Monthly Archives: January 2020

January 28, 2020

The End of Mill Hill?

By daseger

Place names are a topic I have not explored much on this blog, which is odd, as they represent a major entry into the local past. There’s a great article in the old Essex Institute Historical Collections (Volume 31, 1894-95; it was also printed separately) by Essex Institute Secretary Henry Mason Brooks about Salem “localities”, featuring many names that are no longer with us and several that still are, including Carltonville, Blubber Hollow, and Castle Hill. Brooks weaves a historic narrative around most of his localities, but even though he references Mill Hill, he doesn’t have much to say about it. In his time, it was a relatively new route connecting central and South Salem, having only been “opened” or laid out in 1873-74. It is really just an extension of Salem’s central north-south thoroughfare, Washington Street, and a very short and shallow hill indeed. Yet despite its unimpressive size and scale, Mill Hill endured as a place name over the twentieth century. When I moved to Salem in the 1990s people would reference it often, and it took me quite a while to figure out where it was. A couple of years ago it was designated the site of a brand new development incorporating a Hampton Inn plus rental housing, but now that that prosaic structure sprawls across its base (and then some) I am wondering if this particular Salem locality has met its end.

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Mill Hill 1890s (3)

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Mill Hill 1914 PC SSU

Mill Hill 1920s PEMSome different perspectives on Mill Hill beginning with the 1897 Atlas at the State Library of Massachusetts. The first view is looking NORTH, towards downtown Salem, the rest are looking SOUTH towards Lafayette Street. The Phillips Library via Digital Commonwealth (NORTH), two post-fire scenes from the Salem State University Archives and Special Collections, and another Phillips Library view from about ten years later, after considerable post-fire reconstruction. Of course, the old St. Joseph’s–and the new St. Joseph’s–are long gone.

Ok, get ready for the view now, as it is a shocker: first, from my car, trying to take a photograph from the same location as the last photo above. What you see on the left is the side of the sprawling new Hampton Inn. And then: the front, supposedly the best face forward?

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This big boxy building features a conglomeration of materials over all of its facades: it actually looks pretty good from lower Lafayette/ Derby Street and the rear! Salem desperately needs a large commercial hotel to cater to its tourist traffic, but I can’t help but look upon this as a lost opportunity: more proliferation of plastic, or whatever that material is. I can’t understand why the City doesn’t work with chains to conform construction to some semblance of the architecture which made Salem Salem—at least a reflection, or even a nod. Washington Street just seems like a very different place now than when I first moved to Salem decades ago, with generic boxy buildings on every block and an uninspired train station at its head. It’s always been a busy, commercial thoroughfare in transition, but seems increasingly soul-less and place-less: and Mill Hill is clearly no more, as the new hotel is situated (as more than a few people have pointed out to me, so apparently “Mill Hill” does have resonance for Salem natives) at the corner of “Washington and Washington Streets”.

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10 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Architecture, Salem

January 25, 2020

A Feminine Focus

By daseger

The Reverend William Bentley’s Diary is justly famous as a detailed source of much of Federal-era Salem’s history, but I think that three memoirs written by Salem women deserve a bit more storied reputation as sources: Marianne C.D. Silsbee’s Half Century in Salem (1886), Eleanor Putnam’s (the pseudonym of Harriet Bates) Old Salem (1886), and Caroline Howard King’s When I Lived in Salem 1822-1866 (1937). Of these three reminiscences, I find myself returning to Silsbee’s Half Century again and again, so I thought I would feature her on my third Salem Suffrage Saturday post. She is of the next generation, and in a much more enviable position, than the Hawthorne sisters of last week’s post: I think she was also a working woman (like all women!), but by choice rather than necessity.

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20200114_111551_20200120094207958A Half Century in Salem, and two photographs of Marianne Cabot Devereux Silsbee from her 1861 photographic album at the Phillips Library in Rowley (PHA 58): the first dated 1851 and the second 1861.

Marianne Cabot Devereux was born in Salem in 1812 to Eliza Dodge Devereux and Humphrey Devereux: I believe that her father, who had been captured by the British during the War of 1812 and imprisoned on Bermuda, was not present at her birth. Upon his release and return, Humphrey eventually moved his family into a Chestnut Street mansion, but Marianne’s early life was spent elsewhere: I’m not sure exactly where her childhood residence was, but she remembered spending a lot of time at her maternal grandmother’s house on Front Street. Around the time that the Devereux family moved to Chestnut Street, Humphrey commissioned a pair of portraits of himself and his wife by Gilbert Stuart: I was thrilled to discover the latter in the collection of the Rehoboth Antiquarian Society, but I could only find a heliotype copy of Mr. Devereux’s portrait in the The Pickering Genealogy. 

