Category Archives: History

February 9, 2026

Knox Sunday

By daseger

I know, there was a big football game yesterday, and I watched half of it at an actual party at night but the day was reserved for Col. Henry Knox. I’ve been watching online as commemorations of Knox’s Noble Train of Artillery moved across large swaths of New York and Massachusetts on its way to relieve the besieged citizens of Boston but had not made it to one live event—and Evacuation Day (better known as St. Patrick’s Day to those of you not in Massachusetts) is only a little over a month away. So I decided to drive out to Framingham to see some cannons and Patriots before the other Patriots took the field. The event was a bit more talk than action, as I listened to organizers and politicians and community leaders express their joy at being part of the festivities. Quite a few speeches, but earnest expressions all and it was nice to see such a large community gathering.

Scenes of the day; Revolution 250 Chair Professor Robert Allison and the official Trail.

Knox Trail 250 is an initiative of Revolution 250, which bears the motto: Your Town, Your History, Our Nation so the commemorative events of the past few years have always been community-based in terms of organization and participation. This particular event was a Middlesex County affair, with representatives from all the towns surrounding Framingham (Marlborough, Southborough, Wayland ) present. Besides community (then and now), there was also a notable emphasis on the two most heralded African American soldiers of the Revolution from Massachusetts: Salem Poor and Peter Salem. The former was representated by a reenactor (below) who sounded more like an actor as he recounted his life and service, while we saw Peter Salem’s name on a 1775 roster of Framingham Minutemen. (Why the two Salem names? The answer seems somewhat shrouded still, but the general concensus seems to be that Poor’s name, which occasionally appeared as “Salam” might have an Islamic connection or represent a form of salaam, the word for peace in Arabic, while Peter’s name designated the town of one of his enslavers.) I spent a long time looking at the roster.

I’ve been fascinated by Henry Knox’s story for a long time. It seems so sweeping and dramatic, like many Revolutionary personal narratives. Young Boston bookseller becomes inflamed with the cause, marries the daughter of prominent Loyalists who promptly disown her, sets out to liberate Boston by transporting 59 cannons from Fort Ticonderoga in the dead of winter, mounts said cannons on Dorchester Heights and drives the British away after the long siege, becomes Washington’s chief of artillery and later the first Secretary of War, retrieves his wife’s family’s confiscated land holdings and settles down in the midst of the Maine county that would be named for him (and then of course there’s Fort Knox too). Having physical places tied to your memory, in Knox’s case an actual trail, invites exploration.

Revolution 250 Executive Director Jonathan Lane and “Colonel Henry Knox”; a commemorative quilt sown by volunteers at the Framingham History Center; miniature of Henry Knox, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

There’s one more big Knox event if you are in the area: “To Win the Siege: the Noble Train Arrives” at the Hartwell Tavern within the Minute Man National Historic Park on February 21st.

12 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Historic Trails, History

February 2, 2026

The Problem with Sugar

By daseger

I have either written, edited, or read all of the essays that make up Salem’s Centuries many times over these past three years as they have taken shape but now that they’re all together in a published book I read them again last week, as I wanted to see how the book held up, cover to cover, beginning to end. You don’t have to read the book that way, as it is a collection of topical essays in chronological order, but I wanted to see if there were some hidden themes that perhaps we should have made more apparent (I think I was also looking for typos). Overall I was really pleased—-I think the book holds together well, and I only found one rather insignificant typo, in one of my own essays! I was also pleased to come away from this material with questions, because for me that’s the mark of a good history book, or any book for that matter. So I thought I would re-engage with some Salem history from time to time here, prompted by these new questions about old topics. Today I want to write about the supply of sugar in Salem, prompted by a piece by my co-editor, Brad Austin, about Salem’s entrepreneurial candymaker, Mary Spencer, widely known as the “Gibralter Woman.” This is a well-worn narrative: an Englishwoman is shipwrecked in Salem in 1806 and gifted a pound of sugar by Salem residents which she transforms into “Gibralters,” hard candies which she first sells from the steps of the First Church and which are eventually carried all over the world on Salem ships.

