Salem’s 400th anniversary year has been full of events large and small. What I missed was one big “coming together” moment: maybe the parade was that, but it didn’t feel that way to me. Nevertheless, Salem has many social, cultural, and historical organizations and all of them stepped up, for sure: it’s been kind of a decentralized rolling commemoration. Salem State University sponsored several cool events, and the one I worked on was an exhibition of Salem’s last century (1926-2026) entitled Mapping a Century of Salem which was displayed in the Old Town Hall all summer long and has now moved to the Berry Library on our campus. My Salem’s Centuries co-editor, Brad Austin, and I suggested the century focus, but that was about it: the rest of the exhibition prep was pure collaboration with my colleagues in other departments, in the administration, from the library. This collaboration was almost unprecedented in my career. You might think that there are myriad interdisciplinary initiatives in a university setting, but I have never found that to be the case. And I have never worked with administrators on any project apart from accreditation and strategic planning, so the Mapping project was extra special, with deans and directors out in full force.

Packing up at Old Town Hall, and the newly-reinstalled exhibit at the Berry Library, Salem State University.

Exhibit planning developed several themes: the Salem Tercentenary of 1926 (with four parades and myriad happenings, all of which generated so many great pictures we wanted to showcase), the commercial heyday of the 1940s, when Salem was truly a “walkable city,” Salem’s “long big dig” encompassing the construction of a new train tunnel and urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s, immigration, and the rise of Witch City tourism. All these themes can be well-illustrated by the expanding collections of the Salem State Archives and Special Collections. We were focused on, and centered by, the amazing 1946 Nirenstein real estate map of downtown Salem which illustrates the amazing commercial vibrancy and diversity of the city at mid-century and which we used as background for most of the exhibit’s sections. It gradually became clear that we needed to expand our geographical range, however, as Salem’s later 20th century immigration could not be confined to the downtown and we also wanted to tell the story of our own institution.

There are a several features of the exhibition that deserve a special spotlight in my opinion, most prominently the coverage of the home front during World War II and the focus on immigration in the 1960s and 1970s. Both topics are presented in a very personal way and enhanced by oral histories. We also invite people to tell their stories, and at Old Town Hall we collected hundreds of hand-written notes from the (11,000 by our count) visitors to the exhibition. History students are presently hard at work at turning all of these notes into a big map, which of course will be a perfect archival deposit—along with everything else. A century from now, if the organizers of Salem’s quincentenary celebration wish to discover what their predecessors were up to, they will have no problem.