pingree House, Salem (Peabody Essex Museum) and the Rundlet-May House, Portsmouth, New Hampshire (Historic New England).

The Roaster was invented and named after Count Rumford (1753-1814), an absolutely extraordinary man whose biography reads like a (really bad) dime novel. Born plain old Benjamin Thompson in what was then the small village of Woburn, twelve miles northwest of Boston, he transformed himself into quite the continental Count through a combination of scientific genius and what can euphemistically be called “adventuring”. His biographical details can be found elsewhere (this account was good yet succinct; I think his life, work and times demand a larger volume), so I’m going to summarize as much as I can:  Thompson was apprenticed to merchants in both Salem and Boston in his adolescence, and then he obtained a position as a schoolmaster in Rumford (now Concord), New Hampshire. There he met and married a wealthy and well-connected widow about ten years his senior. Through her, he made all sorts of useful connections and became a commissioned officer in the New Hampshire militia by the mid-1770s, but it turns out that he was at best a Loyalist and at worst a spy: he fled to London in 1776, abandoning his wife and child, after accusations of  “being unfriendly to the cause of liberty”.

From a British perspective, Thompson distinguished himself in both public service and scientific experimentation during the American Revolution, serving in the British Colonial Office while simultaneously conducting experiments in ballistics and munitions: these lessons in military combustion would later be applied to more domestic mechanisms. He was knighted by King George III in 1784, but somehow was at the same time under suspicion of spying for the French !!! and so made his way to the Continent and wound up in the service of one of the most powerful German princes, Karl Theodor, Prince-Elector, Count Palatine and Duke of Bavaria. He remained in Bavaria for over a decade, working on such diverse projects as poorhouse reform and urban planning (including the creation of the Englischer Garten in Munich) while continuing to conduct experiments on the nature and applications of heat. In 1791, Sir Benjamin Thompson was made a Count of the Holy Roman Empire, and he chose the title “Rumford”, in reference to his New England origins. This, and the fact that he left a good part of his fortune to Harvard University to establish a Rumford professorship, indicates that there were some misgivings about betraying his native country. During the last phase of the Count’s life, there is something of a “man without a country” air about him; despite his honors there were whispers of spying (AGAIN–this time for Britain), which forced him to leave Bavaria. His last decade was spent traveling back and forth between England and France, where he died in 1814, “the spy who conquered the cold”.

Rumford Portrait 1801

Gillray Scientific Researches BM

Count Rumford was certainly a household name by 1800, inspiring both portraits and caricatures. Above, a mezzotint portrait by John Raphael Smith (1801) and a caricature which is poking fun at Rumford’s fashionable Royal Society lectures:  he is the man who is “producing” steam in James Gillray’s 1802 print, Scientific Researches! New Discoveries in Pneumaticks! Or, an Experimental Lecture on the Powers of Air, both British Museum.  And look at these companion satires below!

Gillray Comforts 1800

Rumpford Caricature BM

James Gillray, The Comforts of a Rumford Stove, 1800; Charles Williams, Luxury, or the Comforts of a RUMPFORD, 1801, British Museum.

Well, back to the rather less racy Rumford stove at Hamilton Hall!  A couple of more shots are below, including open views of the oven (with the arm of a helpful Hall trustee) and the ash box below. There are great records of the administration and maintenance of the Hall in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so we know that this Roaster was supplied by Elijah Fuller of Neptune Street in Salem; I searched through the Salem Register for references to Fuller’s shop and found the notice below, from July 1803. Rumford was clearly a recognizable name–and product–over on this side of the Atlantic as well.

Rumford Roaster at Hamilton Hall Salem

Rumford Roaster Hamilton Hall interior

Rumford Roaster Ash Box

Rumford Cooking Utensils 1803

Hamilton Hall has been the setting for countless “assemblies” over its two hundred + years, including large dinners for such dignitaries as the Marquis de Lafayette, Nathaniel Bowditch, and Martin Van Buren in the first phase of its history; I imagine that the catering of these events was greatly facilitated by the presence of Count Rumford’s Roaster.