Peabody Historical Society.

Brad’s piece, “Mary Spencer: Shipwrecks, Sugar and Salem” is a wonderful example of what he calls “pulling” on a (familiar) narrative thread to reveal more context—and more questions. He picks up the story with Mary’s son Thomas Spencer, who arrived in Salem in the 1820s and carried on the family business while at the same time asserting a very public Abolitionist stance as one of of the founders of the Salem Anti-Slavery Society. And here’s the problem and the question: as sugar was the commodity most associated with slave labor, how can an Abolitionist candy maker run his business in good faith? Brad tells us that “in 1805, the year that Mary Spencer arrived in Salem, the Salem Gazette had more than 2500 mentions of sugar and molasses in advertisements along, on top of the hundreds of news stories and price guides it published discussing these commodities.” Mary Spencer’s first bag of gifted sugar almost certainly came from the West Indies, where it was cultivated, harvested, and processed by enslaved labor. Was this still the case twenty years later when her son joined the business? I think so, but there were a few other possibilities that appeared as I went through a sampling of advertisements myself. (Just a sampling; this is a blog post. A more comprehensive review would take hours and hours and hours, so what follows is an impression.)

What I saw was a lot of West Indian sugar coming into Salem, often called Havanna and or Martinique sugar, and then increasing amounts of domestic New Orleans sugar, also a product of enslaved labor. It’s hard to see how a Salem candy manufacturer or indeed any Salem person could do without sugar produced by enslaved labor unless they did without sugar altogether. Then a little glimmer of hope: the arrival of East Indian sugar, called Calcutta and Java sugar, after 1815. As you can see above, Michael Shepard is sourcing sugar from both east and west, but was the former the way forward? This certainly makes sense with Salem’s eastern-oriented trade, and could have been an American variant of the “East India Sugar not made by Slaves” campaign in Britain.

Sugar bowl, blue glass, inscribed in gilt with the words ‘East India Sugar / not made by / Slaves’, about 1820-30, probably made in Bristol, England. Museum no. C.14-2023. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Sugar from the East Indies did come into Salem in increasing volume but West Indian and New Orleans sugar imports were greater over the next few decades from my sampling. Kind of depressing, certainly not a consumption revolution. But then I came across a striking statement which let me down another road: sugar beet cultivation!

Was this another first for Salem? Likely not—the first sugar beet operation is usually identified as David Lee Child’s “factory” in Northampton at around this same time but there were earlier experiments. Beet sugar seems to have had the potential to be the most promising slavery-free alternative to cane sugar for abolitionists in New England and elsewhere but a real industry didn’t take off until much later. Pickering Dodge Jr. does not appear to have continued his experiments in North Salem (but I’ll keep digging). It seems that both Childs’ and Dodge’s efforts were hampered by processing: the prevalent methods produced a sugar that people just didn’t like. And that was a problem.

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in History, Salem

December 15, 2025

Christmas Tipples

By daseger

I was researching the enforcement of the famous (or infamous) 1659 Massachusetts statutory “ban” on Christmas in the records of the Essex County quarterly courts the other day and soon realized that no one got fined for “keeping Christmas” but rather for excessive “tippling” on Christmas. I think if you kept Christmas quietly at home you were fine, but if you or your guests became “distempered with drink” you were not. Of course this was not the time of the excessive decorating that we indulge in now, so who knew if you thinking or praying: just don’t celebrate! In 1662, William Hoar was presented to the Court for “suffering tippling in his house by those who came to keep Christmas there” and he didn’t even indulge himself. The famous “Salem Wassail” of 1679 involved an elderly couple being held hostage by four young men who wanted to “drink perry and be merry”: when no perry (pear cider) was offered up, the men attacked the house for  a considerable length of time. Another rowdy Christmas occurred in 1671, with some serious drinking occurred at the tavern of John Hathorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s great great great uncle and the little brother of his far more respectable (and intolerant) great great great grandfather William. John’s ordinary already had a reputation for disorderly drinking, but on that Christmas night, witnesses swore that Joseph Collins drank seventeen quarts of rum and his wife Sarah had to be carried to her bed.

