February 16, 2026

Was Andrew Jackson a Welcome Guest in Salem in 1833?

By daseger

Here I am with another Presidents’ Day post which I shall begin with my usual rant about Presidents’ Day: if you merge them all (or Washington and Lincoln) into one day of remembrance you’re going to forget some singular details. Not a fan of generic Presidents’ Day, although I realize we can’t have myriad Mondays off. That said, today I’m posting about one of everyone’s least favorite presidents, Andrew Jackson, who came to Salem at the beginning of his second term in the summer of 1833 as part of a New England tour (just like Washington decades before). Unlike Washington, the concensus is that Jackson was not popular in New England, but reading through some of the contemporary press accounts, I can’t quite tell if that’s the case. This post, probably like several this year, is an extension of research for Salem’s Centuries: I wrote a chapter on John Remond, who catered the big dinner for the President, and my research brought up several complaints about said dinner (not Remond’s cooking, but the guest of honor) and so I thought I’d “pull on this narrative thread” (to use my co-editor’s phrase) for a bit.

New England (and especially southern New England) did not support Jackson in either the 1828 or 1832 elections and so it might seem that the region was hostile territory, but it’s difficult to know whether it was the man or his policies which were unpopular. Jackson was a known enslaver but it was early days in Salem’s abolitionist movement, and while he was criticized for his policies towards Native Americans conspicuously by the genteel Elizabeth Elkins Sanders of Salem in her Conversations, Principally on the Aborigines of North America (1828), I’m not sure that was a general view at this time either. No one seems to have anything to say about the First Sumatran Expedition of just the year before. While Jackson’s response to South Carolina’s strident assertion of states’ rights during the more recent “Nullification Crisis” was popular in the North, John Quincy Adams and his friends and supporters in Massachusetts seemed to aim more personal criticism at him, generally at his lack of education and uncouth behavior. The former president went so far as to refer to the current one as a “barbarian” when he learned that Harvard University would be granting Jackson an honorary degree during his New England tour. The President of Harvard, Josiah Quincy, proceeded with the investiture nonetheless and found himself rather charmed by Jackson, admitting that “I was not prepared to be favorably impressed with a man who was simply intolerable to the Brahmin caste of my native state……”

Election maps from the Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library; Bernhardt Wall, Following Andrew Jackson 1767-1845 (1937).

After his Harvard reception, the President rode up to Salem through Lynn and Marblehead on June 26 in a cavalcade and was met at the town line by a reception of dignitaries; he did not stop to chat, but rather traveled directly to Nathaniel West’s Mansion House  on Essex Street where he would spend the night. He was not well, and would not make it to Remond’s dinner. Since the idea for this post started with the dinner, I think I should say a bit more about it. Compared to other events catered by Remond, the menu was not as elaborate or the preparations made as far in advance. According to the Remond family papers at the Phillips Library, Remond made the contract only on June 20, less than a week before the President’s arrival. He promised a “handsome good dinner including mock turtle soup for 150 people” and the host party requested a few additions, including cherries, strawberries, sherry, champagne and cigars. Everything else was left to Remond’s discretion. (This just seems a little casual compared to Remond’s other extravaganzas—were they dissing Jackson?) The dinner did go on even in the President’s absence, with an afterparty on Chestnut Street. There are hints that Jackson’s frequent illnesses were convenient or of his own making (which are wrong—Jackson was ill). In his Memoirs (IX, 5), John Quincy Adams asserts that Jackson’s illness was “politic……he is so ravenous of notoriety that he craves the sympathy for sickness as a portion of his glory….fourth-fifths of his sickness is trickery, and the other fifth mere fatique.” The next day he was up for a little trip around town in a barouche, however, for which people really turned out according to the Salem Gazette (June 28, 1833): “the crowd of Spectators was greater than has been witnessed in this place since the visit of Lafayette.”

Salem Directory, 1857 (two years before the Mansion House burned down).

You can’t gauge public opinion from mere numbers, so I’m not sure I can answer the question in my title. The Salem crowd was well-behaved by all acounts, but not exuberant. The most revealing detail of the Salem Gazette account was the lack of apparent intoxication among the spectators: we believe no serious accident occurred to mar the festivities of the day. And although we had frequent opportunities to examine the crowd of many thousands, we did not discover a single instance of intoxication, or disorderly conduct of any kind. And that was it, after the parade was over, President Jackson set off for Lowell and no more was said about him. In the following year, however, there was a notable incident that might reveal some sentiment towards Jackson in greater Massachusetts: the venerable USS Constitution was fitted out with a new figurehead depicting Jackson and while anchored in Boston harbor a local sea captain rowed out and cut off its head! In the print below, demons are doing the dirty work. Much later, of course, Jackson’s reputation deteriorated more dramatically, in Massachusetts and elsewhere. Even though Salem City Hall was built with surplus funds distributed to local governments during his administration, Mayor (now Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor) Kimberley Driscoll moved to remove Andrew Jackson’s portrait from the City Council Chambers in 2019, and it was eventually replaced by a striking portrait of the seventeenth-century Naumkeag/Pawtucket leaders Squaw Sachem and Nanepashemet by Indigenous artist Chris Pappan.

Crop of  “The Decapitation of a Great Blockhead by the Mysterious Agency of the Claret Coloured Coat,” (Boston?, 1834), Swann Auction Galleries.

