Category Archives: Culture

January 26, 2026

Frosty Salem

By daseger

So I was going to bring you some photographs of Salem during yesterday’s snowstorm today, but that would have necessitated actually going out and walking around, and just a few steps from my backyard out onto Chestnut Street at midday were enough to convince me that I didn’t want to do that. So I have images of snowstorms past, mostly new discoveries, and most from the Peabody Essex Museum’s Phillips Library, which possesses the largest collection of famed photographers Frank Cousins and Samuel Chamberlain, as well as images by amateur photographers in family papers. True to their promises of several years ago, the Phillips librarians have been steadily digitizing their local collections and everytime I go their digital collections page I see new-to-me things. If you’re new to Salem photo-sleuthing, you can just start with their very accessible “Salem Streets” collection, culled from a variety of sources. And of course all the glass plate negatives of Frank Cousins were digitized quite a while ago, and can also be found at Digital Commonwealth. My title is from Cousins, who assembled several of his favorite images for an 1891 collage, which I imagine was hung in the window of his Bee-Hive shop that very winter. Then I’m going to double back and proceed in chronological order.

So let’s go back a decade into the 1880s, when we really start to see a lot of photographs of Salem streets and buildings, both commercially published and popping up in family papers. I’ll never forget opening up the volumes of the Francis Lee papers a few summers ago at the Phillips Library in Rowley and seeing all of these gorgeous photographs from the mid-1880s. The photos below are from the same time period—1884-86—and this first amazing one is taken from the vantage point of Lee’s house, 14 Chestnut Street. No filter! Isn’t this a striking image? This photo and those that follow are attributed to John Robinson, a Salem author and horticulturalist and trustee of pretty much every single civic institution in the city at the time. I wasn’t aware that he was a photographer as well; I don’t know if had commissioned these images for some future publication? The last one of this group is from the vantage point of his house on Summer Street, and so we have two striking views of Samuel McIntire’s South Church, which burned to the ground in 1903.

Chestnut Street winters, Salem Streets collection, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum.

The 1890s: was Frank Cousins’ most productive decade as a photographer. He loved to photograph Chestnut Street too, but he branched out, all over the city, as his “Frosty Salem” poster illustrates. I love his winter shots because many of them include people, while his more formal architectural photographs decidedly do not.

Essex Street, the Common, Dearborn and Lafayette Streets,1890s, Frank Cousins Glass Plate Negative Collection, Phillips Library via Digital Commonwealth.

Also from the 1890s are several photographs by amateur photographers of an uprooted (Elm?) tree on Chestnut Street, with every possible angle captured!  I have looked in vain for more views of dealing with the snow, but this is as close as I could get. Closing out this decade are several beautiful photographs of the Pickering and Bartlett houses on Broad Street which are somehow connected to (taken by?) a certain Katherine A. Pond. I need to know more about her.

Chestnut and Broad Streets, 1890s, Phillips Library Digital Collections.

The 1920s: when I was looking for photos of Salem’s 1926 Tercentenary in various family albums at the Phillips, I came across the photos of the winter of 1924-25 in Francis Tuckerman Parker’s album. Again, these are not professional, and they are not digitized—I just took photos of the snapshots myself—so they not that great quality, but they are so interesting for what they show. The first image shows the intersection of Chestnut, Summer, and Norman Streets and on the extreme right is what I think is the last photograph of Samuel McIntire’s house before its demolition. The second, looking up Chestunt in the other direction, shows the church that replaced McIntire’s South Church, which was later demolished. Then we have a snow trolley on Essex, and a very messy intersection at the Essex and Summer.

Salem in the winter of 1924-25, Parker Family Photograph Album, Phillips Library.

1930s: the Phillips Library also possesses the huge negative collection of Samuel Chamberlain, a very important mid-century photographer of New England architecture and scenery, which is accessible at Digital Commonwealth. Chamberlain published Historic Salem in Four Seasons in 1938, so I assume these photos are from that time, but the collection encompasses his entire career. Pioneer Village, Salem’s outdoor living-history museum, was in its first decade, and Chamberlain photographed its buildings and landscape lavishly.

Pioneer Village by Samuel Chamberlain, Digital Commonwealth.