That’s a LOT of rum–whether the Collinses drank it or not (they later sued Hathorne for slander). I associate rum more with the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries so this Christmas indulgence surprised me, and immediately turned my attention to what people drank at Christmas in the seventeenth century—and later. Perry and various ciders, definitely. Beer was an everyday drink but maybe more celebratory when you turn it into something else—like lambswool, the favorite Wassail drink of Tudor and Stuart England, in which old strong ale was heated and spiced up and topped with a frothy puree of roasted apples. Did lambswool make it over here? According to Gregg Smith, author of the (I think definitive) Beer in America: the Early Years, it did, and it was called jingle. What could be more Christmassy than that?

John Worlidge, Vinetum Britannicum, or a Treatise of Cider and Other Wines and Drinks, 1676.

Nothing is more celebratory than punch and the eighteenth century seems like the Century of Punch and Revolution to me.  Punches were made and drank in the seventeenth century in England, and really caught on commercially with the emergence of special “punch houses” like that of James Ashley, but they took off in the Colonies too. So many American punches: the famous Fish House Punch of Philadelphia, Ben Franklin’s Milk Punch, Martha Washington’s Punch, the lethal Chatham Artillery Punch served to President Washington when he visited Savannah according to lore and legend. I just know that there was an “Old Salem Punch,” I’ve seen it referenced several times, but have never found the recipe. Nevertheless, Salem merchants in all trades reference punch consistently: fruit traders, dealers in silver and glass wares who offered up punch bowls, ladles, and cups, and of course spice purveyors. Citrus fruits were definitely advertised more as “souring” for punch than health benefits in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries! Though punch could be served cold or hot, the always hot flip, standard tavern fare by all accounts, seems to have been a predecessor of both eggnog and hot buttered rum. I can’t imagine a more suitable drink for the Christmas season, and am surprised it hasn’t been revived.

James Ashley’s Trade Card (c. 1740) © The Trustees of the British Museum

The nineteenth century always brings more, and more variety, of everything. I’m sure this was the case with holiday beverages as well, though most purveyors seem to advertise generic “wines, spirits and cordials” for Christmas from the 1830s so I’m not sure exactly what is being consumed. Salem did have six rum distilleries selling that spirit regionally in the first half of the nineteenth century, so I’m sure it was plentiful at Christmas and throughout the year. The first bartender’s guide, Jerry “The Professor” Thomas’s The Bar-tenders’ Guide: A Complete Cyclopaedia of Plain and Fancy Drinks (1862), is very specific about holiday libations, however. There are toddys and slings, and six recipes for the very American egg nog, including one that is served hot, as well as a British nog variation called “Tom and Jerry” which would become very popular stateside after this publication. And at the very end of the century, “Old Salem Punch” appears, in bottled form—from no less than S.S. Pierce.

The twentieth century seems like the century of adulteration for punch, which remained a favorite Christmas tipple. Not only was it bottled for sale, many more ingredients were added, so much so that it became more of a catch-all than a specific beverage. There were terrible “prohibition punches” during the 1920s, made with no alcohol at all or the literally lethal “wood alcohol”. After prohibition, Christmas punches had to be either red or sparkling, sometimes both: the red was the result of the addition of cranberry juice at best (and red food dye at worst) and the sparkling came from champagne and/or ginger ale. Fruit was added, not for “souring” but just because. Tom and Jerry was really popular in the first half of the century, then disappeared. Eggnog remained popular and was increasingly packaged as well: when you run into the real stuff, made at home, it’s quite something. One of my favorite Salem Christmas memories is of a lovely Christmas Eve party held every year by a wonderful older couple who lived in a Federal house on Essex Street. In the dining room was a huge silver punch (eggnog?) bowl filled to the brim with very frothy homeade eggnog, and everyone was always clustered around it ooohing and aaahing….and drinking! Not me: I really really wanted to, but I am a complete egg-phobic person, so it really says something that I was in such close proximity and even thinking about drinking this nectar. But one year I brought my father, and all I remember is him just standing by that bowl downing cup after cup. He wasn’t even social, which is unusual for him. I may be embellishing this a bit, but that’s my memory, and I’m happy to have it. Cheers!