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Silsbee Humphrey Devereux Pickering Genaology Vol 1 (2)

Mrs. Devereux looks rosy-cheeked in her Stuart portrait, which apparently pleased her very much (her dress apparently was not as pleasing, so the artist Chester Harding later repainted the ruff and drapery) but she was in fact an invalid, and died eleven years after this portrait, when Marianne was sixteen. I’m on the precipice on the dreaded psycho-history here, but I think that Marianne’s reverence for older women, so apparent in A Half Century as well as other works, might stem from her mother’s illness and death. I’m on stronger ground stating that the early years covered in A Half Century were based on her mother’s letters to Marianne, rather than her own reminiscences. So you kind of get a double feminine focus in this text, which dwells on food, shops, schools, entertainments, dress, homes—the life of women, or should I say relatively wealthy women—as well as “external” events: Lafayette’s visit in 1824, when the first steamship line commenced trips to Boston. The book is much more focused on personalities than events however, and women really pop out: the honorable Elizabeth Sanders (who will definitely be the subject of a later post), the charming Mrs. Remond, who catered all the meals at her beloved Hamilton Hall.

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Marianne Cabot Devereux Silsbee expressed herself a bit more publicly, but she was a traditional woman of her time, focused on her family and friends. She married Nathaniel Silsbee Jr., son of a U.S. Senator and later two-term Mayor of Salem in 1829 and moved into the Silsbee mansion on the Common (now undergoing a major renovation and expansion). They had five children, two of whom, George and her namesake Marianne, died in childhood. The Silsbees left Salem for Boston in 1862 when he became Treasurer of Harvard, and there was another move to Milton following his retirement. Throughout this time she wrote poems and reminiscences, some published, some not. Her first publication, Memory and Hope, a compilation of mourning poems edited and introduced by her, was issued anonymously in 1851 (one can understand her interest in this topic given the early deaths of two children), and thereafter there are published children’s rhymes, a handwritten journal of poetry entitled My Grandmother’s Mirror, A New England Idyll (a reference to her maternal Dodge grandmother, who was a Pickering), a book about the Boston Ladies Club, and finally A Half Century in Salem. 

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20200121_111833The Silsbee Mansion on Salem Common in 1884, George H. Walker; Memory and Hope (1851); Title page of My Grandmother’s Mirror (Essex County Collection, Phillips Library, E S585.3 1878).

Much of her writings dwell on home life, social life, all the little things that surround one’s daily existence: one poem in My Grandmother’s Mirror creates a scene in the old Pickering house, while another is written from the perspective of a woman who dwelt within the border, of the town of peace and order, Our pleasant little Salem, on the margins of the sea surrounded by her children and children’s children. Yet Mrs. Silsbee was also an active and engaged woman: a mayor’s wife who carried on a long personal correspondence with abolitionist Lydia Maria Child and whose personal photograph album compiled in 1861 contains as many photographs of soldiers and politicians as it does her own children and grandchildren. Most of the men in uniform are her own family, including her older brother, George H. Devereux, former adjutant general of Massachusetts, and his soon-to be heroic sons, Arthur F. Devereux, commander of the Salem Light Infantry and later the Massachusetts 19th at Gettysburg, and John F., a Captain in the 11th Massachusetts Infantry, as it was perhaps impossible to separate the private and public spheres at this particular time. Several photographs of President Lincoln are included, but also an image of what I can only presume to be the family cat! When it was over, once can hardly blame Marianne Silsbee for desiring to look back to a dimmer, and thus more pleasant past.

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The private and the public: Mrs. Silsbee’s poetry and President Lincoln in her photograph album: Phillips Library E S585.3 (1878) and PHA 58 (1861).

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , | posted in History, Salem, Women's History

January 21, 2020

Salem Needs a Concord Museum

By daseger

This past Sunday was a sparkling sunny day with newly-fallen snow, and as I was in a Little Women frame of mind, I decided to drive over to Concord to see all of its historic sites, starting with the Orchard House, of course. I’ve seen everything before but I go back again and again, seeing new things every time I return, and then there is also shopping and major architectural envy-touring in this old town, which is rich in more ways than one! Everyone seemed to be out walking or cross-country skiing, so I had the sites to myself, but for some reason I spent the most time in the one that actually had the least to offer: the Concord Museum. Don’t get me wrong: the Concord Museum is a great institution (see glowing commentary below) but it is in transition right now, and has very few rooms open. It’s a museum that has always been dedicated to the interpretation of all of Concord’s history in a professional and educational manner, and as such they are in the midst of restructuring their exhibitions—new/old spaces will open up over this year and next month they will have the new Paul Revere exhibition on view: Paul Revere: Beyond Midnight.