And finally, a street view of Broad Street in 1956 and an aerial view of Chestnut in 1972, both after the storms. The latter is included in a feature in Life magazine in that year, prompted by President Nixon’s visit to China. Eastern-oriented Salem seemed like a good place to examine American perspectives on Asia at that time; I don’t think that would be the first Salem association now.

Salem in 1956 and 1972: William F. Abbott collection at the Phillips Library and Life magazine, 1972.

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January 19, 2026

Salem Ladies 1876

By daseger

I think I’ve previewed the “anniversary year” for quite a few years on this blog in Januarys past, but this particular year is going to be so dominated by the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution (nationally) and Salem’s 400th anniversary (locally) that I decided not to. However, I don’t want to lose sight of the trees through the forest! I’ve always thought that the 1870s was an interesting decade for Salem women, and in 1876 in particular there were two women’s organizations which emerged that I think really represent the collective impact of women both within and outside their community at this time, and after. One organization, the Ladies Centennial Committee of Salem, had a very specific focus and is no longer with us, while the other, the Woman’s Friend Society, most certainly is: it is celebrating its 150th anniversary this very year. I thought I’d shine a spotlight on both. I had an opportunity to research the Ladies Centennial Committee’s efforts for my chapter on Salem and the Colonial Revival in Salem’s Centuries, and my general awareness turned to appreciation for both its organization and creative curation: its December 1875 Salem exhibition of “relics” from the past was broadcast across the nation. These objects were sent to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia along with many other Salem exhibits from the present, and because so few other Massachusetts towns and cities followed suit Salem really dominated the entire effort from the Bay State. The Ladies of Salem followed up with a Centennial Ball at Mechanics Hall, which added to Salem’s Centennial Fund coffers and enhanced its reputation as as steward of the Colonial past.

Centennial Commemoration in Salem: Exhibition and Ball, Mechanic Hall on Essex Street Salem and the Massachusetts Building in Philadelphia. Salem is the “Old City of Peace” and not yet Witch City.

The exhibition of antique articles was quite diverse, encompassing furniture, clothing, silver, portraits and paper from the past, but I think these women were more than casual antiquarians relying on their family and social connections for “relics” of Salem’s and America’s past. Mrs. Hagar, the committee chair, wasn’t even old-money North Shore: she was Mary Bradford McKim Hagar from New York State, the wife of Daniel Hagar, the principal of Salem Normal School. They received so much publicity, and often their Centennial efforts were paired with other pieces of “news” related to Salem women (see the first image above) which I think is really interesting. The membership of the committee included women—most prominently educator Kate Tannant Woods—who were as much or more interested in social reform as cultural curation. While she was serving on the Centennial Committee, Woods was instrumental in establishing the Moral Education Society of Salem, which eventually changed its named to the Woman’s Friend Society, after similarly-named societies in the area.

Right from its foundation, the Salem Woman’s Friend Society developed a mission that expanded far beyond the first “Needle Woman’s Friend Society” founded in Boston in 1847 “for the purpose of giving employment in needlework to poor women.” The Salem mission included a girl’s reading room, an employment bureau, and housing, after Salem’s most generous philanthropist, Captain John Bertram, offered them half of a stately Federal house on Elm Street for shelter purposes. In 1884, his daughter Jennie Emmerton, always referred to as “Salem’s richest woman” and long Salem’s largest individual taxpayer, deeded the house to the Society, which acquired the other half of the Joseph Fenno house in 1887 through private donations. There was also a focus on vocational education, but I’ll let the Society explain its expanding mission in its own words, with this great fundraising brochure from its deposited records at the Salem State Archives and Special Collections. (*note: these records are amazing! I had one student write a great paper about the employment bureau several years ago, but more studies could be sourced)

So many initiatives! Including the District (later Visiting) Nurse program, which would later be adminstered out of the House of the Seven Gables, founded by Jennie Emmerton’s daughter, Caroline Emmerton. All of this outreach was extraordinarily important in the historical context, when Salem’s immigrant population was increasing steadily and social and medical services were not yet in place. And now, more than a century later, such systems are well-established but the Woman’s Friend Society continues its important work in the housing sphere, where insufficiency prevails. This is also a Salem organization that knows and shares its history, and will be commemorating its 150th anniversary with several special events in the coming months, so watch this space.

