Schoolhouse to Outhouse

I had some obligations here in Salem so could not leave the Witch City for the weekend, but I did spend yesterday driving around a little part of our county stopping in at open houses for the annual Essex Heritage Trails and Sails event series, which features an array of heritage, cultural and nature events over three weekends every September. I do not like my city during this time of year, but I love my county! I do believe that Essex County has the most colonial houses of any region in the US, and even though I’ve been driving around it for thirty-odd years, I’m always discovering new-to-me ones. I started out my Sunday trip with a visit to the old schoolhouse on Newbury’s Lower Green, restored for the Bicentennial and full of treasures, and ended it at the Samuel Holten House in Danvers right next door to Salem, which has the cutest outhouse ever.I have admired it for years, and always thought it was some sort of shed, but no, outhouse it is. In between, I saw several structures in Georgetown, including a great old tavern, the town’s oldest house, an old firehouse and another schoolhouse, and a former famous inn. The buildings were all great, but what I particularly like about these open houses are the passionate introductions of their stewards, who are so eager to showcase them. In these places, the stewards were representatives of the Newburyport Historic Commission, the Georgetown Historical Society, and the Daughters of the American Revolution.

An 1877 schoolhouse in Newbury.

Georgetown: the Brocklebank-Nelson-Beecher House and a few other structures.

Samuel Holten House in Danvers.

From these stewards, you’re going to learn a lot of lore and more. I learned that: literacy tests for voting were in place not only down South but also up here in the early 20th Century (the schoolhouse served as a polling place), Byfield, another village of Newbury, had lots of mills, and one still standing (I couldn’t find it), Georgetown had a little village in its midst called Marlborough as well as a trolley line, where the oldest house in Georgetown is (see above, dressed for Halloween), where the once-famous Bald Pate Inn is (see above), all about Patriot Samuel Holten, and that there was at least one enslaved person, named Cato, in his house (see under the eaves room above).