In the Spotlight:  a photograph of Hamilton Hall taken last week, during the dawn-to-dusk production of a music video.

Hamilton Hall

10 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Design, History, Salem

January 14, 2013

Carriage Houses

By daseger

I was getting a bit depressed with all the devastation and demolition of the last few posts, so I went searching for structures that have survived:  not too difficult a task in my neighborhood. The weather is odd here (for January):  quite warm, foggy, air filled with moisture but no rain or snow. Rather dreary, really, as you can tell from the photographs. On dark days like these in the midwinter the built landscape really stands out, with no natural landscape to frame or cloak it. For some reason, on my walk yesterday I was particularly noticing the outbuildings rather than the facades:  Salem has many great carriage houses, most in pretty good condition.  This is impressive to me:  it’s hard enough to preserve a big old house, but keeping an ancient ancillary building in good shape is a true commitment. We lost our carriage house long ago:  it is evident on the late nineteenth-century street atlases of Salem, but after the turn of the century, it’s gone.

I don’t have anything similar for Salem, so I want to start with an image of  the Valentine-Fuller house in Cambridge, Massachusetts:  Mr. and Mrs. Fuller are on horseback in their carriage-house courtyard, circa 1890:  this seems like the peak time for carriage houses to me.  After that, they would either come down or be preserved as storage structures or garages. This house, which was built in 1848 on Prospect Street, was demolished in 1937, along with its outbuildings (oh no, more demolition).

HABS, Library of Congress

Back in Salem, carriage houses can be found in several neighborhoods, so this is just a sampler, or part one.  On the street where I live, Chestnut Street, there are some amazing carriage houses, several of which are laid out a considerable distance from their main houses so you really don’t get the courtyard effect that you see above. On one side of the street, a completely new parallel street, Warren Street, was laid out as an access route to these buildings. The photographs below are all of Warren Street carriage houses that belong to mansions on Chestnut, but two of them appear quite capable of fulfilling an independent existence.

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Essex Street, which was the colonial (and remains the present) main street of Salem, runs parallel to Chestnut on the other side: because of its early settlement, it features many beautiful carriage houses–primarily wooden rather than brick. In the general vicinity of the Salem Public Library, stalwart structures peak out from behind the streetscape, particularly visible at this time of year.  Behind this trio of houses–Georgian, Colonial Revival built on the site of a pulled-down Federal at the turn of the century, and Federal–are some of my favorite carriage houses on the street and in Salem.

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And then just across the street from the library, there’s this wonderfully restored Greek Revival, with its NEW carriage house aligned perfectly with what I assume are later nineteenth-century additions, creating a nice sense of enclosure for its yard.  Just a little down the street, is a (nearly) matched pair of Federal houses dating from about 1800, both of which have great carriage houses.  As you can see, carriage-house cupolas abound on Essex Street!

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Essex Street LOC

Essex Street, circa 1910. Detroit Publishing Company/ Library of Congress

On my way across town to the Common, I stopped to take a photograph of a very controversial Federal Street carriage house.  It appears to belong to the very stately Victorian that was converted into condominiums a few decades ago, but actually is part of an adjacent property whose owner tried to do the very same thing with his carriage house at the same time (this was all before I came to Salem, so I’m not that clear on the details).  When he did not get approval, he moved out of his Federal Court house and let it and the carriage house rot. So this is the result, 20+ years later.

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As this is the birthday week of Salem’s famed architect Samuel McIntire, I’ve got to feature some McIntire carriage houses which, again, is not difficult to do. Everybody’s favorite McIntire house, the Gardner-Pingree house, has a charming carriage house in back which has a slightly smaller stature, in keeping with the general scale of the house.  There’s a restoration project going on there now, so I’m sorry that the pictures give a work-site impression, but you can still see how great this outbuilding is.

