What became of the Pineapple House?

There was a large Georgian house in Salem referred to by all as the “Pineapple House” for its prominent door decoration. It was built by Captain Thomas Poynton at some point between 1740 and 1750 on Brown Street near Salem Common, and later moved to an adjacent court off the main street. Today neither the house or the court exist: I’ve been trying to determine what happened to both with little success! According to the Genealogical Memoir of the Driver Family (1889), the frame of the house was brought from England by Captain Thomas Poynton, husband of Mrs. Hannah Poynton (Bray), in one of his own ships as early as 1740. This house still stands in 1887, in a most excellent condition, but not on its original site, having been moved some hundred feet to make room for a house built for Mr. Stephen Ives (no. 40 Brown Street) whose heirs are the present owners of the Pine Apple House. My hero, the photographer-preservationist Frank Cousins, took several photographs of the house and its famous doorframe in the 1890s and 1910s, and I can find references to its existence as late as 1923. It came down sometime after that, and after the door frame (with pineapple) was donated to the Essex Institute, where it was installed in the Phillips Library.

The Captain Thomas Poynton House, 7 Brown Street Court, Salem. Photograph by Frank Cousins, Urban Landscape Digital Collection, Duke University Library.

Captain Poynton was a Loyalist, proudly whitewashing his chimneys and incurring the wrath of an angry mob which attacked his house in 1775, breaking many windows and inspiring him to depart for England. He left his wife behind (this happened so many times in Salem! What a great dissertation topic), and never returned to America. Mrs. Poynton seems to have been everyone’s favorite aunt, and she was devoted to the upkeep of the pineapple atop her front door, which apparently also came from England, painting and regilding it annually and ensuring that the curtains of her second-floor window never obscured its profile.

Two views of the Pineapple/Poynton House doorway by Cousins; as illustrated in the Essex Institute’s Visitors’ Guide to Salem, 1895;  the door frame and pineapple in the Phillips Library of the Essex Institute, Detroit Publishing Company postcard, after 1912.

The pineapple continued to be well maintained until its detachment and donation, but the rest of the house was expanded considerably in the rear (see above), enabling its transition into “tenement” status in the later nineteenth century. As indicated above, it was moved, and then sometime (1920s or 1930s?) it disappeared, leaving only its famous pedimented doorway and Cousins’ photographs behind.

Brown Street Court (just below #49) on a map in an undated Essex Institute brochure titled “A Tour of Salem”; Brown Street  Court today (I think!)–looking towards the Church of St. John the Baptist on St. Peter Street.