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20200119_132630Just some of the charms of Concord, Massachusetts: the Alcott Orchard House, the Old Manse, Hawthorne’s Wayside, the Emerson House, and the Concord Museum. (Every time I see Hawthorne’s Concord House, it reinforces how much he disliked his native city, as it is the most un-Salem house I’ve ever seen!)

Despite the obvious differences between the suburban, wealthy enclave of Concord, and the more densely-settled and diverse city of Salem, the two old settlements are similar in terms of their heritage resources: both played important roles in the American Revolution, both had very vibrant reform movements and intellectual milieus in the nineteenth century, both claim Hawthorne, both were key influences in the Colonial Revival movement of the twentieth century. Because of their perceived importance in American history, both have a landscape of heritage sites and important collections, and a federal acknowledgement of such in the form of a National Historic Site/Park. But two developments shaped Salem’s role as a “historical” city that differentiated it from that of Concord: 1) the comprehensive commodification of the Witch Trials and their tenuous connection to Halloween; and 2) the demise of the Essex Institute, which was Salem’s “Concord Museum”.

Historic massachusetts (3)The emphasis is on HOMES and MANSIONS for Concord and Salem on Ernest Chase Dudley’s 1964 map of Historic Massachusetts, Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library. No Witches (but Witch City of course).

I’ve written about Salem’s embrace of the profit potential of the Witch Trials time and time again so I’m not going to repeat myself: it remains an absolute mystery to me why everyone involved in this industry does not realize—much less acknowledge—that they are trading in tragedy and how a horrible statue of television witch situated in our major major historical and political square mocks the victims of 1692 in perpetuity. But that’s just me, apparently. So let’s move on. At some point, the heritage-focused citizens of Concord realized that they had too many institutions, too many attractions, too many stories: there was a need for a gateway to their town’s history. Salem had always had its gateway: the Essex Institute, which had collected, interpreted, and disseminated its history—all of its history—for more than a century. Concord did not have an Essex Institute, so it needed to develop the Concord Museum, which has served, and flourished, as the gateway to the Concord of the Revolution, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and more. When the Peabody Essex Museum absorbed the Essex Institute in the early 1990s, Salem ceased to have an institution which introduced and interpreted its cumulative history—and oriented its many visitors—in a comprehensive and professional manner. Salem is a historic “Gateway City”, but it has no historic Gateway. This has been clear to me for a while, but it became crystal clear when I was in the midst of the few new galleries that Concord Museum did have open the other day, most especially its introductory exhibition entitled Concord: at the Center of Revolution. “Revolution” is used in a broader sense here, not simply as a reference to the American Revolution but also to the “social and intellectual revolution of the mid-1800s” of which Concord was a center, thus leading it to “symbolize devotion to liberty, individualism, equality and democracy.” And because the emphasis here is on interpretation and representation, only a few objects from the Museum’s collections were chosen to introduce visitors to Concord’s history: an ancient spearhead, a revolutionary powder horn, a looking glass that belonged to an enslaved man who fought in the Revolution, the copper tea kettle that Louisa May Alcott used when she nursed the Civil War wounded, and more. These objects were carefully chosen—curated—and I immediately thought who does that in Salem? Where does that happen in Salem? What 7 or 8 or 9 objects could represent all of Salem’s history, and where would we find them?

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The Museum’s gateway role extends beyond its walls: it features Concord itineraries and self-guided tours and has a formal educational partnership with the Lowell and Lawrence school systems, bringing students to its galleries and new Rasmussen Education Center through the “Paul Revere’s Ride” fund. With its recent expansion, it has expanded its interpretation to include Native American history, women’s history, and African-American history. The mission, the mandate, and the message seem to be very clear: Concord’s history is more than that of Minutemen. Certainly Salem’s history is more, much more, than that of “witches”, but the many voices repeating that message are drowned out by crowd.

20200119_121235And yes, Concord has maintained its Tercentenary markers.

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

January 18, 2020

The Hustling Hathorne Sisters

By daseger

I wanted to start my Salem Suffrage Saturday posts with a focus on two lesser-known members of one of Salem’s most conspicuous families: the Ha(w)thornes. Generally we hear about either the Witch Trial Judge, John Hathorne, of the seventeenth century or the famed author (who added the w) of the nineteenth, but I’m going to look at two women who lived in between these towering figures: Mary (1742-1802) and Sarah (1750-1804) Hathorne. Nathaniel had multiple familial connections to the Salem Witch Trials on his paternal side: besides the infamous judge, both of his great uncles married granddaughters of Philip English, who was accused in 1692 along with his wife Mary but managed to flee to New York. Captain William Hawthorne married Mary Touzel, the daughter of Philip’s and Mary’s daughter Susannah Touzel, in 1741 and they had seven children, among them Mary and Sarah. I do believe that the girls and their siblings grew up in—and likely resided later—in what is generally referred to as the Benjamin Marston House on the corner of Cambridge and Essex Streets, which was passed down to their parents by Philip English: this was a very old house with a “modern” addition grafted onto the front in their time, when it was generally referred to as the Hathorne House.

benjamin-marston-house-salem-massachusetts (4)_LIThe Marston/Hathorne House on Essex & Cambridge Streets, drawn by John Robinson in 1870, just before its demolition.

