Monthly Archives: September 2023

September 19, 2023

Late Summer at Greenwood Farm

By daseger

I’ve been taking walks at Trustees of Reservations properties all summer long, so it seems appropriate to end the season with a post on one: Greenwood Farm in Ipswich, Massachusetts. I had never been to this saltmarsh farm before this spring, and I returned every other week. Last week was definitely my favorite time: there’s just something poignant about golden late summer, just before the appearance of any red. It’s not a huge reservation, but it is a well-situated one, overlooking the marshes and islands of Ipswich Bay. A perfect first-period house, the Paine House, sits right there along the its main path, with no driveway or modern conveniences in sight. There are venerable oak trees, and some recent additions: “Remembrance of Climate Futures” markers, indicating how and when the landscape will change. They were the only source of anxiety on my walks around Greenwood Farm.

Once again we must be grateful for the efforts of an old and wealthy New England family, the Dodges, who purchased the property in the early 20th century, were responsible stewards during their summer residence, and eventually donated the farm to the Trustees of Reservations in the 1970s. A larger, newer farmhouse built on the property by Thomas Greenwood in the early 19th century served as their principal summer house, and they used the 1694 Paine House as a well-appointed guest house. I’d love to go inside, but it’s never been open—in fact I have never seen a single person on this whole property on my walks this summer! Of course there is a Salem connection: Robert Paine, the first of six generations of farmers to live in the house was a jury foreman during the Salem Witch Trials. As you can see, the house is a touchstone for me as I walk around the farm, but I’ve also developed more appreciation for trees this summer, and solid land when I come across these jarring “remembrance” markers.

Appendix: I searched for an image of the Paine house among the works of Ipswich artist extraordinaire Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922), who mastered all genres—oils, woodblock prints, cyanotypes—and seemed dedicated to depicting every square inch of his native town (as well as being a very influential art educator), but found nothing. Many of his landscapes look like the farm, because saltmarsh farms ARE Ipswich. This little collaboration of Dow and the poet Everett Stanley Hubbard, which you can access here, is particularly evocative.

5 Comments | tags: Art, Arthur Wesley Dow, environment, First Period Houses, great houses, Ipswich, Nature, Seasons, Summer, Trustees of Reservations | posted in Houses, Nature

September 12, 2023

The Summer of Old Photographs

By daseger

I worked all summer long on my chapters for Salem’s Centuries and a few other projects, researching and writing, researching and writing, researching and writing. Once I’m on the trail, I’m a pretty steady worker, but I do take breaks: I’ve learned from other writing projects that you have to pause to let your mind absorb and process information. Sometimes the break might be at night when you’re asleep—I got into the habit of leaving a notebook by my bedside when I was writing my dissertation and when I woke up in the morning sometimes I would see notations inside that I didn’t even remember writing! That must have been one of the benefits of a younger mind because it didn’t happen this summer, when all my breaks were conscious. Every time I went up to the Phillips Library in Rowley, I would dutifully call up boring municipal records but also collections which contained old photographs of Salem. I’d pore over them a bit and photograph them for later perusal, and by the end of the summer I had quite a collection. The Phillips has digitized two of its largest collections of Salem photographs: the Frank Cousins and Samuel Chamberlain collections, but there remain many seldom-seen images within collections. Fortunately there are great finding aids to locate such images, but also some very miscellaneous collections which yielded surprises, at least for me! I loved schoolteacher Grace Hood’s shots of the Salem and Massachusetts celebrations in 1926-1930 (PHA 67; including some completely new-to-me views of the opening day of Pioneer Village in 1930) and an unknown photographer’s depictions of a very gritty Salem encased in a large composite collection entitled Photographs of interiors and exteriors of Salem, Mass., circa 1890-1950 (PHA 151). And there’s much more.

Phillips Library PHA 67 & 151.

My favorite collection was the first one I accessed, back in May: a treasure trove of images contained in the scrapbooks of Francis Henry Lee of 14 Chestnut Street, mostly from the 1880s (Phillips Library MSS 128). Lee was the son-in-law of the woman who lived in my house, and a committed architectural antiquarian focused on documenting the history of every house on Chestnut and adjoining streets. He did not rely on hearsay, but sent queries to anyone who ever lived in the neighborhood, and his scrapbooks are filled with detailed responses, some written on black-trimmed stationery indicating that their authors were in mourning. I was familiar with his articles in the Historical Collections of the Essex Institute, but surprised to find his research materials accompanied by so many wonderful photographs.

Some of my favorites: (I filtered those that were really hazy or damaged).

Chestnut, Summer & Norman Streets from two perspectives. I’ll never get over how wonderful Norman Street was!

Riding and looking north on Summer Street, and then south (Samuel McIntire’s house is on the extreme left of the last photograph).

Broad Street, looking west.

Cambridge Street, looking north and south.

Work on Bott’s Court.

Hamilton Street, looking north.

Chestnut Street Houses—what’s going on with that figure at the third-floor level of the third photo above, which I think is #26?