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February 9, 2026

Knox Sunday

By daseger

I know, there was a big football game yesterday, and I watched half of it at an actual party at night but the day was reserved for Col. Henry Knox. I’ve been watching online as commemorations of Knox’s Noble Train of Artillery moved across large swaths of New York and Massachusetts on its way to relieve the besieged citizens of Boston but had not made it to one live event—and Evacuation Day (better known as St. Patrick’s Day to those of you not in Massachusetts) is only a little over a month away. So I decided to drive out to Framingham to see some cannons and Patriots before the other Patriots took the field. The event was a bit more talk than action, as I listened to organizers and politicians and community leaders express their joy at being part of the festivities. Quite a few speeches, but earnest expressions all and it was nice to see such a large community gathering.

Scenes of the day; Revolution 250 Chair Professor Robert Allison and the official Trail.

Knox Trail 250 is an initiative of Revolution 250, which bears the motto: Your Town, Your History, Our Nation so the commemorative events of the past few years have always been community-based in terms of organization and participation. This particular event was a Middlesex County affair, with representatives from all the towns surrounding Framingham (Marlborough, Southborough, Wayland ) present. Besides community (then and now), there was also a notable emphasis on the two most heralded African American soldiers of the Revolution from Massachusetts: Salem Poor and Peter Salem. The former was representated by a reenactor (below) who sounded more like an actor as he recounted his life and service, while we saw Peter Salem’s name on a 1775 roster of Framingham Minutemen. (Why the two Salem names? The answer seems somewhat shrouded still, but the general concensus seems to be that Poor’s name, which occasionally appeared as “Salam” might have an Islamic connection or represent a form of salaam, the word for peace in Arabic, while Peter’s name designated the town of one of his enslavers.) I spent a long time looking at the roster.

I’ve been fascinated by Henry Knox’s story for a long time. It seems so sweeping and dramatic, like many Revolutionary personal narratives. Young Boston bookseller becomes inflamed with the cause, marries the daughter of prominent Loyalists who promptly disown her, sets out to liberate Boston by transporting 59 cannons from Fort Ticonderoga in the dead of winter, mounts said cannons on Dorchester Heights and drives the British away after the long siege, becomes Washington’s chief of artillery and later the first Secretary of War, retrieves his wife’s family’s confiscated land holdings and settles down in the midst of the Maine county that would be named for him (and then of course there’s Fort Knox too). Having physical places tied to your memory, in Knox’s case an actual trail, invites exploration.

Revolution 250 Executive Director Jonathan Lane and “Colonel Henry Knox”; a commemorative quilt sown by volunteers at the Framingham History Center; miniature of Henry Knox, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

There’s one more big Knox event if you are in the area: “To Win the Siege: the Noble Train Arrives” at the Hartwell Tavern within the Minute Man National Historic Park on February 21st.

12 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Historic Trails, History

February 2, 2026

The Problem with Sugar

By daseger

I have either written, edited, or read all of the essays that make up Salem’s Centuries many times over these past three years as they have taken shape but now that they’re all together in a published book I read them again last week, as I wanted to see how the book held up, cover to cover, beginning to end. You don’t have to read the book that way, as it is a collection of topical essays in chronological order, but I wanted to see if there were some hidden themes that perhaps we should have made more apparent (I think I was also looking for typos). Overall I was really pleased—-I think the book holds together well, and I only found one rather insignificant typo, in one of my own essays! I was also pleased to come away from this material with questions, because for me that’s the mark of a good history book, or any book for that matter. So I thought I would re-engage with some Salem history from time to time here, prompted by these new questions about old topics. Today I want to write about the supply of sugar in Salem, prompted by a piece by my co-editor, Brad Austin, about Salem’s entrepreneurial candymaker, Mary Spencer, widely known as the “Gibralter Woman.” This is a well-worn narrative: an Englishwoman is shipwrecked in Salem in 1806 and gifted a pound of sugar by Salem residents which she transforms into “Gibralters,” hard candies which she first sells from the steps of the First Church and which are eventually carried all over the world on Salem ships.

Peabody Historical Society.

Brad’s piece, “Mary Spencer: Shipwrecks, Sugar and Salem” is a wonderful example of what he calls “pulling” on a (familiar) narrative thread to reveal more context—and more questions. He picks up the story with Mary’s son Thomas Spencer, who arrived in Salem in the 1820s and carried on the family business while at the same time asserting a very public Abolitionist stance as one of of the founders of the Salem Anti-Slavery Society. And here’s the problem and the question: as sugar was the commodity most associated with slave labor, how can an Abolitionist candy maker run his business in good faith? Brad tells us that “in 1805, the year that Mary Spencer arrived in Salem, the Salem Gazette had more than 2500 mentions of sugar and molasses in advertisements along, on top of the hundreds of news stories and price guides it published discussing these commodities.” Mary Spencer’s first bag of gifted sugar almost certainly came from the West Indies, where it was cultivated, harvested, and processed by enslaved labor. Was this still the case twenty years later when her son joined the business? I think so, but there were a few other possibilities that appeared as I went through a sampling of advertisements myself. (Just a sampling; this is a blog post. A more comprehensive review would take hours and hours and hours, so what follows is an impression.)