Emmerton House/ Women’s Friend Society, 12 Elm Street, Salem, Massachusetts.

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January 12, 2026

Minority Report

By daseger

Provocative title, yes? It’s not mine. A very different presentation for me today: a very short post, with no pictures and very little analysis on my part. Basically I just want to offer you a link, to the Minority Report of the two historians appointed to the City Seal Task Force, whose contributions to the Official Report were so butchered and detached from documentation that they felt compelled to compose their own report and submit it to the Salem City Council for its review and consideration of an alteration to Salem’s official city seal since 1839. I’m not sure what’s going to happen here, but we all (including myself—five posts here!) got very swept up in this process. In general, the City Council seems to have a preference for very bland history, which offends no one and affirms some contemporary value, or very commodified history (all witches all the time everywhere), which many people find offensive but is rationalized according to its perceived monetary value, and nothing in between. Very little nuance is permitted, and of course history is all nuance and the City Seal discussion really had a lot of nuance, all of which is presented so well in this Minority Report. And that’s one reason I want to amplify it.

Download Report

The other reason why I wanted to share this report is that it is excellent in general as well as in nuance! It’s a detailed summary of a major sector of Salem’s maritime history during its so-called “golden age,” drawn from both traditional and new studies, with some great insights into cultural history and public history. It features an array of perspectives, from both the past and the present. Even if you’re not into the seal debate (which is understandable–I don’t know how it creeped up on me either) it’s well worth your time.

Now usually I would analyze and annotate this myself, but I said to myself (for once): I have said (written) enough! I certainly would be interested in your comments here, however (particularly because I haven’t had anyone to discuss this with), and I’ll be back with something new next week. I’m not sure when the City Council is going to take this issue up, but I’ll report back when they do.

9 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Culture, Current Events, Salem

December 1, 2025

Old Salem Settings

By daseger

One of the chapters I wrote for the forthcoming (on January 6!) Salem’s Centuries was on the Colonial Revival, and in it I  explored Salem’s experience of that cultural movement as well as Salem’s influence in that cultural movement. I am no art historian, so my purview is very broad, and more focused on popular distillations of “Salem style” than original creations.  There were so many references to “Old Salem” in the first three decades of the twentieth century; now when you hear that phrase it is generally referring to Old Salem Museum & Gardens in North Carolina. But in the 1920s and 1930s, you could buy silverware, furniture, rugs, wallpaper, draperies, and ceramics influenced by “Old Salem.” One product that was particularly effective at conjuring up an image of a very romanticized Salem during its commercial heyday was the “Old Salem” line of china manufactured by Copeland starting in Salem’s tricentennial year of 1926 into the 1950s. This was a “Blue Room” issue marketed under Copeland’s original name Spode, for extra transferware sentimental appeal. I think it was first issued in a polychrome pattern, but the blue-and-white version really took off in the U.S., if advertisements and auction lots are any indication.

I’ve included a snip of text from a House Beautiful feature on “colonial” dinnerware from the 1930s in this last image because there’s a lot there/here. First of all, I love this line about how Old Salem the pattern evokes Old Salem the place, a place lost in time, when “the shoe factories had not yet banished the salty flavor of its existence.” Very Colonial Revival. The author wants to emphasize the pattern’s revival and continuity: it was originally produced back in that “salty” past and New Englanders have always bought Spode. I do find the “original production” assertion a bit confusing as the pattern does indeed feature ships, though not exclusively Salem ships, and the settings are clearly European. In fact, Old Salem, which was produced with old copper plate transfers of Italian views, is kind of a composite view in several ways: old world, new world, maritime, floral, all fused together by the magic of transferware for Salem’s 400th and America’s 150th.