Warren Street, looking towards the “Turnpike” (Highland Avenue).

There were several photographs which were especially exciting to see among the Lee papers, including those which show the magnificent formal garden in the rear of the Cabot-Endicott-Low House on Essex Street, which extended to Chestnut before no. 30 Chestnut was built in 1896. This garden was quite famous: it was prominently featured in many horticultural publications and was by all accounts quite the tourist attraction, especially in the spring. A 1904 Boston Globe article on “Beautiful Old Gardens of Salem” reports that for many years the tulip bed was the greatest feature of this garden, and each spring, when these flowers were in perfection, and upper portion of the high fence on Chestnut was removed to enable the public to view the exhibit.

Even more exciting than this lost garden were two photographs of my own house that I had never seen before, including one sans the apartment that was added on in phases between 1890-1910. Our house is the right side of a double house built in 1827: both sides were identifical until the 1850s, when one of our owners expanded the house considerably in back and altered the interior to look more fashionable at the time—round mouldings rather than square ones! The big entrance alteration reflects the changes inside, but I did not know that this guy also put new mouldings over the windows, and disdained shutters as too colonial, I guess. Several owners later, there was a sequential addition on the side of the house: first as an office for a very well-know opthamologist who lived here, and then bedrooms were built above: this is our present-day 7 1/2, a really cute apartment with the best views of Chestnut Street. I assumed that it covered up windows which were on the side of our house, but it looks like there were none. As you can see from all of the other photos of the street, Chestnut was driveway-less in the nineteenth-century: the larger houses had carriage access on Warren or Essex: the property of our house actually wrapped around Hamilton Hall next door and so our carriage house—long- demolished—accessed Cambridge Street.

10 Comments | tags: Architecture, Chestnut Street, Libraries, Peabody Essex Museum, Phillips Library, Photography, Salem Houses, Streets of Salem | posted in Culture, History, Salem

September 5, 2023

Tips for Salem “Septoberween”

By daseger

Residents of Salem have long noticed that our city’s Halloween festivities are not confined to October, hence “Septoberween,” a phrase I’ve heard once or twice. It’s been crowded for some time though—all summer, late spring—people are coming for a general goth spookiness, I think, rather than just for Halloween. Of course, none of it is connected to Salem, or the Salem witch trials, because they were not witches but try telling that to a bridal party wearing little witch hats in July. I’m not sure what’s going to happen to Salem’s dark tourism, but it does seem as if something needs to change in its overall management (I’ve given up on messaging). Whatever happens, if anything at all, will be the result of a top-down decision rather than any impetus from mere residents. After last Halloween season, when weekend crowds of a million people pushed around downtown, I decided that I had experienced my last Salem October: my husband and I are packing up the cats and moving to Maine for a month. Fortunately we have a big family house in York Harbor, which my parents generally vacate for a cozier condo nearby, so I’m going home. I think this is a good solution for my Halloween angst, but we’ll see: I’ll still be commuting to Salem several times a week! Since I’m getting out of town, I thought I would push up my annual little advice to visitors post a bit, especially as I’ve received a lot of email queries over the summer. This is hardly an exhaustive list: if you want that I suggest Destination Salem (truly the master list of events and a very dynamic site, but skip the “History” sections which are dreadful), or Things To Do in Salem or the dedicated Haunted Happenings site. I am no booster, as regular readers of this blog know, so the most important assertion I can make here is that there is only one museum in Salem, the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), and the best advice I can give is to avoid all the other venues calling themselves museums if you are seeking authentic objects and/or professional curation based on the most recent scholarship. If you are coming to Salem because you want to learn about the Salem Witch Trials, the PEM offers a lot, but not the whole story: that’s not its mission. However, in the past five years or so, the PEM has really engaged with the Trials, and this year is offering an exhibition entitled The Salem Witch Trials. Recovering Justice. I popped in yesterday and found it very accessible and continuous with its previous exhibitions’ focus on authentic documents and objects.

Given the focus is on recovering justice, I think it would have been nice to exhibit some of the restitution requests (+transcriptions) submitted by victims and victims’ families that are referenced above: these statements by those related to the “Sufferers in the time of the Witchcraft” are very compelling and can amplify the judicial tragedy. The struggle to clear the names of those who were not included in the 1711 Reversal of Attainder could have been given more attention as well—it extended all the way up the 21st century! The exhibition does include the most recent attempt at restitution: the successful campaign of North Andover middle-school students to exonerate Elizabeth Johnson, who confessed to practicing witchcraft and was condemned to death but obtained a reprieve but no reversal. Similar heroic efforts happened in the 1950s when Ann Pudeator “and certain other persons” were legally exonerated, and again in 2001 when those “certain other persons” were named in a formal resolution. The Recovering Justice exhibit invites its onlookers to dig deeper in both primary and secondary sources, and also to visit other galleries in the PEM: the month of October gets its own “chapter” in Salem Stories and related objects and images can also be found in On this Ground: Being and Belonging in America.