What I saw was a lot of West Indian sugar coming into Salem, often called Havanna and or Martinique sugar, and then increasing amounts of domestic New Orleans sugar, also a product of enslaved labor. It’s hard to see how a Salem candy manufacturer or indeed any Salem person could do without sugar produced by enslaved labor unless they did without sugar altogether. Then a little glimmer of hope: the arrival of East Indian sugar, called Calcutta and Java sugar, after 1815. As you can see above, Michael Shepard is sourcing sugar from both east and west, but was the former the way forward? This certainly makes sense with Salem’s eastern-oriented trade, and could have been an American variant of the “East India Sugar not made by Slaves” campaign in Britain.

Sugar bowl, blue glass, inscribed in gilt with the words ‘East India Sugar / not made by / Slaves’, about 1820-30, probably made in Bristol, England. Museum no. C.14-2023. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Sugar from the East Indies did come into Salem in increasing volume but West Indian and New Orleans sugar imports were greater over the next few decades from my sampling. Kind of depressing, certainly not a consumption revolution. But then I came across a striking statement which let me down another road: sugar beet cultivation!

Was this another first for Salem? Likely not—the first sugar beet operation is usually identified as David Lee Child’s “factory” in Northampton at around this same time but there were earlier experiments. Beet sugar seems to have had the potential to be the most promising slavery-free alternative to cane sugar for abolitionists in New England and elsewhere but a real industry didn’t take off until much later. Pickering Dodge Jr. does not appear to have continued his experiments in North Salem (but I’ll keep digging). It seems that both Childs’ and Dodge’s efforts were hampered by processing: the prevalent methods produced a sugar that people just didn’t like. And that was a problem.

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in History, Salem

January 26, 2026

Frosty Salem

By daseger

So I was going to bring you some photographs of Salem during yesterday’s snowstorm today, but that would have necessitated actually going out and walking around, and just a few steps from my backyard out onto Chestnut Street at midday were enough to convince me that I didn’t want to do that. So I have images of snowstorms past, mostly new discoveries, and most from the Peabody Essex Museum’s Phillips Library, which possesses the largest collection of famed photographers Frank Cousins and Samuel Chamberlain, as well as images by amateur photographers in family papers. True to their promises of several years ago, the Phillips librarians have been steadily digitizing their local collections and everytime I go their digital collections page I see new-to-me things. If you’re new to Salem photo-sleuthing, you can just start with their very accessible “Salem Streets” collection, culled from a variety of sources. And of course all the glass plate negatives of Frank Cousins were digitized quite a while ago, and can also be found at Digital Commonwealth. My title is from Cousins, who assembled several of his favorite images for an 1891 collage, which I imagine was hung in the window of his Bee-Hive shop that very winter. Then I’m going to double back and proceed in chronological order.

So let’s go back a decade into the 1880s, when we really start to see a lot of photographs of Salem streets and buildings, both commercially published and popping up in family papers. I’ll never forget opening up the volumes of the Francis Lee papers a few summers ago at the Phillips Library in Rowley and seeing all of these gorgeous photographs from the mid-1880s. The photos below are from the same time period—1884-86—and this first amazing one is taken from the vantage point of Lee’s house, 14 Chestnut Street. No filter! Isn’t this a striking image? This photo and those that follow are attributed to John Robinson, a Salem author and horticulturalist and trustee of pretty much every single civic institution in the city at the time. I wasn’t aware that he was a photographer as well; I don’t know if had commissioned these images for some future publication? The last one of this group is from the vantage point of his house on Summer Street, and so we have two striking views of Samuel McIntire’s South Church, which burned to the ground in 1903.

Chestnut Street winters, Salem Streets collection, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum.

The 1890s: was Frank Cousins’ most productive decade as a photographer. He loved to photograph Chestnut Street too, but he branched out, all over the city, as his “Frosty Salem” poster illustrates. I love his winter shots because many of them include people, while his more formal architectural photographs decidedly do not.

Essex Street, the Common, Dearborn and Lafayette Streets,1890s, Frank Cousins Glass Plate Negative Collection, Phillips Library via Digital Commonwealth.

Also from the 1890s are several photographs by amateur photographers of an uprooted (Elm?) tree on Chestnut Street, with every possible angle captured!  I have looked in vain for more views of dealing with the snow, but this is as close as I could get. Closing out this decade are several beautiful photographs of the Pickering and Bartlett houses on Broad Street which are somehow connected to (taken by?) a certain Katherine A. Pond. I need to know more about her.

Chestnut and Broad Streets, 1890s, Phillips Library Digital Collections.

The 1920s: when I was looking for photos of Salem’s 1926 Tercentenary in various family albums at the Phillips, I came across the photos of the winter of 1924-25 in Francis Tuckerman Parker’s album. Again, these are not professional, and they are not digitized—I just took photos of the snapshots myself—so they not that great quality, but they are so interesting for what they show. The first image shows the intersection of Chestnut, Summer, and Norman Streets and on the extreme right is what I think is the last photograph of Samuel McIntire’s house before its demolition. The second, looking up Chestunt in the other direction, shows the church that replaced McIntire’s South Church, which was later demolished. Then we have a snow trolley on Essex, and a very messy intersection at the Essex and Summer.

Salem in the winter of 1924-25, Parker Family Photograph Album, Phillips Library.

1930s: the Phillips Library also possesses the huge negative collection of Samuel Chamberlain, a very important mid-century photographer of New England architecture and scenery, which is accessible at Digital Commonwealth. Chamberlain published Historic Salem in Four Seasons in 1938, so I assume these photos are from that time, but the collection encompasses his entire career. Pioneer Village, Salem’s outdoor living-history museum, was in its first decade, and Chamberlain photographed its buildings and landscape lavishly.