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Just next door, another house owned by the Peabody Essex Museum features one of the most prominent carriage houses in town:  the Andrew Safford House was built after McIntire’s in 1811, but you can see his influence in both the main house and the carriage house, both of which overlook Salem Common. When it was built in 1819, this was one of the most expensive houses in America, and it remains very impressive, nearly two centuries later.

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Safford House

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Safford Stable 1939

The Andrew Safford House and Carriage House, yesterday and in 1910 & 1939 photographs, Library of Congress.

Finally, my very favorite Salem carriage house.  The Clifford Crowninshield House (1806) is a McIntire house located on another corner of the Salem Common, just across from the Safford house. Behind the main house, almost hidden really, is a wooden carriage house with an elegant stature and very intricate details:  every time I pass by it makes me smile.

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10 comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Houses, Salem

January 10, 2013

Vanished Vantage Points

By daseger

There’s no better way to see how a landscape, or a streetscape, changes over time than to compare images of the past and the present. I am always on the hunt for nineteenth-century photographs and drawings of Salem, before urban renewal, before the great fire of 1914, before the CAR, so I can see how these forces altered the city, for better or for worse (mostly for worse).

I’m going to ease into what is often a shocking contrast of past and present with two photographs of a section of Federal Street, taken about a century apart.  This is the street looking east from the vantage point of the Peirce-Nichols House, one of Samuel McIntire’s most important commissions, looking toward North Street and the courthouses on the other side. The new (hugely out-of-scale) courthouse (or “judicial center”), which opened up for business just last year, is mostly out of the frame of the modern picture, or the contrast would indeed be shocking. What you do see, or what I see, is the brick former Baptist church, now law library, which was moved to its present location and situated on an angle so to accommodate the curve in the road and effect a transition from residential to institutional buildings on the street. This was an absolutely brilliant idea, whoever thought of it (I know that Historic Salem, Inc. advocated for it) as the courthouse project mandated the demolition of the smaller wooden buildings you see in that location in the earlier picture:  without the in-scale angled brick building, the judicial center would have even less connection to the street.

Vantage Point Fed Street 1910

Vanished Federal Street present

Now for a comparative vantage point that is a little more jarring:  Church Street in the 1890s and today. This was an old residential street in Salem, which was also the site of the original Salem Lyceum building, which you see here (the image is from Winfield S. Nevins’ Witchcraft in Salem Village, 1892 & 1916) as well as St. Peter’s Church, the source of its name.  In between the church, the Lyceum, and the great old firehouse (fortunately still there) were rows of primarily eighteenth-century houses, now all gone. The old wooden Lyceum was built about 1831 and burned down at the turn of the century, but it was replaced by a very elegant brick structure that was long the site of the Lyceum Restaurant, now 43 Church. Despite the unfortunate designs of both the District court on the right and the office building past the Lyceum on the left, the upper (foreground) part of Church Street is aesthetically pleasing and commercially successful (the site of an organic grocery store, a wine shop, and a coffee shop in addition to 43 Church), primarily because its buildings line up with the sidewalk, just like those in the older photograph. But in the background of the modern photographs, you see the ravages of urban renewal:  a large parking lot on the right, and a faux-Federal condominium building and brutally ugly parking garage/mall on the right.

Vanished Church Street Nevins Witchcraft

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From the vantage point of St. Peter’s Church, looking west towards the Lyceum: all those house removed to accommodate cars.

Vantage Church Street

My last group of images shows a completely obliterated street:  Norman Street, a short street that has been transformed beyond all recognition in the twentieth century. Not a shred of its built historical fabric remains, including this wonderful house, the Benjamin Cox house at 21 Norman Street (with the man standing in front of it). It is gone, along with its garden, and all of its neighbors, replaced by office buildings and a wide, wide road so that commuters might easily speed through Salem on their way to the university, or Marblehead. The historic photographs below, which date from about 1875-85, are from the Brown Family Collection of the Schlesinger Library at Harvard, and the modern photograph was taken this morning.  It’s difficult to reconcile these two settings:  I think that the Cox House was located somewhere in the vicinity of the white car (the one driving, as opposed to the one parked) in the 2013 photograph.