The punch (eggnog) bowl of my memory, although it could be wrong.  A Christmas memory prompted by a punch bowl from Oliver Wendell Holmes: “This ancient silver bowl of mine—it tells of good old times, of joyous days, and jolly nights, and merry Christmas chimes.”

 

10 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in History, Salem

November 10, 2025

My Shaker Family

By daseger

I am very excited about The Testament of Ann Lee, the new film about the Shaker founder, because its sounds like quite the experience and I am descended from a Shaker family. I know that sounds like an odd thing to say, because one of the most conspicuous characteristics of the Shakers is their celibacy, but my great great great grandfather James Valentine Calver sold off all his possessions and left his (rather large, I’ve seen it) home in Diss, England and traveled to America with his wife Susan and nine children, Ellen, Maria, Henry, James Jr., Thomas, William, twins Mariah and Jane, and Amelia, to take up residence near the Shaker community in New Lebanon, New York (generally called Mount Lebanon) in 1849. Five of the children were indentured to the Shakers, including my great great grandfather Henry:

SA 881.2         Henry Calver, age 5, indentured by his father James V. Calver to Frederick W. Evans of the New Lebanon Shakers; Henry is to be educated, and to be taught farming or some other suitable occupation; witnessed by George M. Wickersham and Moses Clement, August 28, 1850 (Winterthur Library).

At the end of their indentured terms, most of the Calver children left Mount Lebanon, some immediately, others later. James Sr. and Susan never lived with the Shakers, but nearby. Maria, Mariah (later known as Mary) and Jane (Jenny) all left pretty quickly and married. The boys left in phases, but all eventually wound up in Washington, DC with professional occupations. My great great grandfather became a lawyer (as did his son and grandson), Thomas became a physician and Treasury Department official, and the last to leave, James and William, became a dentist and inventor, respectively, in their forties.  James Valentine Calver, Jr. was a complex man: he seems to have thrived at Mount Lebanon and I wish I had more insight into his decision to leave. He was a teacher, a deacon, an assistant elder and craftsman, and left a material legacy: about a decade ago a wash stand made (and signed, which is unusual) by him fetched a notably high price at auction and the Shaker Museum has a box of toothpick holders (a more sustainable version of today’s interdentals) which were sold in the Shaker shop. He also had a patent for “toothache pellets” and a successful practice in Washington, but apparently failing health and a “nervous condition” drove him to suicide while in winter residence in Florida in 1901.

Postcard of “Group of Shakers in Costume” at Mount Lebanon, n.d. (before 1871), including James Calver (tall man upper left), Winterthur Digital Collections; Box of tooth-pick holders, Shaker Museum Collections.

The suicide of James in the world seems shocking; the earlier drowning of his sister Ellen while among her Shaker community even more so. Two years before James and William left Mount Lebanon, their sister Ellen committed suicide by drowning herself in the community’s pond. In the summer of 1869, this act was covered with sensational headlines on both sides of the Atlantic, primarily because a local Justice of the Peace, rather than the County Coroner, was called in to rule on the cause of death. Ellen was buried but questions lingered, and so in late August there was an exhumation and a Coroner’s inquisition, which in the end confirmed suicide but compelled the Shakers to be quite assertively defensive. Ellen was found to be clinically “pure” but also insane, and several newspapers (particularly those in Great Britian!) opined that all members of spiritualist sects were mad. I was particularly struck by the words of a London Daily Telegraph story, or should I say editorial: we can quite comprehend how the free, open, frank, social spirit of the States should strongly revolt against a system of silence, abstinence, and stern self-suppression, which not merely takes away the faculty of sound and active citizenship, but tempts the individual nature to seek refuge from a joyless existence in the desperate resources of madness.