Pioneer Village by Samuel Chamberlain, Digital Commonwealth.

And finally, a street view of Broad Street in 1956 and an aerial view of Chestnut in 1972, both after the storms. The latter is included in a feature in Life magazine in that year, prompted by President Nixon’s visit to China. Eastern-oriented Salem seemed like a good place to examine American perspectives on Asia at that time; I don’t think that would be the first Salem association now.

Salem in 1956 and 1972: William F. Abbott collection at the Phillips Library and Life magazine, 1972.

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January 19, 2026

Salem Ladies 1876

By daseger

I think I’ve previewed the “anniversary year” for quite a few years on this blog in Januarys past, but this particular year is going to be so dominated by the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution (nationally) and Salem’s 400th anniversary (locally) that I decided not to. However, I don’t want to lose sight of the trees through the forest! I’ve always thought that the 1870s was an interesting decade for Salem women, and in 1876 in particular there were two women’s organizations which emerged that I think really represent the collective impact of women both within and outside their community at this time, and after. One organization, the Ladies Centennial Committee of Salem, had a very specific focus and is no longer with us, while the other, the Woman’s Friend Society, most certainly is: it is celebrating its 150th anniversary this very year. I thought I’d shine a spotlight on both. I had an opportunity to research the Ladies Centennial Committee’s efforts for my chapter on Salem and the Colonial Revival in Salem’s Centuries, and my general awareness turned to appreciation for both its organization and creative curation: its December 1875 Salem exhibition of “relics” from the past was broadcast across the nation. These objects were sent to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia along with many other Salem exhibits from the present, and because so few other Massachusetts towns and cities followed suit Salem really dominated the entire effort from the Bay State. The Ladies of Salem followed up with a Centennial Ball at Mechanics Hall, which added to Salem’s Centennial Fund coffers and enhanced its reputation as as steward of the Colonial past.

Centennial Commemoration in Salem: Exhibition and Ball, Mechanic Hall on Essex Street Salem and the Massachusetts Building in Philadelphia. Salem is the “Old City of Peace” and not yet Witch City.

The exhibition of antique articles was quite diverse, encompassing furniture, clothing, silver, portraits and paper from the past, but I think these women were more than casual antiquarians relying on their family and social connections for “relics” of Salem’s and America’s past. Mrs. Hagar, the committee chair, wasn’t even old-money North Shore: she was Mary Bradford McKim Hagar from New York State, the wife of Daniel Hagar, the principal of Salem Normal School. They received so much publicity, and often their Centennial efforts were paired with other pieces of “news” related to Salem women (see the first image above) which I think is really interesting. The membership of the committee included women—most prominently educator Kate Tannant Woods—who were as much or more interested in social reform as cultural curation. While she was serving on the Centennial Committee, Woods was instrumental in establishing the Moral Education Society of Salem, which eventually changed its named to the Woman’s Friend Society, after similarly-named societies in the area.

Right from its foundation, the Salem Woman’s Friend Society developed a mission that expanded far beyond the first “Needle Woman’s Friend Society” founded in Boston in 1847 “for the purpose of giving employment in needlework to poor women.” The Salem mission included a girl’s reading room, an employment bureau, and housing, after Salem’s most generous philanthropist, Captain John Bertram, offered them half of a stately Federal house on Elm Street for shelter purposes. In 1884, his daughter Jennie Emmerton, always referred to as “Salem’s richest woman” and long Salem’s largest individual taxpayer, deeded the house to the Society, which acquired the other half of the Joseph Fenno house in 1887 through private donations. There was also a focus on vocational education, but I’ll let the Society explain its expanding mission in its own words, with this great fundraising brochure from its deposited records at the Salem State Archives and Special Collections. (*note: these records are amazing! I had one student write a great paper about the employment bureau several years ago, but more studies could be sourced)

So many initiatives! Including the District (later Visiting) Nurse program, which would later be adminstered out of the House of the Seven Gables, founded by Jennie Emmerton’s daughter, Caroline Emmerton. All of this outreach was extraordinarily important in the historical context, when Salem’s immigrant population was increasing steadily and social and medical services were not yet in place. And now, more than a century later, such systems are well-established but the Woman’s Friend Society continues its important work in the housing sphere, where insufficiency prevails. This is also a Salem organization that knows and shares its history, and will be commemorating its 150th anniversary with several special events in the coming months, so watch this space.

Emmerton House/ Women’s Friend Society, 12 Elm Street, Salem, Massachusetts.

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January 12, 2026

Minority Report

By daseger

Provocative title, yes? It’s not mine. A very different presentation for me today: a very short post, with no pictures and very little analysis on my part. Basically I just want to offer you a link, to the Minority Report of the two historians appointed to the City Seal Task Force, whose contributions to the Official Report were so butchered and detached from documentation that they felt compelled to compose their own report and submit it to the Salem City Council for its review and consideration of an alteration to Salem’s official city seal since 1839. I’m not sure what’s going to happen here, but we all (including myself—five posts here!) got very swept up in this process. In general, the City Council seems to have a preference for very bland history, which offends no one and affirms some contemporary value, or very commodified history (all witches all the time everywhere), which many people find offensive but is rationalized according to its perceived monetary value, and nothing in between. Very little nuance is permitted, and of course history is all nuance and the City Seal discussion really had a lot of nuance, all of which is presented so well in this Minority Report. And that’s one reason I want to amplify it.