I don’t think their father made much money: the fact that both they—and their Hathorne-Touzel cousins—are living and working in this old “mansion house” over much of their lives gives one that impression, as does the fact that their mother, Mrs. Mary Hathorne, kept by all accounts a well-stocked shop. As neither Mary or Sarah married, they had to fend for themselves to a certain extent–albeit in the midst of family, connections, and what remained of the English inheritance. I’m starting my year of Salem women by looking at Mary and Sarah because they were working women: the hardest nut to crack. It’s really hard to get a window into the lives of women in general before the twentieth century, but single working women are particularly elusive though much more representative of the population at large than many of their more well-documented peers. Generally there has to be some conspicuous event, some legal procedure, something that happens to them—to give us insights. I was able to learn something about the life—or should I say death—of a Salem mill girl much later in the nineteenth century only because she suffered a severe workplace injury. But there are some Salem sources which can illuminate a bit of the working lives of Mary and Sarah Hathorne at the turn of the nineteenth century: a conspicuous “eulogy” by the every-chatty Reverend William Bentley following the death of the former, and an account book of the latter, preserved in the collection of the PEM’s Phillips Library.

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20200114_110044Entry for March 25, 1802 in the Reverend William Bentley’s Diary; Phillips Library MS 1577.

I am sure you can understand why I could not ignore that Bentley statement! Wow–a lot to unpack there. Bentley has a lot to say about everyone, of course,  but he devoted quite a bit of space to Miss Hathorne (and her mother as well). The $40,000—which is repeated by others, including Sidney Perley. I don’t know how to verify, but there are other contemporary statements attesting to Mary (often referred to as Molly) Hathorne’s wealth, enterprise, crudeness, intemperance, and lack of femininity. I’d like to know more about the precise nature of conducting business as a “pedestrian trader”, but we have evidence of Mary’s shop (at the corner of Cambridge and Essex, of course) and considerable property investment via outstanding mortgages. From the deed research that I’ve engaged in, I know that real estate was a popular enterprise for those Salem women who had the means and the opportunity in the nineteenth century; apparently the eighteenth as well. Dr. Bentley informs us that Mary’s mother (also named Mary) who died at the venerable age of 80 three years after her daughter acquired property in peddling from Salem in the neighboring towns, by a parsimony almost unexampled among us and was also characterized by the family “intemperance”.

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Hathorne Mortgages2_LI (2)Salem Gazette.

I wish I could get inside the “shop of Miss Mary Hathorne” to gain some insights into her business as a “pedestrian trader”, but so far, no luck. However, her younger sister Sarah did leave us an account book which sheds some light on the nature of her more feminine occupation: that of a seamstress. The day book, covering transactions from 1794-96, is literally covered in computations—not an inch of paper is wasted, inside or outside. Within we can see all of Sarah’s suppliers and the materials she purchased for her work: a lot of cotton and buckram, linen, silk, gauze, cambric, calico, chintz, baize, flannel, “nancain” (nankeen). We see some familiar Salem names with whom she is doing business: Bott, Symonds, even a man named “Samuel Mackentier”! Of course I’d like to see more details about her commissions and the general management of her business, but I love this inventory of eighteenth-century fabrics—and her apparent preoccupation to get the numbers right.

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20200114_105739Pages from Sarah Hathorne’s Day Book, Phillips Library MS 1577

Sadly there are no portraits of these two: unlike the Hathorne males in their line and the well-heeled merchant’s wives of their time. European artists had been interested in anonymous working women for some time, however, so I’m including two of my favorite portraits of a shopkeeper and a seamstress, just because they are period-perfect, and the anonymous shopkeeper’s small smile reminds me of Molly Hathorne’s characterization.

British School; The Woman Shopkeeper

Wybrand_Hendriks_-_Interieur_met_naaiende_vrouwAnonymous, A Woman Shopkeeper, c. 1790-1810, Glasgow Museums; Wybrand Hendricks, Interior with Woman, c. 1800-1810, Rijksmuseum Twenthe.