The reference to “sound and active citizenship” in the Daily Telegraph piece really references with me as I cannot imagine a more sound and active citizen than the Calver family member who remained with the Shakers at Mount Lebanon throughout her life, clearly flourishing in their company: Amelia Calver. She was a devoted teacher and a published author. She kept bees at Mount Lebanon, wrote poetry and songs for her fellow Shakers, and traveled to Washington to visit her brothers. (I believe her mother was living in Washington as well, after the death of her father in the 1860s). Sister Amelia always came back to the Shaker community, throughout her entire life, and seems also to have cultivated both spiritual and “mind culture” there, to use one of her own phrases. I think she found joy there too. For a disciplined woman, she seems very free, at least in comparison to my largely unformed impression of a Shaker. Her book Every-Day Biography, published by a New York City publisher in 1889, was just that: a collection of brief biographies arranged for every day of the year. According to her preface, she was inspired to write it by the infinite variety of sea pebbles she found while walking along the seashore, and when she returned to her “mountain home” it took shape and flight. All sorts of biographies are inside, including those of many women from the past and her own time, illustrating the Shaker emphasis on gender equality. Sister Amelia seems like the “last Shaker” to me: when she came to Mount Lebanon as a small child in 1850 it was flourishing, with hundreds of menbers; when she died in 1929 it was in obvious decline. I think she thrived in her chosen world but would have been capable of transition if need be.

One of Sister Amelia’s teaching certificates from Columbia County and a stereoview of her classroom (she is at upper right), Shaker Museum Collections; the “Shaker Retiring Room” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art features Amelia’s desk, on the left; portrait photograph taken in Washington, DC, 1890-1910, Every-Day Biography (1889), and her autograph, Shaker Museum Collections.

8 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in History, Women's History

September 29, 2025

Schoolhouse to Outhouse

By daseger

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).

8 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in History, Houses

September 8, 2025

Houses are History

By daseger

Last week I was thinking about all the things that annoy or concern me about Salem now, and the list seemed endless, which depressed me, and then I suddenly thought, why don’t I focus on the things that I love about Salem so I won’t be so depressed? This seemed like a good idea, and an easy realignment. Why did I move to Salem? Architecture. What do I love about Salem? Architecture. So I’m going to go back to the foundations of my own Salem story and getting back to architecture with an occasional series here and on social media (#salemhistoryhouses) looking at individual houses in the present and past as a means of telling more Salem stories. Just one house can open a wide window into the city’s history, American history, even world history, as Salem has always had a global orientation. This is not a novel observation, but somehow as I pursued a range of Salem topics here and in our forthcoming book Salem’s Centuries I lost sight of one of the most basic expressions of cultural achievement: houses. Besides the inspiration of merely pursuing my own happiness, I am also motivated by the efforts of two people who I’ve written about a lot here and also in Salem’s Centuries: Frank Cousins and Mary Harrod Northend. These two contemporaries dedicated a good part of their lives to highlighting Salem architecture in print and image. Both wrote books and magazine articles and established photographic publishing companies which distributed images of Salem houses nationwide. They were both particularly keen to emphasize that all not was lost with the Great Salem Fire of 1914, and that much of Salem’s architectural heritage remained; a decade later both were intent on celebrating that heritage during Salem’s Tercentenary in 1926. Cousins died the year before; Northend in that very year. I’ll feature a lot of their work in my series, as preserved and digitized by the Phillips Library (via Digital Commonwealth), the Winterthur Library, and Historic New England, as well as the large collection of images available at the Salem State University Archives and Special Collections. So there you are, or there I am: one of the things that annoys me about Salem is its lack of a professional historical museum, but all these institutions, and more, are in fact collecting, preserving, and sharing Salem history.