Vanished Cox House 21 Norman

Vanished Cox House garden

Vanished Cox House Interior

Vanished Norman Street

18 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Design, History, Houses

August 17, 2012

Salem Houses for Sale

By daseger

I’m a persistent, one might say compulsive, realestalker:  my admiration for my own house doesn’t stop me from checking out others, often. I think that this compulsion is shared by many of my neighbors: nothing stirs up a Salem gathering better than real estate chat. With the down market over the past few years, these discussions have not been as much fun, but I think (hope) that the market is picking up now. I thought I would start featuring a sampling of Salem houses for sale from time to time on the blog, because it’s a nice way to focus on great houses that may or may not have some historical connection or architectural feature that would land them here anyway.  Salem is full of great old houses, many of which are overlooked and very worthy of notice, and lots of newer houses too, though I am not interested in those. Sorry–if you haven’t figured it out before now, I am a complete old-house snob, for aesthetic, architectural, environmental and experiential reasons. The houses below are all in the McIntire Historic District with one exception:  I’ll focus on other neighborhoods in future posts. I’m linking the listings below to Coldwell Banker‘s site, just because I find it particularly easy to navigate.

Two ivy-covered brick mansions:  26 Chestnut Street and 14 Pickman Street

The Devereux Hoffman Simpson House at 26 Chestnut was the last of the grand Federal mansions to be built on the street, in 1826.  The house has 15 rooms, 7 bathrooms, and a restored carriage house with an apartment on the second floor. It was featured in the New York Times real estate section several weeks ago, and the first photograph below is from there.

I featured the completely-ivy-covered exterior of the Cook-Kimball house on the blog about a year ago and got 4000 clicks in 10 minutes:  it is a striking sight.  The interior looks more stark–and well-preserved, but I’m only going by the listing, which also attributes the house to Samuel McIntire (while all the sources I consulted–Fiske Kimball, Bryant Tolles, Jr.–attribute it to his son, Samuel Field McIntire).  Located on a quiet side street off Salem Common, the property includes six bedroom, an adjacent lot with carriage house, and, as you can see, an amazing staircase.

Beckford Street Colonials: 22 Beckford Street and 20 Beckford Street

Adjacent to each other on Beckford Street, a side street that runs between Federal and Essex in the McIntire Historic District, are these two houses built before the Revolutionary War.  22 Beckford is a really interesting house with lots of period details and a great enclosed yard:  it was actually moved to this location at some point in the nineteenth century.  It has seven fireplaces, parking, and a really cute garden shed out back.  20 Beckford Street, right next door, is actually a multi-family house with two units–there are 12 rooms in all.  The situation of this house, with its front facade at right angle to the street and enclosed yard, affords it quite a bit of privacy.

A Colonial Revival on Federal Street:  87 Federal Street.

Just down the street from the Beckford street colonials, and almost across from McIntire’s Peirce-Nichols house, is the Albert Goodhue House at 87 Federal Street. The house was built in 1893, and has that combination of architectural detail and enhanced scale characteristic of Colonial Revival houses. It is also a multi-family house, with 3 units, parking, and a private yard.

Addendum:  From the Old House Blog, Five Reasons to Invest in an Older House.

10 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Houses, Salem

August 11, 2012

Ladies of Salem

By daseger

Looking down upon the streets of Salem this summer are 12 “Ladies of Salem”, nautical figureheads created by local artists to commemorate Salem’s maritime past and highlight its present role as a “port of culture”.  The Lady of Salem festival, spearheaded by the city’s Beautification Committee, is the most recent of a succession of positive public arts initiatives designed to draw the attention of both residents and visitors away from the tacky exploitation of Salem’s witch-trial past, or at the very least to put the events of 1692 (and their “interpretation”) in context.  These ladies, affixed to lampposts on downtown streets adjacent to their sponsoring businesses, peer down at passers-by with their characteristic open gazes.  Here’s a sampling:  as the organizers of the festival are encouraging the public to vote for their favorites, I’m starting with mine, and then proceeding in no particular order.