6 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in History, Salem, Women's History

January 14, 2020

Salem Picturesque

By daseger

I don’t think the word “picturesque” could be applied to the city of Salem in 2020: certainly some residential neighborhoods, but the major arteries of the city, which both access and divide said neighborhoods, are increasingly lined with residential, commercial, and even public buildings of which no one could possibly ever state, much less believe, that aesthetics was the highest criteria of construction (or even a consideration). I have no idea what the priorities of Salem’s planning department might be besides more density, but I am sure that “it’s better than what was there before” is the sole aesthetic standard. The Spring semester starts this week, which means on my “commute” I have to find creative ways of avoiding the MONSTROUS new Hampton Inn rising and sprawling on lower Washington Street, which is now the street of banal buildings (and the Bewitched statue, of course). It’s too big, too impossible not to see, so I’ll just have to close my eyes (when walking, not driving). As usual, when the present is objectionable, I always retreat to the past, so obviously a title like Salem Picturesque is appealing! It’s a slim volume of just 23 photographs, published in the 1880s by the Lithotype Publishing Company in Gardner, Massachusetts. It features select “Public Buildings, Churches, and Street and Birds’ Eye Views” of Salem, Massachusetts”: to be fair to the present, Salem was a densely-settled industrial city in the later nineteenth century, so not every quarter was picturesque, and this book features only those that were. Also, and again: someone has been cleaning up after all those horses! Still, there was an apparent striving to make the public part of the city aesthetically pleasing at that time which is not present now, in terms of preservation, maintenance, and most especially new construction. I’m nostalgic.

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screenshot_20200114-154003_flickrSalem Common/Washington Square 

screenshot_20200114-154012_flickrLanding at the Willows

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screenshot_20200114-154213_flickrCourthouses on Federal Street

screenshot_20200114-154241_flickrThe City Almshouse

screenshot_20200114-154245_flickrPhillips Wharf: the Philadelphia & Reading Coal and Iron Company.

screenshot_20200114-154024_flickrCorner of Norman, Summer & Chestnut Streets

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screenshot_20200114-154018_flickrEssex Street

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screenshot_20200114-154233_flickrChestnut Street

screenshot_20200114-154136_flickrCorner of Flint and Warren Streets

screenshot_20200114-154143_flickrBroad Street

I’m also nostalgic to see pictures of houses lost to the Great Salem Fire in 1914 on Warren and Broad Streets—and the Bulfinch Almshouse. Salem Picturesque is just one of the interesting Flickr albums of the State Library of Massachusetts.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Architecture, History

January 11, 2020

Salem Suffrage Saturdays

By daseger

In honor of all those women who struggled for decades to become enfranchised, here in Salem and across the United States, I am dedicating Saturdays in 2020 to stories of Salem women as my own personal commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment. I am going to follow the example of the Salem Woman’s Suffrage Club, which met both monthly and annually in the second half of the nineteenth century: the monthly meetings were reserved for newsworthy speakers and expedient strategy, but the annual meetings were all about highlighting women’s contributions to many realms, over time: culture and even “daily life”, not just politics. So on Saturdays I will be featuring some prominent suffragists, but also artists, authors, businesswomen, educators, housewives, and socialites and women who defy simple characterization. I’ve already written about quite a few women on the blog over the past nine years (just click on the “Women’s History ” category in the lower right-hand corner) but there are many more whose stories remain untold. I don’t think I’ll have any problem filling my Saturday posts (although please forward suggestions!) and today’s post is a preview of what (or who) is coming.

US-ENTERTAINMENT-ROSE PARADE2020 Suffragists in the Rose Bowl Parade, Getty Images.

Artists & Artist-Entrepreneurs: I’ve posted about quite a few women artists, including the famous Fidelia Bridges, but there are more to be discovered. I am on the trail of a Salem silhouette artist, a Salem miniaturist, and an early Salem photographer, and I already have all I need to write about a succession of early twentieth-century artist-entrepreneurs, including furniture restorer and stencilist Helen Hagar, the very successful Sarah Symonds, and Jenny Brooks, who taught embroidery and sold “ye olde” cross stitch patterns at the turn of the century. Like Mary Harrod Northend, these women were selling Salem craftsmanship and artistry, in sharp contrast to their near-contemporary Daniel Low, who was peddling witch wares.

Women Helen Hagar

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Women of Salem Jenny Brooks 1910 Hagley (2)Helen Hagar in 1915, courtesy the Local History Resource Center at the Peabody Institute Library.  After her graduation from Peabody High School that year, Miss Hagar moved to Salem and lived there until her death in 1984, working for the Society of the Preservation of New England Antiquities and then the National Park Service to live in and conduct tours of the Derby House. She became an expert on traditional stenciling, and lectured and taught on its history, as well as producing some of her own stenciling work on tole and wooden objects and partnering with various antique dealers like Ethelwyn Shepard (flyer courtesy Historic New England). A cross stitch pattern by the Jenny Brooks Company, located at One Cambridge Street, Hagley Museum & Library.