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November 24, 2025

Facts, Feelings, and Erasure

By daseger

I really didn’t want to publish any more about the Salem City Seal saga here, but the closing meeting of the Task Force which has recommended its replacement was concerning in so many ways that I simply had to write about it (it was keeping me up at night). For those that haven’t followed this issue and are (really) interested, previous posts are here and here and here. I am going to write about the discourse and deliberations in this last meeting, but I’m not going to use names. I don’t see any need to get personal beyond public statements, but you can watch all of the recorded zoom meetings (which get very personal), including the November 1oth one, here. A very brief summary before I get into it. In the spring of 2024, several Salem residents, most of whom seem to be members of the North Shore Asian American and Pacific Islanders Coalition, expressed their opposition to the Salem City Seal, which features a depiction of a native of the Aceh province of Sumatra, a pepper plant, and an arriving ship, all of which represent the lucrative and impactful pepper trade which dominated Salem’s economy and society (and culture) in the first half of the nineteenth century and left a lasting imprint. The seal was adopted in 1839, and its central image was redesigned by Salem artist Ross Turner in the 1880s to represent a more general Asian figure, with the ship and pepper plant remaining. Those opposed to the seal perceived its central depiction as an offensive cartoonish character, and called for its replacement. The City’s Race Equity Commission voted to do just that, without consulting the residents of Salem in any way, but the Mayor and City Council recommended the appointment of a deliberative body to conduct historial research, gauge public opinion, and make a recommentation. And so the City Seal Task Force first met in March of this year, ostensibly for a period of 18 months, with members appointed from the Race Equity Commission and the Salem Cultural Council, two “credentialed” historians, and other mayoral appointees. By October they had concluded their business with a recommendation to replace the seal and since then they’ve been dealing with the cumbersome business of assembling their final report. The meeting on November 10th was the last meeting of the Task Force, and on the agenda was the approval of this report, which was created by the submission of individual sections by task force members and a editorial process to create a “unified” voice.

Paintings of the original seal and Ross Turner replacement, and the current seal. The former are in the public drive of the Task Force, where you can find presentations and other materials. I had never seen the original seal before.

The dynamic in this meeting was led largely by four people, the two designated historians and the editors of the draft final report.For reasons that were unclear to me, the charge to those writing sections of this report was to keep it short, very short: a page or two. This mandate was explained in the meeting by the two editors, who are the Chair and Vice Chair of the Task Force: attention spans. Anyone reading this report would have a short attention span. Since this report will be sent to the City Council for final approval I thought this was a little insulting to its members, and pretty condescending to the Salem public at large. Anyway, that was the charge and everyone obeyed, but the two historians had asked that citations be included in the report and excluded from the draconian word limitations since documentation is a requisite part of any historical analysis. Apparently that request was agreed upon, but the draft report has no citations: as the editors explained, they had included a bibliography which, in their view, was a sufficient replacement for footnotes. Now I am sure everyone reading this can understand the difference between footnotes and a bibliography. As I am typing this, I am taking a break (although I don’t really need one, as they are very good!) from a stack of rough drafts my students have submitted in our capstone seminar course, and I can assure you that these history students are documenting their assertions. What you have in the report are assertions without documentation, which to me looks like a device to render them mere opinion. Since there is a very stark contrast between the non-historical sections, in which the seal is presented in the company of strident images of nineteenth-century Orientalism and twentieth-century popular culture, and the historical sections which lay out the vastness of of the pepper trade and its impact in a more documentary manner, it’s almost impossible to discern between feelings and fact when you read this report unless you are independently knowledgeable about any of the information presented “in evidence.”

I’m going to let James Lindgren move my “story” along while demonstrating the use of a footnote, but I should say that the historians on the Task Force were trying to source and document primary sources as well as interpretive texts.