Figurehead by Jeanne Pare, sponsored by Treasures over Time, Washington Street.

Figureheads by Mary Ellen Halliwell for the Salem Beautification Committee, Amberlynn Narvie for Beverly Cooperative Bank, and John Devine for the Palmer’s Cove Yacht Club on Essex Street.

Two more Essex Street ladies:  figureheads by Jade Mason for Body & Soul Massage/Collins Cove Appraisors and Sheila Billings for Cabot Money Management, Inc.

Figureheads were a prominent feature of ships built from the seventeenth century to the age of steam and were often, but not exclusively, female. The general consensus seems to hold that for very superstitious seamen, real women on board were bad luck, so this was the only way to have a feminine presence on seagoing vessels, which were, of course, also characterized as feminine.  At the same time, figureheads represented the “spirit” of their ships and offered protection on long, arduous voyages. The Peabody Essex Museum has a lovely collection of figureheads, many of which are very majestically displayed in East India Marine Hall, but the largest collection of figureheads from merchant ships can be found at the newly-restored Cutty Sark in Britain, part of Royal Museums Greenwich. I love this picture of them all together.

Figureheads in the East India Marine Hall of the Peabody Essex Museum, and one attributed to Samuel McIntire in the PEM’s collection; the Cutty Sark figureheads, collection of the Royal Museums Greenwich.

She’s not from Salem, but as most of us rarely have the vantage point of viewing a figurehead from above, I wanted to include this interesting photograph by Alan Villiers of the bow of the Herzogin Cecilie from 1928–the very last days of figureheads.

7 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Current Events, Design, History, Salem

August 3, 2012

Samuel McIntire in Texas

By daseger

I knew that the charming 1793 summer house designed by Salem’s renown architect and woodcarver Samuel McIntire (1757-1811) had been moved (from its original location 4 miles away on Salem merchant king Elias Hasket Derby’s Peabody farm–successively the property of the Crowninshield and Osborn families), and copied (by Derby’s distant descendant Martha Codman for her Newport mansion Berkeley Villa, which you can read about here), but I had no idea until very recently that it was the inspiration for a Houston McMansion.

Here is a panorama of pictures taken yesterday of McIntire’s beautiful summer house, situated since 1901 on the Glen Magna estate in Danvers, Massachusetts.

And here, via my very favorite pinner on Pinterest, via the Cote de Texas blog, via Luxe magazine, are pictures of a house outside downtown Houston designed by John Ike of Ike Ligerman Barkley Architects of New York.

It is probably wrong of me to call this house a McMansion as it is only two rooms deep, but it does have white marble flours (versus the painted wood of the original).  I’m not sure what to think of this creation:  is imitation the sincerest form of flattery in this case?

Another view:  a Rudolf Ruzicka Christmas card for the Merrymount Press, 1940.

3 comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in History, Houses

July 17, 2012

Fireboards

By daseger

I’m never quite sure what to do with fireplaces in the summer time:  just leave them alone, throw a potted fern in them, or a few of those old-fashioned fireplace fans?  Books?  The television? (I’d rather put the television in the fireplace than over it; I hate that television-over-the-mantle look) It seems like a wasted space and opportunity, as the fireplace remains the focal point of the room no matter what the season. Our ancestors had the solution to what was for them not just a decorating problem:  they filled their damperless hearths with fireboards or chimney boards, decorated with flowers, street scenes, ships, or whatever caught their fancy. These boards would keep out (or hide) soot, dust, and birds and brighten up the dark and dusty cave in the room at the same time.

Here in Salem, the Peabody Essex Museum has several fireboards from the early nineteenth century that I have long admired and which have inspired me to try to find my own period fireboard, but I’ve never been able to find one that was even remotely affordable and fit any of my fireplaces at the same time.  But the hunt continues because it’s always nice to have a quest!