Download Report

The other reason why I wanted to share this report is that it is excellent in general as well as in nuance! It’s a detailed summary of a major sector of Salem’s maritime history during its so-called “golden age,” drawn from both traditional and new studies, with some great insights into cultural history and public history. It features an array of perspectives, from both the past and the present. Even if you’re not into the seal debate (which is understandable–I don’t know how it creeped up on me either) it’s well worth your time.

Now usually I would analyze and annotate this myself, but I said to myself (for once): I have said (written) enough! I certainly would be interested in your comments here, however (particularly because I haven’t had anyone to discuss this with), and I’ll be back with something new next week. I’m not sure when the City Council is going to take this issue up, but I’ll report back when they do.

9 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Culture, Current Events, Salem

January 4, 2026

Salem’s Centuries

By daseger

Yesterday I received three copies of Salem’s Centuries. New Perspectives on the History of an Old American City, and Tuesday is publication day, so I thought I’d provide an introductory post. The crucible of this book is definitely this blog, so I want to thank all of its followers, readers, and commenters: I truly am grateful for your support and inspiration! I can’t believe that I’ve been writing in this space for fifteen years: that’s a long time in internet years. It started out as just a vehicle to satisfy my own curiosity about Salem’s history and showcase Salem’s architecture, though I definitely thought I would move on to more worldly topics, despite its title. But the Salem posts were always the most popular, by far (except for anything to do with maps!) And so a more sustained focus on Salem led to the book, but a book is different than a blog. What I share here are mostly stories, but Salem’s Centuries is all about the history of this storied place.

 

I “posed” the books all over the house!

Salem is indeed a storied place. You (or I) can’t walk down the street without seeing a structure that conjures up some story or inspires the search for one. Stories are part of history, but history is more: layers, context, perspectives. After Covid and the publication of The Practical Renaissance I knew I wanted to write something about Salem for its 400th anniversary in 2026, but I wasn’t sure what—or how. The easiest thing to produce would be a compilation of the Salem stories I have posted here, but I wanted more and I thought Salem deserved more, and so the thought of a proper Salem history emerged. It was an intimidating thought for me, as Salem is an important American city and as I have asserted here time and time again, I am not an American historian. I think I’ve acquired some knowledge and expertise in Salem’s history over these fifteen years, but not enough to sustain a volume that attempts to cover 400 years. So I turned to my colleagues at Salem State, and the result is a collection of essays which explore Salem’s history from different scholarly perspectives across time but centered in place. The key moment in this turn was definitely that in which Brad Austin, our Department chair, 20th century American historian and experienced editor, agreed to be my co-editor. And the rest is history!

Here’s an overview of the book, which will be released everywhere on Tuesday and showcased in a series of events, beginning with a presentation (and hopefully discussion) at Hamilton Hall on January 25. Brad and I are incredibly grateful to the Peabody Essex Museum for centering its PEM Reads podcast on Salem’s Centuries throughout 2026. There’s a lot to discuss, but as both Brad and I realized as we finished this book, there’s also a lot more to learn about Salem’s vast history, so we hope that its reception encourages further research. And that’s exactly where you want to be at the end of a history project: stories end, history doesn’t.

The First Century (note: an innovative feature of our book is its division into full-length chapters and shorter, more focused “interludes” on people, places, and specific events. This was Brad’s idea.):

“Putting Salem on the Maps” is a grand display of historical and geographical context by Brad, and a perfect orientation for our place and book. My colleague Tad Baker has written the definititve history of the Salem Witch Trials, A Storm of Witchcraft, but he is also an archeaologist and historian of the indigenous peoples of New England, and his contributions to our book showcase both these fields of expertise. “The Dispossession of Wenepoykin” gives some much needed historical background of Salem’s “Indian Deed,” and “Gallows Hill’s Long Dark Shadow” is a first-hand account of the revelation of Proctor’s Ledge, a space below Gallows Hill, as the execution site of the victims of 1692, set in historiographical and contemporary contexts. My brief history of Hugh Peter, Salem’s fourth pastor and a regicide of King Charles I, enabled me to indulge in my own scholarly expertise for a bit, and Marilyn Howard’s depiction of John Higginson and his world is a rewrite of one of the best (no, the best) masters’ theses that I have read at Salem State. A magisterial chapter on “Salem and Slavery,” including both indigenous and African-American enslavement in Salem, by my award-winning colleague Bethany Jay, completes this century. Salem’s Centuries contains five pieces on African-American history, all set in larger contexts.

The Second Century: 

You would think that an eastern American city as venerable and consequential as Salem would have a published history of its myriad roles during the American Revolution, but no. Hans Schwartz, also a graduate student at Salem State who went on to get his Ph.D. at Clark University, has contributed a succinct yet comprehensive history of these roles in Chapter Four, with an emphasis on the social and economic changes brought about by the Revolution. Another one of our graduate students, Maria Pride, contributes some of her dissertation research on privateering in an interlude on Salem’s “hero among heroes,” Jonathan Haraden, with a little public history push by me. A strong theme of the book is Salem’s continuous “outward entrepreneurialism,” which Dane Morrison’s and Kimberly Alexander’s chapter on the rather tragic expatriate residency of the Kinsman family represents well. “Sabe and Rose” summarizes the collaborative research of Professor Jay and Salem Maritime National Historic Park Education Specialist Maryann Zujewski into the lives of the two people enslaved by Salem’s wealthy Derby family. The much-told story of Mary Spencer, “the Gibralter Woman” who (ironically) made and sold her famous hard candy with slave-made sugar while simultaneoulsy maintaining (and passing down) a fierce Abolitionist stance, gets the Austin treatment while I am able to indulge in a longer history of the man who inspired me to dig in, and dig in deeper, to Salem’s history: patriarch, entrepreneur and abolitonist John Remond.