I’ve written about several Salem female novelists (notably Katherine Butler Hathaway and Maria Cummins) but no authors of nonfiction I believe, or diarists. Right now I am fascinated by the formidable Elizabeth Elkins Sanders, who was surely the most vocal critic of Andrew Jackson and defender of Native Americans in 1820s Salem. She was at the forefront of an emerging progressive tradition in Salem, and more than that, she was an early feminist: her Conversations Principally on the Aborigines of North America (1828) is written in the form of a dialogue between mother and daughter.

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So many Salem businesswomen! In the seventeenth century, the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century, and the twentieth (and now, of course). It will be hard to showcase them all; I’ll just have to follow my sources. Many dressmakers and milliners, laundresses, bakers, and shopkeepers. I’ve just scratched the surface of the entrepreneurship of the amazing Remond family: while the famous abolitionist Sarah (who gets all the attention, understandably, but still) was in England and Italy her hardworking sisters (and her mother) were back here, baking, catering, hairdressing, completely dominating the wig industry in Massachusetts, all while serving on abolitionist and suffrage committees. So they need more attention, for sure—and I really hope to illuminate Caroline Remond Putnam’s particular role in the suffrage movement. There are a succession of female tavern-keepers I’m trailing, and also the various enterprises of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s unmarried cousins, one of whom died in possession of an estate valued at $40,000 by the Reverend William Bentley.  Famed female shopkeepers appear in memoirs from the later nineteenth century—Mrs. Bachelder’s, Mrs. Harris’s, Miss Plummer’s (the social center of Salem in the 1890s according to James Duncan Phillips) and in the early twentieth century, there seems to have been a significant subset of women antique dealers. And of course we must not forget Salem’s first woman printer, Mary Crouch, short-lived as her time in Salem might have been.

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Women of Salem 269 Essex StreetGoldthwaite & Shapley, Dressmakers, 269 Essex Street, Salem. Andrew Dickson White Architectural Collection, Cornell University Library.

Educators: another huge category, incorporating teachers in private dame schools, public schools, and of course the “Normal School” for teacher education established in 1854, now Salem State University. I’ve posted on the first African-American educator in Salem, Clarissa Lawrence, and on Lydia Very, but I still don’t have a full grasp of all the private schools for women that existed in Salem in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, overseen by a succession of widows and spinsters: Mrs. Rogers, Mrs. Higginson, Mrs. Dean, Miss Savage, Miss Oliver, Miss Draper. There were the very “select” schools of Sarah Fiske Stivours on Essex Street and the “Misses Phillips” on Chestnut Street. Charlotte Forten, a graduate of Salem Normal school and the first African-American teacher of white children in the Salem public schools, has a whole committee and park devoted to her so I don’t think there is much I could add: a nice summary of her life and accomplishments is here. A traditional career for women, teaching could also open up other opportunities: after a very successful career teaching in the Salem Public Schools, Martha L. Roberts went on to earn both law and Ph.D. degrees, and became one of the first women to be admitted to the Massachusetts Bar in 1897. She also lived very openly with her partner Martha O. Howes, who worked in the City Clerk’s office in Salem. Together, they built one of my favorite houses in South Salem: Six Forest Avenue.

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20200109_144027Needlework Sampler by Naby Dane (b. 1777), Sarah Fiske Stivours School, Salem, Massachusetts, Dated 1789, Sotheby’s; 6 Forest Avenue, Salem.

As is always the case with me, things lead me to ask questions and seek stories: a sampler, a house, a dress. There are two wedding dresses in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, that will yield some interesting stories for sure: an actual dress made of Spitalfields silk worn by Mary Waters of Salem for her wedding to Anthony Sigourney in 1740 and then remodeled for their daughter, also named Mary, to wear to her wedding to James Butler in 1763. Like so many things in the mid-18th century, this robe à l’anglaise seems so trans-Atlantic to me: the Spitalfields silk industry in London was established by French Huguenot émigres in the later seventeenth century—and perhaps members of the Sigourney family were among them. The photograph (daguerreotype really) shows Martha Pickman Rogers of Salem in her more conventional (to our eyes) wedding dress worn for her marriage to John Amory Codman of Boston in the 1850s. She was the great-granddaughter of Elias Hasket Derby, and the mother of Martha Codman Karolik, the collector and philanthropist.

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screenshot_20200109-141058_instagramWaters-Sigourney Dress and Southworth Hawes Daguerreotype, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Then there are stories about the suffrage movement itself, so intertwined with the struggle for abolition and other reform movements in Salem as elsewhere. Three very different Salem women went to the first meeting of the National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester in October of 1850: Eliza Kenney, a very passionate reformer who later became an equally passionate spiritualist, and housewives Delight (yes, that was her name!) Hewitt and Sarah Wilkins. Their stories are easy to access, but a lot of women’s history falls into a “black box” which can never be opened unfortunately: there just isn’t any evidence. For example: I’d love to find out about two very different Salem women, who lived at two very different times, but all I have are brief mentions in newspapers, centuries apart. The first story relates the tragic death of an African woman who wanted to return to her country in 1733, and in a desperate attempt took her own life. The second refers to an anonymous German sympathizer during World War I whose name I have not been able to uncover. Just two anonymous Salem women, each part of Salem’s long history.