Here are some of my favorite fireboards from the PEM, beginning with a beautiful scene of upper Washington Street and the Samuel McIntire courthouse painted by George Washington Felt about 1810-20 and a view of Beverly from the same period, by an anonymous artist.  Departing from street scenes and bird’s-eye views representing pride of place, the last two boards represent an historic gale which sank eleven Marblehead fishing boats in 1846 and the stately mansion of Chatsworth in England.

Fireboards from the Collection of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem:  View of Court House Square by George Washington Felt, c. 1810-20; View of Beverly by an anonymous American artist, c. 1800-20 (from the Safford House); The Great Gale of 1846 by William Thompson Bartoll; A Distant View of Chatsworth, Derbyshire, England by Michel Felice Corné, c. 1800 (from the Bertram K. Little and Nina Fletcher Little Collection auction at Sotheby’s,  January 29, 1994).

Pieces such as these have fetched high prices at auction:  most recently, a mid-eighteenth century board featuring the John Hancock House in Boston (below) went for over $600,000 at a Sotheby‘s auction (against an estimate of $150,000-$250,000), but this is a very early and apparently very special piece. The trompe l’oeil louvered fireboard depicting an idyllic landscape was probably made in Philadelphia around 1810-40: it sold for $60,000 in 2005 and is now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The MFA example above features two motifs that often appear on fireboards:  louvers and trompe l’oeil decoration.  In fact, it combines them:  some of the louvers are apparently real and some are fake.  I’ve seen some other louvered boards around, which has made me wonder if something could be made of all the old and abandoned exterior shutters in my basement?  A very literal trompe decoration is on the c. 1820 board below from a Skinner auction a few years ago. I wonder what the purpose was of replicating the bricks behind the board? A more charming example (to me) is the “watermelon” fireboard made in Salem, New York, about 1840, now in a private collection.

A variation on the fireboard is the dummy board or “silent companion”, which did not have to go before the hearth but certainly could and did. You could choose an iconic or period person to go before your fireplace, or you could place a pig there, like the eighteenth-century English example below. In my continuing search for a fireboard (or two), I’ve looked for new sources as well as old, and while most of the former are a bit too rustic for my taste and house, these blue and white pots by British decorative painter Lucinda Oakes look really beautiful.

Pig feeding from a Bowl Dummy Board, c. 1750-1800, Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Blue and White Pots I fireboard by Lucinda Oakes.

8 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Design, History

July 11, 2012

Definitive Duels

By daseger

Living right next to the Samuel McIntire-designed Hamilton Hall, a virtual memorial to Alexander Hamilton, I am always semi-conscious of the man, his life, and his death:  208 years ago today in a famous duel with Aaron Burr.  I wrote about the duel and its cultural impact in a post from last year, so for this particular anniversary I thought I would look at some of the more famous duels in Anglo-American history.

A romanticized view of the Burr-Hamilton duel, July 11, 1804, from an 1890 American history textbook.

I’m going to start with some early modern English duels and then work my way forward towards the nineteenth century and America.  Duels are interesting little events in European history because they represent the remnants of early medieval judicial combat, as well as a tradition that early modern kings were intent on ending in order to establish themselves as the ultimate defenders of the peace.  I’ve seen images from as early as the fourteenth century of kings “overseeing” duels between their noble subjects, thus projecting the message that the ritual had royal sanction. By the early modern era, one which witnessed a great expansion of royal authority, duels were made illegal and participants were subject to prosecution, especially if a death occurred.  A case in point was the duel fought between the Elizabethan playwright Ben Jonson and his actor colleague Gabriel Spencer on 22 September 1598 in the sprawling Hoxton Fields northwest of London.  Spencer was killed and Jonson was sentenced to hang for murder, but managed to escape this fate by pleading the ancient privilege of “benefit of clergy”.  Spencer’s death left no mark on Jonson, who went on to fame, fortune and celebrity as the recipient of lots of royal patronage.