There was a lot of back and forth on this issue, and the citations are somehow going to be made public, but I don’t think they are going back in the text, because that would make it far too long for all those readers with short attention spans. But a larger issue loomed over all of this discussion, introduced at the beginning and never resolved. One of the historians asserted that his entire section had been rewritten by the editors, with the exception of one dangling (citation-less) quote!  Neither of the editors appeared to assume responsibility for this, and so the charge kept coming back, politely but assertively, with the final observation that the rewrite was so awkward that it must have been the work of ChatGPT. Immediately after this serious concern was raised, another task force member commented that the historians in the group were trying to dominate not only the discussion, but the report, with their voices—-immediately after her colleague declared that he had lost his! This exchange made everything so crystal clear to me: I had never seen erasure so up close and personal before. Generally historical erasure is about omission, or so I thought, but this seems much more pro-active. As soon as voices from Aceh, the people actually represented on the seal, spoke in its favor, they were diminished and dismissed. Salem’s long-running pepper trade was reduced to the Battle of Quallah-Battoo (Kuala Batu), a retaliatory attack by the US Navy on the Malays who had seized the ship Friendship and killed three of of her crew in 1831, an obvious overreaction which was questioned and even condemned up and down the eastern seaboard. A half-century of maritime history, with major reverbations on both sides of the world, reduced to one action, and attempts to introduce historical context rewritten, literally. Indeed, it seemed to me that the majority of the City Seal Task Force was intent on erasing not only Salem’s history, but the discipline of history itself.

200th Anniversary of PEM’s East India Hall this very year! At the dedication dinner in October of 1825, President John Quincy Adams gave a toast to Salem’s trade with the East Indies: No commercial nation has been great without it, may the experience of ages induce us to cherish this rich source of national wealth.

 

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November 17, 2025

The Revolution in Color

By daseger

I decided to celebrate the debut of Ken Burns’ new series on the American Revolution by getting out two old books which I always enjoy browsing through, and which I now realize were quite foundational in how I look (and I do mean look) at American history in particular and history in general. The two books are The Pictorial History of the American Revolution by Rupert Furneaux and The Colonial Spirit of ’76 by David C. Whitney, and they were both published for the Bicentennial by Ferguson Publishing of Chicago with ample illustrations, including watercolors of noted Revolutionary spaces and places by “visual artist” Kay Smith. That’s how she is always described, and she died just this year at age 102! Every time I look at her watercolor buildings, I remember when I saw them for the first time; it happened just yesterday when I took the books out. And so it has finally dawned on me that my lifelong pursuit of history through houses began with her. The two books have lots of other cool illustrations too, including prints of every single tavern along the eastern seaboard which has any sort of Revolutionary connection, but Kay provides most of the color. I don’t know about reading these books—they’re definitely rather dated and devoted to storytelling rather than multi-causal analysis, but they are fun to look at. No Salem at all, sadly: colonial capital or Leslie’s Retreat or privateers. The Pictorial History has a chronological/geographical format and the Colonial Spirit is supposed to be more of a social history, I think, but its basic structure is biographical. Here are some of my favorite illustrations—all by Kay Smith, and most of buildings, of course—from Boston to Yorktown.

Kay Smith could depict people too—-her take on Major Andre’s famous sketch of Peggy Shippen Arnold is very charming. Interesting illustrations are scattered throughout both books liberally: uniforms, of course, firearms, vignettes of “daily life,” a great presentation of a Declaration of Independence cover sheet juxtaposed with a facsmimile of Thomas Jefferson’s hand-written and -corrected copy (used by Burns at the opening of episode one of The American Revolution). These books made for just as pleasurable browsing as all those years ago. And what do we think of the latest take on the Revolution?

 

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November 3, 2025

A Sampler of Salem Folk Art

By daseger

Salem is not particularly known for its folk art, I think. The standard for craftsmanship during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century was so high, and production so prolific, that the curatorial and collecting emphasis always seems to be on the best and the brightest of the decorative arts rather than the more idiosyncratic. But I’m always looking for interesting examples of folk art, and every once in a while I do a round-up of samplers, silhouettes and signs. The Peabody Essex Museum has wonderful examples of Salem-made folk art in their huge collection, including my favorite trade sign, featuring a bust of Paracelsus made for James Emerton’s Essex Street apothecary shop, samplers from the famous Sarah Stivours school, and the “soft sculpture” (I’m not sure what else to call it) of textile artist, author and abolitionist Lucy Hiller Lambert Cleveland. And all manner of maritime objects of course. The amazing decoys of Captain Charles Osgood, carved while the Captain was biding his time waiting for his gold rush ship to set sail from San Francisco back to Salem in 1849 and hidden in a friend’s hunting lodge in Rowley for a century thereafter, are valued quite highly. Most are in the collection of the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, but one came up for auction recently with an impressive result.