The Third Century:

The Third Century opens with two studies of Salem and the Civil War by former Salem State graduate students Robert McMicken and Brian Valimont. McMicken contributes a general overview (like the Revolution, there isn’t one!) and Valimont a more focused piece on Captain Luis Emilio of the Massachusetts 54th. Here we have another Salem hero with no statue while a fictional witch reigns in Salem’s most historic square (at least Haraden has a plaque, even though it’s in the Korean barbecue restaurant which stands where his home once did). Our colleague Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello contributes a valuable overview of Salem’s Catholic parishes (Irish, French, Italian and Polish) with her chapter on “Immigrant Catholicisms” and we have another example of Salem’s many connections to Asia in Chapter Nine, “A Salem Scholar Abroad: the Worldview of Walter G. Whitman” by our department’s South Asian historian, Michele Louro, and the Dean of the Salem State Library, Elizabeth McKeigue. This chapter is based on Whitman’s writings and lantern slides of his time in Asia in the SSU Library’s Special Collections, and could definitely be the basis of a larger project. There are two focused studies on Salem Willows in this Century: mine on the evolution of Salem’s famed “Black Picnic” from the eighteenth century to the present, and Brad’s portrayal of the Willows as the “playground” of the North Shore. My chapter on four notable Salem representatives of the Colonial Revival movement definitely transitions well in the twentieth century, while my examination of the 1879 “School Suffrage” election is pretty focused on that one year.

The Fourth Century: 

We were slightly deferential to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as Salem historiography has been so focused on the witch trials and maritime history and felt that this last century has been a bit ignored. From a department perspective, we also have several acclaimed twentieth-century historians and wanted to showcase their work. Brad and I worked together on all the editing and introductions in Salem’s Centuries, but the one chapter we co-wrote is an overview Salem’s urban development over the twentieth century, beginning with the aftermath of the Great Salem Fire of 1914. This chapter enabled me to finally figure out Salem’s experience of urban renewal in the 1960s and 1970s! Avi Chomsky, an eminent Latin Americanist who also studies labor history and Hispanic communities here in the US, contributed two pieces to this century, one on the 1933 strike at Salem’s largest employer, the Naumkeag Steam Cotton Company, and another on Salem’s changing demographics in the later twentieth and twenty-first century. Brad worked with SSU archivist Susan Edwards on a chapter on Salem during World War II and with Professor Duclos-Orsello on the Salem State community during the lively 1960s: both pieces are based on SSU archival holdings, which we also wanted to showcase. Readers of this blog have read my rather struggling posts about Salem’s public history in its present “tourism era,” but our book contains two much more illuminating studies by public history professionals Margo Shea and Andrew Darien. Drew Darien, our former chair and now Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at SSU, presents an analysis of oral histories taken during and after a conference held on the occasion of the 325th anniversary of the Witch Trials back in 2017, which Professor Shea and her former graduate student Theresa Giard explore the lure and meaning of one of Salem’s most popular present attractions, ghost tours. Finally, we have an epilogue (by me, exploring or maybe the better word is summarizing 400 years of Salem history through the perspective of one place, Town House Square) and a coda, by our colleague in the English department, J.D. Scrimgeour, Salem’s very first Poet Laureate.

Salem’s Centuries. New Perspectives on the History of an Old American City. Temple University Press, 2026.

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December 29, 2025

Finishing my 2025 Books

By daseger

I’m still working on the fall version of my 2025 reading list even as the year draws to a close. I certainly won’t finish it by the end of the year, but I have a LONG break ahead of me as I have a sabbatical for the spring semester! Lots of great books coming out next year (including my own) so I better get going. Next week, I’ll post about Salem’s Centuries as its publication date is January 6 (hoping to change the vibe for that particular date). This is a really good working list of books that I have read, am currently reading (I tend to read books concurrently) and plan to read pretty soon, all of which were published in 2025. In fact the last book is due to be published tomorrow, so I don’t have it in my possession but I pre-ordered it. As usual, this is a nonfiction list; I just don’t read very much fiction so I can’t offer up any kind of a guide to those genres. I read history, history of science, art history, the history of food and drink, folklore, and books about various types of design and architecture. That’s pretty much it. Maybe a bit of politics and popular culture—and media, but the vast number of titles for fiction and self-help books appearing every year seldom catch my attention. So here goes, beginning with books in my period that I felt that I had to read but were nevertheless quite good.

I thought Borman’s book was going to be just a narrative of Elizabeth’s declining years, death, and the succession of James I and VI, and it was that, but it was more too—I learned lots of little things I did not know about these years. Borman is more than a television presenter, clearly: this is a very source-based history, with particular reliance on new revelations about William Camden’s Annales. Just further complexities relating to James for me! I think I have a book on him on many of my book lists here, and as 2025 was the 500th anniversay of his death I had to have one more: Clare Jackson’s Mirror of Great Britian is amazing, one of the best royal biographies I’ve ever read, and that is saying something as James was complex: earnestly Protestant but also a pursuer of pleasure, well-educated but also a true believer in demonic witchcraft, the only contemporary critic of tobacco, the first King of Great Britain. He’s a lot, and Jackson handles both the man and his era really well. Getting away from royalty and this specific era, two other British books which I am kind of reading together, gradually (they are both what I think of as “dipping” books in that you can pick up and dip into them wherever and whenever you like) are all about food and folklore—both just completely entertaining and informative at the same time.