Several decades later one of the most interesting men of his age, Sir Kenelm Digby (natural philosopher, cookbook author, courtier, swordfighting cavalier) killed a French nobleman who had insulted King Charles I in a 1641 Parisian duel from which he emerged unscathed.  Back home, the fact that he had defended the honor of the King of England did not mollify his fellow Englishmen, who remained affronted by his Catholicism on the eve of the English Civil War.

The romanticized image of the duel envisions a fight over a lady, but it seems to me that most duels were either about politics or petty insults.  One exception was the duel fought in 1668 between George Villiers, the 2nd Duke of Buckingham, and Francis Talbot, the 11th Earl of Shrewsbury, over Anna Maria Talbot, the Countess of Shrewsbury.  The Duke and the Countess were brazen lovers, and Talbot seems to have challenged Villiers to avenge his own honor more than that of his wife.  To no avail: he died from injuries sustained in the duel and his widow was promptly installed in Buckingham’s new country estate, Cliveden House.  The Duke’s career was not tarnished by this particular episode, but Samuel Pepys, the diarist of the age, did note that “this will make the world think that the king hath good councillors about him, when the Duke of Buckingham, the greatest man about him, is a fellow of no more sobriety than to fight about a whore.“

Anna Maria (Brudenell) Talbot, the Countess of Shrewsbury, 1670 by Sir Peter Lely, National Portrait Gallery, London.

The later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a golden age of duels, fought for more petty reasons than previously. It is almost as if the professionalization of war led to the trivialization of duels.  Before I jump the pond, let’s briefly examine the “royal duel” fought between the Richard Lennox, the (future) Duke of Richmond and Governor General of British North America and Frederick, Duke of York, second son of King George III.  When royals get involved, dueling becomes “fashionable”, but compared to the seventeenth-century duels, this one does indeed seem a bit trivial:  the Duke of York was said to have made a passing remark about Lennox’s cowardly disposition, to which the latter took offense, and they met at Wimbledon Common with pistols on May 26, 1789. Lennox’s shot merely grazed the Duke’s hair, and the Duke refused to fire, and so the matter was settled.

I could go on and on with British duels in this period:  duels involving future and serving Prime Ministers, Cabinet members and Members of Parliament, peers, military officers, journalists, and even ladies!  But I’m going to leave duel-happy Britain and cross the Atlantic to put the Burr-Hamilton duel in a bit more historical perspective.  Just two years after Hamilton’s death, another scandalous duel had a very decisive end:  the future seventh President of the United States, Andrew Jackson, fatally wounded Charles Dickinson in Kentucky on May 30, 1806.  Not being an American historian with the ability to recognize reliable primary sources from those prone to exaggeration, I must say that there are a variety of confusing accounts about this duel.  Here is what I understand, but I may be wrong:  Dickinson slandered his Nashville neighbor Jackson, then a country lawyer, over a bet on a horse race and threw in a slur on his previously married wife.  Jackson (who was apparently involved in anywhere from 13 to over 100 duels over his lifetime, depending on the source) took offense and challenged Dickinson, who accepted the challenge. When they met on the field of a Kentucky border town (because dueling was illegal in Tennessee), Jackson let Dickinson fire first, and received a bullet that would shatter two ribs next to his heart and remain with him for the rest of his life.  The wounded Jackson then fired straight at Dickinson, and his pistol either misfired or stopped half-cocked (depending on the source), so he fired again, and effectively killed him. Besides the bullet, nothing about this event hindered Jackson in any way:  he went on to become the “hero of New Orleans” and the President of the United States.

An illustration from the fictional author Major Jack Downing’s Life of Andrew Jackson (Boston, 1834); General Andrew Jackson, The Hero, the Sage and the Patriot, N. Currier lithograph, 1835 (Library of Congress).

My last duel has a Salem connection via Nathaniel Hawthorne.  As part of the notable Bowdoin College class of  1825, Maine Congressman Jonathan Cilley formed friendships with classmates Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and  Hawthorne, and the latter would memorialize him after his death from immediate injuries sustained in a duel with Kentucky Congressman William Jordan Graves in 1838. The cause of the duel was, again, politics, and the contentious Democrat (Cilley)-Whig (Graves) rivalry at the time; Graves, who is always described as an experienced “marksman” in the historical record, was standing in for the Whig New York publisher James Webb, whom Cilley had labelled biased and corrupt.  Months after the duel, Hawthorne published an earnest memorial/obituary in which the honor of New England is put forward as the greater cause of Cilley’s death, anticipating the larger conflict in years to come.