 Lucy Hiller (Lambert) Cleveland, Sailor’s Home, mid-1800s, cotton, wood, leather, pigments, Gift of Mary T. Saunders, 1915, Peabody Essex Museum; Sally Rust’s Sampler from the Sarah Stivours School, 1788, Peabody Essex Museum; three Osgood decoys, Shelburne Museum.

But a lot of anonymous pieces crafted in Salem seem to sell for very little money. There’s a painting of Salem Harbor by an anonymous artist coming up for auction later this month at Eldred’s Auctions that is so beautiful I could fall into it—and it has a higher starting bid than I’ve seen before for folk art marine paintings. It seems worth it; this is not just a painting of a ship, but of life on land and sea. Contrast this with another nautical view below, a reverse glass painting of “Ship Siam of Salem / Built 1847 / Capt. Ebenezer Graves” sold by Jeffrey S. Evans & Associates Auctions. There’s certainly a lot more going on. Also from Evans, these two wonderful carved allegorical figures, which were apparently located at Salem Willows! I really can’t imagine where, precisely. Silhouettes cut in Salem appear at auctions frequently, but I’m not sure these would count as Salem art as such artists seemed to have been characteristically itinerant.

Folk art painting of Salem Harbor, Eldred’s Auctions; reverse glass painting and allegorical figures, Jeffrey S. Evans & Associations Auctions; Massachusetts cutwork silhouette “of S.P.H. of Salem, cut by S.A.D,” Dovetail Auctions.

Besides the first painting above, my favorite recent folk art finds are twentieth-century creations: a c. 1910 popcorn popper  and a wooden house purse made by Mercedes Hitchcock of Houston, Texas. You can find more about her business, “Houses by Hitchcock,” here. Apparently women from all over the country would send in photographs of their houses to her, and she would make scale model wooden pocketbooks for them! The owner of a Summer Street house commissioned a purse, and it came up for auction a few years ago. I’ve got to go for a walk–not quite sure which house it is. But it’s November, so safe now.

Scary Salem Popcorn Popper, c. 1910; Mercedes Hitchcock Folk Art Wooden Salem House Purse, Fairfield Auction; Salem Popcorn Popper, Bray & Co. Auctions.

 

9 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Art, Culture, Salem

October 27, 2025

“Salem is not a Theme Park”

By daseger

You hear my title phrase all the time in Salem now, with increasing frequency. It’s a way to acknowledge the fact that residents of Salem have to (or want to): go to work, drive to their appointments, take their kids to school, walk along the sidewalk or sit on their front stoops in the prolonged Halloween season of September and October (and a bit of November, and…….) when a million people shuffle around our very small city taking pictures of each other. Most people say it out of frustration. I’ve heard this expression from members of our City government as well, no doubt to also express frustration but at the time time, as coverage for doing nothing to ease it. Because the (other) official party line is that no one can do anything about it; the tourists just come and we have to do everything possible to accomodate them. We couldn’t possibly be asking them to come, in any way, because that would indicate a deliberate campaign to exploit an historic tragedy. Nope, they just come, we can’t stop them, and Salem is a real city, not a theme park, and if it exhibits theme park characteristics in response to the demands of the crowd, it’s the tourists’ fault and not ours! I understand the desire to point out that Salem is not a theme park, but at the same time, it looks like one to me, during this time of year, and increasingly all year long. And there’s a bit of protesting too much that it isn’t one going on here.

Here’s my argument for.

Some definitions of a “theme park”:

Oxford English Dictionary (my holy grail): an amusement park designed or organized around a unifying idea or subject.

Merriam-Webster: an amusement park in which the structures and settings are based on a central theme.

Cambridge Dictionary: a large permanent area for public entertainment, with entertaining activities and big machines to ride on or play games or restaurants, etc., sometimes all connected with a single subject.

Collins: A theme park is a large outdoor area where people pay to go to enjoy themselves. All the different activities in a theme park are usually based on a particular idea or theme.