I like to read books that are sweeping in terms of their topics, sweeping over the centuries: a change from most of the academic reading I do which is much more constrained in terms of both topic and time. The very popular genre that I call “commodity history” often includes sweeping titles, but as its title asserts, Jordan Smith’s The Invention of Rum is more narrowly focused on the invention of this “perfect” Atlantic spirit. Another “invention” book (though I really don’t think “design” was invented in the twentieth century but that’s why I want to read The Invention of Design) covers only the twentieth century. A really fascinating book blending history, magic and medicine (one of my favorite combinations), Decoding the Hand covers more ground.

 

I have my natural, constant interests, but if I’m looking for something new to read the first place I go is to the website Five Books, at which experts recommend five books in their areas of expertise and lots of lists to inspire a wider range of reading. I love this site! One great book that I never would have found on my own came from here: Sara Lodge’s Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective, which was on the shortlist for this year’s Wolfson History Prize, awarded annual for both well-researched and accessible (enjoyable!) history writing. This book was definitely both, and a case study in utilizing historical and literary sources.

Finally, three books of a more timely/political nature. The medievalist Patrick Boucheron has written a great book about Political Fictions over time, I am searching for some explanations for/relief from the NOISE that assaults Salem all year long so I purchased Chris Berdick’s well-reviewed Clamor (though I’m sure he will take on all the sirens and jackhammers but not the tour guides), and I think we should always remember January 6 (for more than the publication of Salem’s Centuries) so I’m going to read Nora Neus’s oral history on that day.

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December 22, 2025

The Woman Who Invented Christmas Decorating?

By daseger

Everyone has their favorite Christmas movies, and most of mine are classics from the mid-twentieth century: there is the Barbara Stanwyck double feature of Christmas in Connecticut and Remember the Night followed by the Bing Crosby double feature of Holiday Inn and White Christmas and then I turn to Holiday Affair and The Bishop’s Wife. Very close to Christmas, I put on variations of A Christmas Carol, saving my favorite (the Reginald Owen one) for last. And that brings me to the one Christmas movie that is a family favorite in our house which is actually from our own time: The Man Who Invented Christmas. Both my husband and I love this film, and if we are hosting we force our guests to watch it. It’s all about Charles Dickens and his struggle to write A Christmas Carol, with its characters making regular appearances in his study. I wouldn’t say it’s a great film, but it’s certainly a joyous one. And the title gets you thinking. Those Victorians were definitely changemakers in many realms, including that of celebration. If Dickens “invented ” Christmas with his text, did his contemporaries pile on with their visual displays? Queen Victoria debuted her family’s German-inspired Christmas tree in the same decade (the 1840s), when the first commercially produced Christmas card also appeared. Several decades later, an American woman produced sketches which seem to have been quite influential in their representation of  “decking the halls” in the nineteenth century, at least on this side of the Atlantic: Lucy Ellen Merrill (1828-1886) of Newburyport, Massachusetts. Merrill’s pen and ink sketches of Christmas interiors, in the collection of the Museum of Old Newbury, often surface this time of year as inspiration for museum holiday decorating, and were published in 1961 as a portfolio in Christmas in the Good Old Days: A Victorian Album of Stories, Poems, and Pictures of the Personalities Who Rediscovered Christmas, edited by the prominent Salem author, Dan Foley. According to Foley, the sketches were produced around 1870 as illustrations for a planned publication by local poet Anna Gardner Hale to be entitled Merry Christmas, and they are featured alongside photographs of the decorations reproduced in 1958 at the Museum’s Cushing House in Newburyport.

Garlands everywhere! Apparently Merrill also included notes on which evergreens she used in her creations. Her sketch of a dining room is the most charming of her embellished interiors: you see it reproduced regularly, and a colored version is out there too (missing the large dog in the corner). Here garlands are draped around everything, even the place settings, with little stacks of presents adjacent: this particular arrangement/custom does not seem to have caught on. While many of Merrill’s creations seem a bit tortured, her advocacy for lush garlands still lives on today: the quest to find the perfect faux greenery has dominated my social media for weeks as my own search for decorating ideas for Christmas in Salem definitely triggered the algorithm.

Dan Foley deserves his own post. A native and lifelong resident of Salem, he was a garden and horticultural authority who designed the Colonial Revival garden at the House of the Seven Gables and authored over 20 books, including three bestselling Christmas classics: in addition to Christmas in the Good Old Days he published The Christmas Tree: An Evergreen Garland filled with History, Folklore, Symbolism, Traditions, Legends and Stories and Christmas the World Over in the 1960s. When I bought my house, two people told me that he had designed its garden and while I could never confirm that, I did buy an old copy of his 1972 book Gardening for Beginners to help me take care of it, and it remains my essential guide.