Women of Salem Slavery Suicide Boston Gazette May 29 1733 (3)

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5 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in Current Events, History, Salem, Women's History

January 5, 2020

A Portfolio of Prints

By daseger

This is kind of a housekeeping post: the blog has gotten so big (over 9 years!) that I have lost track of what’s in it, so I’m going to gather together a few portfolios of images for ready reference. Today: some of my favorite Salem prints. I could spend hours going through every one of Frank Cousin’s photographs of Salem (especially now that so many have been digitized) but there’s something about prints that really captures the essence of a structure—or a street—so I’m always seeking them out. Below are some of my favorites: most from the nineteenth century, and most from books; some from the twentieth century and some “stand-alone” imprints. Some are from engravings; some from drawings. I think most have been featured in the blog before, but I’m not sure! In any case, they are all my go-to images when I want to conjur up a time and space in Salem’s history.

Salem Prints John Turner House, Drawing Circa 1899

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screenshot_20200105-104448_chromeMy favorite pre-restoration print of the House of the Seven Gables, 1889; prints by two women artists—Mary Jane Derby (North Salem) & Ellen Day Hale (Corner of Summer, Norman, and Chestnut Streets, where now we have a traffic circle!)–and pioneering lithography firms from the Boston Athenaeum’s Digital Collections.

These next images will seem familiar: they are from John Warner Barber’s Historical Collections of Massachusetts, which was first published in 1839. They have been reprinted many times, but my favorite version of them is in antiquarian George Francis Dow’s Old wood engravings, views and buildings in the county of Essex, a beautiful little volume published in 1908. Dow supplements Barber a bit with information and images he found in the Essex Institute, of course.

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As you can see in the caption for the (Downing-)Bradstreet house above, Joseph Felt’s Annals of Salem, first published in 1844, is the source of some classic Salem printed images, as are the guidebooks published in the later nineteenth century and national publications like Gleason’s/Ballou’s Pictorial and Harper’s. Salem got a lot of press once Hawthorne started selling, and the national Centennial and Bicentennial of the Witch Trials in 1892 also focused attention on “Old” Salem. And another great source for graven images is of course ephemera: the front and back pages of the successive Salem Directories are full of imagery, and many invoices, billheads, and other business paper contain beautiful prints. Fortunately the Salem State Archives is digitizing whatever comes their way.

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Salem Print Directory

20170207_145723Prints of the James Emerton Pharmacy in the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum and the Salem Directory; Seccomb Oil Works billhead, Salem State Archives and Special Collections.

On the verge of the twentieth century, a lot of the classic images above were started to look a bit dated, so we get new versions of Salem’s most characteristic buildings and streets in periodicals and guidebooks like Moses Sweetser’s Here and There in New England and Canada, first published in 1899. Most architectural publications from this time and after used the photographs of Frank Cousins or (a bit later) Mary Harrod Northend for illustrations, with the notable exception of the measured and drawn renderings of “Colonial Work” contained in the Georgian Period portfolios. I can never get enough of these! More impressionistic, printed illustrations return in architectural books aimed at the general public in the mid-twentieth century: I particular like Ethel Fay Robinson’s Houses in America (1936, with drawings by her husband Thomas.

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Salem Prints Georgian Period Details Vol 1 1899

pixlr_20200105165102085Illustrations of Salem architecture from Here and There in New England and Canada, The Georgian Period, and Houses in America.

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Architecture, Art, books, History

January 1, 2020

2020: the Commemorative Year

By daseger

One of the major themes of this blog has been how we remember history: what we choose to remember, what we choose to celebrate (or exploit), and what we choose to forget or ignore. This year promises to be very interesting in the realm of “anniversary history”, with two big commemorations crowding the calendar: the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the Mayflower in Massachusetts and the 100th anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment enfranchising American women after a long, long struggle. I don’t think anything else—certainly not the 200th anniversary of the Missouri Compromise (1820) or the 300th anniversary of the South Sea Bubble (1720)— can compete with these epic events. Yet looking ahead at the succession of initiatives and events designed to commemorate these two markers, I am struck by one notable difference: the Suffrage Centennial seems to be a truly national movement, with major events in Washington, D.C., every single state, and many localities as well, while the Mayflower anniversary seems much more restricted: to Massachusetts, and even to the descendants of the Pilgrim passengers. This might just be my American perspective: the Mayflower commemoration certainly has a broader geographic scope, incorporating Great Britain, the Netherlands, and the Wampanoag Nation, encompassing the Aquinnah and Mashpee tribes. My perception might also shaped by the fact the Suffrage Centennial is already very much in full swing, so we shall see.