This last definition could undermine my assertion, as people do not pay an admission fee to enter Salem—but they certainly pay in all sort of other ways. Still, it makes the point that a theme park is generally seen as a private enterprise, and I think that’s a big part of the “Salem is not a theme park” refrain. It’s not Disney. But I’m still going to beg to differ. And certainly no one can argue that Salem does not have a central, unifying theme! I could show you tons of pictures of a packed Essex Street which would look very theme-parkish, but I really feel that the City looks most like a designated entertainment zone—or even a movie set– early in the morning when no one is about. Right in the center of it all is Samantha, the Bewitched statue, surveying her domain.

It was a slow burn, but once the Hocus Pocus fan base reached critical mass, that gloss was added to Salem’s veneer as key scenes were shot here. During the week before Halloween, the Peabody Essex Museum dresses up the Ropes Mansion as “Allison’s House,” which you can see above, along with the City’s new bollards installed to protect picture-takers and tour groups. This scene definitely reinforces the “Salem as set” impression! Across town, Salem Common is transformed into a marketplace, food court, and carnival site at this time of year, and you can’t get more theme park than that–a large outdoor area where people pay to go to enjoy themselves.

And then there’s the coordinated messaging/marketing. Don’t get me wrong, it is necessary: people need to know which roads are closed and encouraged to take the train. But it looks and feels commercial rather than civic. Look at this first photo–posted by the Salem Police Department, whose badge bears the image of a witch on a broomstick. Just below, a post from the City’s official travel and tourism agency, Destination Salem: I’m sure this cookie is delicious (the Chocolate Pantry on Derby Street features wonderful treats all year long), but would it be front and center if it didn’t bear the City’s offical witch brand? The “unifying” or “central” focus is the defining characteristic of a theme park and you just can’t miss it in Salem. I completely understand the sentiments of frustrated Salem residents—-I think I actually uttered these same words myself to a squad of felt witch hat ladies who were just standing in the middle of my street obliviously when I was trying to pull out of my driveway, nearly late for class. But I think the City should own it; after all, it is no mean feat to transform a city into a theme park.

 

15 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Culture, Salem, Tourism

October 20, 2025

Limning the Local

By daseger

I’ve engaged in lots of different history here: a lot of public, some world, American and European, but above all, local. I’m always looking for new ways to delve into and present local history. I follow the sources, I chase down new perspectives and approaches whenever I catch a trail, and because I’m operating in a digital world, I always look for striking visuals. All of these avenues have somehow brought me to a somewhat obscure graphic artist who centered much of his life on living in, working in, and  illuminating the backwoods Maine lumber town of Weld, Maine, a man named Seaverns W. Hilton who often signed his work S.W. Hilton. Hilton was born in Rhode Island and worked as a graphic artist (he is generally referred to as a poster artist) in New York City, but by the 1930s and his 30s he was in Weld, a Franklin County town whose population had shrunk precipitously as it lost its lumber trail. He diversified his artistic training into wood carving as a means of reviving and perhaps becoming part of his chosen community, but continued to illustrate on paper as well—mostly local history texts, and this is how I found him. I became a bit preoccupied by Benedict Arnold’s disastrous Quebec Expedition of 1775 after attending some commemorative events in Newburyport a few weeks ago, and found a little treatise with that perfect mod/mid-century aesthetic by none other than S.W. Hilton. And then I caught his trail.

It’s just great! I mean, this was quite the adventure (disaster) and you need the pictures. I tried reading some academic texts, but I think I learned more from Mr. Hilton. He illustrated books about the neighboring towns of Livermore and Rumford, as well as the famous Mount Zircon Moon Tide Spring in the latter. The Bethel Historical Society has an online exhibition on this venerable mineral spring, comparable to Poland Spring, featuring Hilton’s illustrations fromThe Mount Zircon Moon Tide Spring: An Illustrated History by Randall H. Bennett. These inland Maine cities and towns have interesting histories, as highlighted by Hilton and the authors for whom he illustrated, but they are not as well known as the Downeast ports on the coast with their more dramatic maritime narratives, so I appreciate Hilton’s creative spin. The title page of Josiah Volunteered, featuring the Civil War diary of a Maine soldier, also illustrates the Hilton treatment: it was published in the year he died, 1977. Looking at Hilton in a somewhat wider frame, he seems to have had success working in advertising in New York City (his copy work is  scarce but has fetched high prices in recent auctions), and became increasingly entangled in Maine from the later 1930s, primarily through the woodworking shop he founded, Woodworkers of Weld, which produced toys and figurines into the 1950s. Some of his creations garnered a national spotlight when an adjoining restaurant adorned with them, The Farmer’s Wife, was featured in Life magazine in 1937, and postcards followed. In this and all of his work, there’s an obvious whimsy in his depictions of past and present, and I think that’s what I appreciate the most, especially now.