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December 15, 2025

Christmas Tipples

By daseger

I was researching the enforcement of the famous (or infamous) 1659 Massachusetts statutory “ban” on Christmas in the records of the Essex County quarterly courts the other day and soon realized that no one got fined for “keeping Christmas” but rather for excessive “tippling” on Christmas. I think if you kept Christmas quietly at home you were fine, but if you or your guests became “distempered with drink” you were not. Of course this was not the time of the excessive decorating that we indulge in now, so who knew if you thinking or praying: just don’t celebrate! In 1662, William Hoar was presented to the Court for “suffering tippling in his house by those who came to keep Christmas there” and he didn’t even indulge himself. The famous “Salem Wassail” of 1679 involved an elderly couple being held hostage by four young men who wanted to “drink perry and be merry”: when no perry (pear cider) was offered up, the men attacked the house for  a considerable length of time. Another rowdy Christmas occurred in 1671, with some serious drinking occurred at the tavern of John Hathorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s great great great uncle and the little brother of his far more respectable (and intolerant) great great great grandfather William. John’s ordinary already had a reputation for disorderly drinking, but on that Christmas night, witnesses swore that Joseph Collins drank seventeen quarts of rum and his wife Sarah had to be carried to her bed.

That’s a LOT of rum–whether the Collinses drank it or not (they later sued Hathorne for slander). I associate rum more with the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries so this Christmas indulgence surprised me, and immediately turned my attention to what people drank at Christmas in the seventeenth century—and later. Perry and various ciders, definitely. Beer was an everyday drink but maybe more celebratory when you turn it into something else—like lambswool, the favorite Wassail drink of Tudor and Stuart England, in which old strong ale was heated and spiced up and topped with a frothy puree of roasted apples. Did lambswool make it over here? According to Gregg Smith, author of the (I think definitive) Beer in America: the Early Years, it did, and it was called jingle. What could be more Christmassy than that?

John Worlidge, Vinetum Britannicum, or a Treatise of Cider and Other Wines and Drinks, 1676.

Nothing is more celebratory than punch and the eighteenth century seems like the Century of Punch and Revolution to me.  Punches were made and drank in the seventeenth century in England, and really caught on commercially with the emergence of special “punch houses” like that of James Ashley, but they took off in the Colonies too. So many American punches: the famous Fish House Punch of Philadelphia, Ben Franklin’s Milk Punch, Martha Washington’s Punch, the lethal Chatham Artillery Punch served to President Washington when he visited Savannah according to lore and legend. I just know that there was an “Old Salem Punch,” I’ve seen it referenced several times, but have never found the recipe. Nevertheless, Salem merchants in all trades reference punch consistently: fruit traders, dealers in silver and glass wares who offered up punch bowls, ladles, and cups, and of course spice purveyors. Citrus fruits were definitely advertised more as “souring” for punch than health benefits in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries! Though punch could be served cold or hot, the always hot flip, standard tavern fare by all accounts, seems to have been a predecessor of both eggnog and hot buttered rum. I can’t imagine a more suitable drink for the Christmas season, and am surprised it hasn’t been revived.

James Ashley’s Trade Card (c. 1740) © The Trustees of the British Museum

The nineteenth century always brings more, and more variety, of everything. I’m sure this was the case with holiday beverages as well, though most purveyors seem to advertise generic “wines, spirits and cordials” for Christmas from the 1830s so I’m not sure exactly what is being consumed. Salem did have six rum distilleries selling that spirit regionally in the first half of the nineteenth century, so I’m sure it was plentiful at Christmas and throughout the year. The first bartender’s guide, Jerry “The Professor” Thomas’s The Bar-tenders’ Guide: A Complete Cyclopaedia of Plain and Fancy Drinks (1862), is very specific about holiday libations, however. There are toddys and slings, and six recipes for the very American egg nog, including one that is served hot, as well as a British nog variation called “Tom and Jerry” which would become very popular stateside after this publication. And at the very end of the century, “Old Salem Punch” appears, in bottled form—from no less than S.S. Pierce.

The twentieth century seems like the century of adulteration for punch, which remained a favorite Christmas tipple. Not only was it bottled for sale, many more ingredients were added, so much so that it became more of a catch-all than a specific beverage. There were terrible “prohibition punches” during the 1920s, made with no alcohol at all or the literally lethal “wood alcohol”. After prohibition, Christmas punches had to be either red or sparkling, sometimes both: the red was the result of the addition of cranberry juice at best (and red food dye at worst) and the sparkling came from champagne and/or ginger ale. Fruit was added, not for “souring” but just because. Tom and Jerry was really popular in the first half of the century, then disappeared. Eggnog remained popular and was increasingly packaged as well: when you run into the real stuff, made at home, it’s quite something. One of my favorite Salem Christmas memories is of a lovely Christmas Eve party held every year by a wonderful older couple who lived in a Federal house on Essex Street. In the dining room was a huge silver punch (eggnog?) bowl filled to the brim with very frothy homeade eggnog, and everyone was always clustered around it ooohing and aaahing….and drinking! Not me: I really really wanted to, but I am a complete egg-phobic person, so it really says something that I was in such close proximity and even thinking about drinking this nectar. But one year I brought my father, and all I remember is him just standing by that bowl downing cup after cup. He wasn’t even social, which is unusual for him. I may be embellishing this a bit, but that’s my memory, and I’m happy to have it. Cheers!

The punch (eggnog) bowl of my memory, although it could be wrong.  A Christmas memory prompted by a punch bowl from Oliver Wendell Holmes: “This ancient silver bowl of mine—it tells of good old times, of joyous days, and jolly nights, and merry Christmas chimes.”

 

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