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Plans for the Suffrage Centennial have clearly been in the works for years, and their most dramatic manifestation was three major exhibitions in Washington: Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote at the National Archives Museum (May 10, 2019- January 3, 2021), Shall Not be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote at the Library of Congress (June 4, 2019-September, 2020), and Votes for Women: a Portrait of Persistence  at the National Portrait Gallery (March, 2019-January 5, 2020). As you can see, the last exhibition ends this weekend, but there is a companion catalog with wonderful essays and images. These exhibitions are just the beginning of a wave of suffrage remembrance and interpretation, washing over the nation: the website of the Women’s Vote Centennial Initiative is a great place to go for events and resources but every state seems to have its own central site as well, linking to institutional and local initiatives. Here in Massachusetts, Suffrage100MA, the Women’s Suffrage Celebration Coalition, sponsors features like the “Suffragist of the Month” at the Commonwealth Museum, but is hardly the extent of commemorative activity: the Massachusetts Historical Society had a very visual exhibit entitled “Can She Do It?” Massachusetts Debates a Woman’s Right to Vote up over last summer, the Boston Athenaeum has an ongoing “Eye of the Expert: (Anti) Suffrage program focused on items from its collection, the Schlesinger Library at Harvard will feature Seeing Citizens: Picturing American Women’s Fight for the Vote from March 23 to October 3, 2020, and there are local events all around me commencing next month. This very layered exploration of the coming of universal suffrage has been extremely comprehensive, examining the complexities of the struggle, divisions of class and race, and all sorts of attendant aspects (and materials!)—and there’s a lot more to learn and see.

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pixlr_20200101133156977Ace of Spades card (verso and recto) from a c. 1915 deck published by the National Woman Suffrage Publishing Co., Boston Athenaeum.

By contrast, the coming commemoration of the Mayflower’s arrival doesn’t seem very layered or very national: there are no events in Washington that I could find. The official US website for the commemoration is Plymouth400, Inc., which reports that the April 24 Opening Ceremony will be a two-hour event of historical content, musical headliners, interpretive readings, choreographed movement, original productions, and visual narratives to create a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle. The Plymouth 400 Legacy Time Capsule will be introduced, and the first items will be placed inside by special guests. Honoring the past and celebrating the future, each of the commemoration themes – exploration, innovation, self-governance, religious expression, immigration, and thanksgiving – will be presented in creative ways. Invited participants include state and federal officials, representatives of the UK, The Netherlands, colony partners, and many more. Besides this extravaganza, it’s all about the ship: the Mayflower II (1957), which has been under repair in Mystic, Connecticut for several years. The newly-restored ship will sail to Boston for a maritime festival in May (docking right next to the Constitution, which should look cool), and then proceed home to Plymouth via Provincetown for more festivities in both ports. I do see references to attendant exhibitions on Pilgrim women and the Wampanoags on the Plymouth400 site, but nothing like the diffusion of inspired initiatives associated with the commemoration of suffrage.

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screenshot_20191231-154733_chromeThe Mayflower II seemed to be more of a national story in 1957; on the stop in Provincetownfrom Boston to Plymouth, there will be a “reenactment of the signing of the Mayflower Compact and VIP reception”.

The Plymouth400 website might not be comprehensive but it is all we have to go on; it is also, very decidedly, not a resource, with minimal effort toward edification. When compared to the much more impressive official British commemoration website Mayflower400 it is exposed for just what it is: a Chamber of Commerce production. After watching all of the poignant expressions of remembrance associated with the commemoration of each and every phase of World War One over the past few years, I am not surprised to see the sophistication, earnestness, and creativity of the British commemoration of the Mayflower voyage, which will include the opening of a Mayflower Trail through and outside Plymouth, multiple exhibits, public art and music projects, living history events, a muster, festivals, illuminations, a religious history conference, and even sporting events. The website links to resources and is itself a resource, with digital maps exploring the sites associated with the Mayflower itself and every single passenger and crew member. It brings all these people to Plymouth and then to America ( some via Leiden): why can’t we have something similar that shows where they went once they got here? As I am not a Mayflower descendant, I am forming the opinion that if I want to feel a real connection to those who left England in 1620 I had better make my way to Plymouth in Devon rather than Plymouth in Bristol County.

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screenshot_20200101-153517_chromeThe official British program and interactive maps on the Mayflower400 website, which also includes artwork that has been seldom seen (over here, at least), like Anthony Thompson’s 1938 painting The ‘Mayflower’ Leaving Plymouth, 1620 @Essex County Council.

13 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Culture, Current Events, History, Tourism, Women's History

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