Opening Day of the Mount Zircon Spring, from The Mount Zircon Moon Tide Spring: An Illustrated History by Randall H. Bennett.

Hilton posters for the Northern Pacific from the 1920s: Swann Auction Galleries and David Pollack Vintage Posters.

A wonderful 3 part series about Weld and Hilton starts here: https://luannyetter.wordpress.com/2021/04/09/the-shop-land-part-i/

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Culture, Design

October 13, 2025

So much WOOD!

By daseger

The Historic New England season is closing this Columbus/Indigenous People’s Day weekend and as I am up in York Harbor, I went to visit one of HNE’s oldest houses (both in terms of sheer vintage and time under its stewardship): the Jackson House in Portsmouth, built circa 1664. This is an extraordinary house: I’m sorry to be posting at this time when you won’t be able to visit it until next June, because I’d really like to urge everyone reading to go. I had been in it before, but when I was much younger and couldn’t appreciate it properly. But now, wow. I always thought it was a saltbox: it is not. It’s a seventeenth-century two-story small square house which had an elaborate lean-to added a bit later, along with two additions on each side. It is also a lavish display of wood: certainly not from an American perspective, but from an English one, which would have been its builder, Richard Jackson’s perspective. When I was writing my first book, The Practical Renaissance, I was reading treatises written for carpenters and shipbuilders, as well as some more general agricultural pamphlets, all of which made me aware of the increasing concern about the shortage of wood in seventeenth-century England. All the first-growth forests had long been chopped down, so to come to North America and see all this wood must have been something. So for me, the Jackson House was just a great illustration of that abundance. Our guide emphasized this theme adroitly as she described the house’s framing, exterior and interior, and she also illustrated the construction impact of less-abundant woodland in New Hampshire by showing us the attic over the eighteenth-century addition, with its decidedly less-robust timbers. The Jackson House is one of Historic New England’s unfurnished study houses (like the Gedney House in Salem), so the emphasis is decidedly on construction, but we got to learn a fair amount about the family as well, who possessed the house until 1924, when William Sumner Appleton, the founder of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (now Historic New England) purchased it.

Perfect 17th century parlor and east and west wings, with a patch of preserved wallpaper.

Appleton had apparently been obsessed with the Jackson House since his freshman year at Harvard, when he came up from Cambridge and knocked on the door. A pioneering preservationist and critic of “one property museums,” he began acquiring choice properties after the founding of SPNEA/HNE in 1910. Rather than stripping off the east and west additions of the house, he removed stucco and plaster to reveal its construction. The original property was extensive, fifty acres or so just across the North Mill Pond from downtown Portsmouth, in a neighborhood named Christian Shore. When I was growing up across the Piscataqua River in southern Maine in the 1970s and 1980s, Christian Shore seemed to me a drive-through area with delapidated old houses, but then suddenly appeared The Inn at Christian Shore and I started noticing all the beautiful old houses and now they really are all beautifully restored. Portsmouth is actually growing in this direction, with several hotels built in what were once vacant lots which divided Christian Shore from downtown. But when you look out the windows (replaced by Appleton, but in their original openings) of the house on its slightly elevated lot, you can imagine, and even sort of feel, the aura of its first century.

The replacement windows and upstairs, including some wood-carvings. I knew all about the counter-magical daisy wheel from the M.A. thesis on apotropaic marks by Alyssa Conary at Salem State, so it was fun to see it (a perfect example of how I didn’t “see” on my first visit as I have no memory of it). A watercolor and Detroit Publishing Co. (Library of Congress) photograph of the house before it became a museum.

5 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Architecture, Culture, Houses, New England