I am taking my title from Simon Schama’s classic Landscape and Memory, but my inspiration comes from a brief cocktail party conversation a few weeks ago. I was the host of this particular party, so I was hopping around and really only getting snippets of conversation, but I woke up the next morning with a very clear memory of a bit of discussion between a film historian and a maritime historian/curator about a movie that was filmed in Salem in 1922: Java Head, based on the then-popular novel by Joseph Hergesheimer of the same title. I’ve written about this film before: its theme and narrative focuses on the cross-cultural encounters between the Chinese wife of a Salem trader and his friends and family back home. This was no backstage production: Salem served as the set for the exterior scenes of Java Head and Derby Wharf was actually transformed into a century-earlier version of itself during the height of the China Trade by a very detailed reproduction, right on top of the reliquary pier. My two historian friends were bemoaning the fact that it is extremely unfortunate that this is a lost film, as the reproduction had been informed by the memories of those who had seen the wharf when it was still in some semblance of its former glory. And so I was reminded, once again, of the power of memory—and initiatives to recall it. John Frayler and Emily Murphy, past and present historians at the Salem Maritime National Historic Site, maintain that the set designers worked from old photographs in their 2006 piece, “Java Head is Missing” (Pickled Fish and Salted Provisions, October 2006) and I’m sure that’s true, but I’d also like to think that there was an old salt somwhere in the process. This article also features what must be a very cherished photograph of the reproduced wharf—given that the film is lost, one of only a few extant images of its Salem set.
Photograph of Derby Wharf as reproduced for Java Head, from the “Java Head is Missing” 2006 Salem Maritime Newsletter, “Pickled Fish and Salted Provisions”. ALL of these valuable newsletters, and more from the Salem Maritime archives, can be found at its NPS History eLibrary site.
I’m dwelling on this long-lost film and its set because I have always been interested in, and indeed reliant on, captured memories of Salem’s streetscape. We’re so fortunate to have photographic records from the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but there are rich textual records too. Long before the field of “oral history” ever existed, or was acknowledged as such, there were people out there asking other people about their memories of Salem’s built environment: the articles which ran under variations of “Notes on the Building of……..[insert street]” in the Essex Institute Historical Collections convinced me that that institution was definitely functioning as Salem’s historical society from the later nineteenth century onwards. From 1945-1947, the Collections featured a series of reminiscences of former residents of Chestnut Street whose memories were prompted by Francis H. Lee, who was compiling his own history of the street in the 1880s. Lee wrote letters to everyone who ever lived on Chestnut, and many responded with missives of varying detail about the street and its surrounding neighborhood. I looked through the Lee Collection at the Phillips Library when I was researching our Salem book last summer, and was immediately transfixed by his photographs; I knew that all the letters were gold, but I didn’t have time for them then. I think I need to go back to Rowley, but in the meantime the Collections transcripts will have to do. They begin with Leverett Saltonstall’s 1885 letter in the January 1945 issue, in which he gives us the built and social history of the neighborhood in his childhood: schools are everywhere as well as bakeries and stables, but he also tells us who lived in which house on Chestnut and Essex Streets, and when and how they added on to their houses. In a bit of commentary about new (1880s) construction, he notes that the Bancrofts lived on the latter street “in a pretty old-fashioned gambrel roof house, once occupied by Judge Prescott, father of the historian, with a solid old elm in front, which I saw quite recently cut down while apparently in full vigor, by some vandal to display his new shingle palace.” Ah, those elms in full vigor! Saltonstall also recalls swimming in the North River with his friends when it was “a clean body of water and the swim across to “Paradise,” the fields beyond the swirling flood, was a feast for a strong boy.” For the 1880s reader or the 1940s reader, that description of the then-tannery-lined North River would have been notable, likely more so than for us. Saltonstall was born in 1825: there are no photographs of the Salem of his childhood, we must rely on his memory if we want to picture it.
Francis H. Lee photographs of the lower and upper Chestnut Street in the 1880s, Francis Henry Lee Papers, MSS 128. Courtesy of Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Rowley, MA. Saltonstall and others remember only “fields” past the Phillips House at number 134, the lighter house on the right above.
There are actually a few visual references in the Lee letters. Henry K. Oliver actually provided a plan of his house on Federal Street, Samuel McIntire’s Samuel Cook house, and a very detailed descriptions of its interior, including the French landscape wallpaper on the walls of its east parlor, “put on in 1825 (60 years ago) and now appears fresh and unfaded.” These were not memories, but Oliver went on to recount the built history of the entire neighborhook of upper Federal Street, including houses moved to that location from the more ancient Essex Street (EIHC LXXXII, April 1946). J.B. Chisholm’s letters to Lee from February of 1885 note that “I had once thrown aside my pencil sketch of the South Meeting House in Chestnut Street (which burned down in 1903) but the possibility of its being suggestive to you induces me to enclose it with this.” (but the sketch is not included in the 1946 Historical Collections article!) My favorite recollection (so far) is that of John H. Nichols, who gave Lee an explanation for the distinct width of Chestnut Street which I had never heard before: At the time it was proposed to open the street, the owners of land on one side were unvilling to contribute their portion and it was then made of half its present width by those on the opposite side, who left a narrow strip, with a wall standing upon it, so that the recusant abuttors should not be benefitted by the new street. When, however, at a later period the latter were willing to part with a portion of their land as first contemplated their proposition was rejected, and they then made another street of the same width, leaving the wall at its center. On the erection of some house, Captain Phillips’ I think (#17), each of the workmen employed received a certain stipulated sum for carrying away a stone from the wall every time he left work, until the whole were removed, and thus the street became double the width originally designed. Two parallel streets of like width with a wall between! We’re never going to see a photograph of this, obviously, but there might be a sketch out there somewhere……..
The wide street of the 1880s (no wall): Looking up (west) and down (east) Chestnut Street, from Salem Picturesque, State Library of Massachusetts.
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