An 1838 broadside ballad, courtesy of Special Collections & Archives, Bowdoin College Library.

1 comment   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in History

May 3, 2012

Chestnut Street Days

By daseger

In 1926, the year of Salem’s tercentenary, the residents of Chestnut Street threw open their doors and some old clothes and welcomed the world into their stately homes, setting the precedent for four more “Chestnut Street Days” over the next half-century. This weekend the tradition will be revived with “May Day on Chestnut Street”, an event to benefit Hamilton Hall, during which ten homes on the street will be open to ticket-bearing guests.  In a departure from the original Chestnut Street Days and the other big Salem house tour, Christmas in Salem, this tour promises to be a more low-key affair, with an emphasis on history and architecture rather than dress or decoration.

Brochures for this weekend’s tour of Chestnut Street, and the second Chestnut Street Day, held in 1939, featuring Samuel Chamberlain’s etching “Springtime in Salem”.

I am fortunate to live on this storied street and it is a privilege (and pleasure) that I never tire of, even as the tourist trolleys stop outside my bedroom window every half hour.  I see Chestnut Street as an early (circa 1805) planned development, as Salem’s merchant princes sought to distance themselves from the busy wharves from which they conducted their business and live only amongst themselves, on a big broad street of boldly American (Federal) houses, filled with the wares (to varying degrees) that they brought home from the East.  It is fortunate that the street and its houses were built, as both kept old money and old families (never a bad thing!)  in Salem as the city experienced maritime decline and industrial growth and its accompanying dynamic change later in the nineteenth century.  By the end of the century, the street had become one of the symbols of “old Salem” and a succession of postcards, produced for a national market, reinforced that image, while at the same time freezing the street in time.

Images (mostly cards) of Chestnut Street in (somewhat) chronological order, 1890s-1980s.

The first picture above, which I included in one of my very first blog posts, shows the opening of Chestnut Street–looking west–about 1891. You can see Samuel McIntire’s amazing South Church on the right hand side, and the second photo shows the church in its entirety.  It burned down in 1903, to be replaced by the Gothic Revival structure that you see immediately above, which also burned down, in 1950.  Apparently it was recognized that the lot was cursed at that time, so it remains a church-less “McIntire Park”.

Detroit Publishing Company postcard of Chestnut Street looking west, 1906, in black-and-white and colored versions.  These were reissued for many years as far as I can tell.  The last card is a rarer western perspective, printed in Germany and published by A. Kagan of Boston, Massachusetts.  The personal note on the back is dated 1918, but I can’t imagine American publishers ordering German postcards in 1918, so it must have been around for awhile.

The eastern perspective–looking towards the harbor and the center of town–is more common.  Above are examples from the first two decades of the twentieth century.  The “car card” is always striking because of its head-on view, but also because Chestnut Street has been one-way in the other direction for decades.  The canopy of elms always makes me sad; I have no idea why chestnut Street was lined with elms rather than chestnut trees, other than the fact that all great American streets seem to have been planted with elms in the nineteenth century.  Much of this land was an orchard belonging to the Pickering Family before Chestnut  Street was laid out; maybe chestnuts reigned at that time.

A bit further up the street and a bit later, but still looking east. The middle card (courtesy of the Dionne Collection) appears to have been taken in the 1950s, while the last card is from the 1980s.  Only the cars change!

I can’t resist closing with my own reissue of Felicie Waldo Howell’s (Mixter, 1897-1968) vibrant painting of the first Chestnut Street Day:  Salem’s 300th Anniversary, Chestnut Street, June 1926.  Such a great image–and a reminder that streets are all about people as well as houses.




2 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in History, Salem

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