News clippings from exoneration efforts in the past (which also offer interesting insights into the commercialization of the Witch Trials in Salem), further reading in the Recovering Justice exhibition (including my colleague Tad Baker’s definitive book), October in Salem Stories and portrait of Witch Trial judge Samuel Sewall by John Smibert, 1733, in On this Ground gallery.

The PEM has a Trials “collection focus” page on its website with FAQs and also offers an audio self-guided “Salem Witch Trials Walk,” but if you want a more personal and narrative experience, you might want to take a walking tour, of which Salem has many. The quality spectrum seems very wide: you could take a tour with someone who has studied early American history for years and has the credentials to prove it, or you could be led around by someone who (literally) just got off the bus. I get asked for recommendations quite often and I am hesitant to offer any, because I just haven’t taken many tours. I am curious about a couple of things, however, and I’ve been working on a longer piece on Salem tourism for a while (now interrupted by the Salem’s Centuries project) so I intend to take more tours in the future. Having just watched them, I’m particularly interested in how tour guides use the physical space of Salem, where so few structures tied to the Trials exist, and also in what kind of context is presented: local, regional, Anglo, global? When you read reviews on Tripadvisor or Google, tourists often comment on authenticity (“all we saw were parking lots”: a paraphrase of a common complaint) or lack thereof: I’m curious how guides compensate for/use the relatively modern streetscape of Salem (the PEM must have noticed the authenticity issue too, as it has used that word in all press materials relating to its exhibitions). So with these questions in mind, I did take a walking tour this past weekend, with Krystina Yeager, a student in the Salem State MA program who was in my Renaissance grad course last spring. Krystina operates a tour called the Historian’s Guide to Salem and produces a podcast as well, and I chose her tour because I was impressed with her work in class but also thought her perspective on the Salem trials might be similar to mine, as she has been more focused on English witchcraft. We set off on a hot Sunday afternoon at a vigorous pace of walking and talking, and I was really glad that the tour group wasn’t too big–maybe 12 or so when the city allows groups of 40. If you’re a mere pedestrian on the streets of Salem you literally cannot get out of the way of such big groups. Krystina had me at the very beginning of her tour when she uttered the name “Martin Luther” as the Reformation is undeniably the biggest factor in instigating and intensifying fears and accusations of witchcraft in early modern Europe. She presented a comparative context throughout while still focusing on the very personal stories and suffering of each and every victim of 1692. It was a very source-based tour: standing before a parking lot and the new building on the site of the former Salem jail, she described conditions within using the detailed restitution requests I referenced above. So that’s how you rise above the parking lot—with some pretty vivid testimony! Krystina explained the Protestant demonization of magic, the power vacuum that gave rise to the odd legal “system” put in place during the Trials, and the character of Giles Corey as close as we could get to the site of his torture–and much more. We wound up at the Salem Witch Trials Memorial downtown, a site that seems both authentic and modern at the same time and certainly an appropriate place to end the story of the “Sufferers in the time of the Witchcraft.” I was exhausted! This tour seemed to echo the whirlwind pace of the Trials themselves over the months of 1692 in its intensity, and I recommend it enthusiastically.

Krystina Yeager explaining Puritan theology and disdain of counter-magic in the courtyard of the First Church and the horrors of the Salem gaol in 1692 in a rather less inspirational spot: clearly tour guides have to be conjurers! Our ending point at the Witch Trials Memorial overlooked by the 17th Century Pickman House, which is now the Welcome Center for both the Memorial and the adjoining Charter Street Cemetery.

And speaking of authenticity, as I have throughout this post, I really can’t recommend the adjoining sites overseen by the Charter Street Cemetery Welcome Center enough, and its establishment was a City initiative, in collaboration with the PEM. A decade ago, both the Witch Trials Memorial and the adjoining Charter Street Cemetery, otherwise known as the “Old Burying Ground,” were being completely overrun by tourists: the walls of the former and graves of the latter were actually endangered by abuse. I don’t even like to think or write about it, if you want to “go” there, read this post, which I typed with my hands shaking. The City stepped up, restored the cemetery and opened an orientation center in the adjoining Samuel Pickman House owned by PEM. Welcome Center staff monitor both the cemetery and the Memorial, and every time I go there, even last Septoberween, there is an air of respect and stewardship for these sacred places. I saw Amber Shannon, another Salem State History grad who works at the Welcome Center, on my way out, keeping her eyes on both the cemetery and the Memorial and clearly steeling herself for the crowds to come. I think everyone in Salem was doing that, this first weekend in September.

Amber Shannon of the Charter Street Cemetery Welcome Center and Rory Raven of Salem on Foot Tours, the first Sunday in September, (relative) calm before the storm. I haven’t been fortunate enough to take one of Rory’s tours, but when I heard him speak at an event he made an impression, and so when some family members visited a couple of years ago I signed them right up. They raved, and so I would certainly recommend his tour as well, especially if you’re interested in a more general tour of Salem and not just the Witch Trials. As I’ve been ranting about here for years now, there’s so much more to Salem!