My first social media post is a great example of how just one house can lead you in all sorts of directions. The Eden-Browne has was built in 1762 by Captain Thomas Eden as a warehouse, and then converted into a (very elegant) residence by Benjamin Cox in 1834. Captain Eden was a trader in the codfish rectangular trade between Salem, southern Europe, and the West Indies, and the very first member of the Salem Marine Society: his grandaughter, the artist Sarah Eden Smith, lived and died in the house. Her other grandfather, Jesse Smith, was an officer in General Washington’s First Horse Guards, and she herself was a professional artist and instructor who spent several years at the Hampton Institute (now University) teaching Native American students. Miss Smith, “the last of her family,” was also the author of a lovely little pamphlet on the history of the Second Church of Salem, visible below in the top photograph, which obviously dates from before it was demolished by fire in 1903. So that’s a lot of history tied to just one Salem house!

A house that both Cousins and Northend adored (both really seem to have preferred Salem’s 18th-century houses) is the Dean-Sprague-Stearns House on the corner of Essex and Flint Streets. It was built in 1706 and acquired a portico by Samuel McIntire a century later. It has a connection to Salem’s most notable Revolutionary event, Leslie’s Retreat, through the residence of distiller Joseph Sprague, a major participant in that resistance, and it was operated as an inn named the East India House in the middle decades of the twentieth century. I love the description of this house in Samuel Chamberlain’s Open House in New England: “the EAST INDIA HOUSE  contains a wig room, two powder rooms and a Tory hide-out in one of the chimneys. A quadrille was given here for General Lafayette in 1824.” TORY HIDE-OUT.

Top photograph from the Frank Cousins Collection of Glass Plate Negatives at the Phillips Library, via Digital Commonwealth.

Talk about going back to Salem houses: One Forrester Street was one of the first house reports I researched and wrote for Historic Salem, Inc., way back in the 1990s! I was in graduate school, and this was my way of “learning” Salem. These are another great resource (and mine are far from the best!), as members of the Salem Historical Society digitized them several years ago. These house histories, in addition to the Massachusetts Historical Commission’s MACRIS database, represent accessible information about hundreds of Salem houses. I remember being very excited about researching One Forrester as it’s such a great house, with a distinctive profile right on Salem Common. Though built by a tanner named John Ives, the house was kept in the Webb family for quite some time, I think, almost two centuries. In the northwest corner of the house is a “cent shop” straight out of the House of the Seven Gables; it might even have been Hawthorne’s inspiration.

Stereoview (top) from the 1860s, and the  Nelson Dionne Salem History Collection at Salem State University.

There were many Webbs in Salem and it is quite a challenge to keep them straight! Sea captains in the 18th century, entrepreneurs in the nineteenth. Another Webb house is one of my favorite brick-sided houses in Salem, adjacent to what was long a Webb apothecary shop on Essex Street. These buildings are 52 (house) and 54 (shop) Essex Street, and they represent what were probably hundreds of attached or adjacent residences and shops which once existed in Salem.

Stereoview from the Dionne Salem History Collection, Salem State University Archives and Special Collections.

I’ve decided that I’m not going to feature lost houses in my little series, as I am engaged in the pursuit of happiness. But I’m definitely going to feature houses that were moved, because there are so many, and also because I love these examples of nineteenth-century (and a bit of twentieth-century) sustainability. One house that was moved from Salem’s main street, Essex, to a nearby side street is Five Curtis Street, which is featured prominently in one of my favorite architecture books, John Mead Howells’ Lost Examples of Colonial Architecture: Buildings That Have Disappeared of Been so Altered as to be Denatured: Public Buildings,Semi-Public Churches, Cottages, Country Houses, Town Houses, Interiors, Details (1931). It is indeed one of my favorite books, but I also realize that Howells makes a lot of mistakes, so I always check him. He indicates that the house was moved in 1895, which does check out, and refers to the house as the Joseph J. Knapp House. More recent researchers refer to the house as the the John White House, and I think this is correct: White, a mariner, built the house around 1802 and sold it to Knapp, another mariner (a loose term which generally means merchant and maybe captain but more likely owner of shares in a ship at that time) six years later. The house remained in the Knapp family until 1848, which means that this house has a connection to the most notorious murder in nineteenth- century Salem. Joseph J. Knapp’s two sons, John Francis (Frank) and Joseph Jenkins Jr., hired Richard Crowninshield to murder their wealthy uncle Captain Joseph White in 1830 and all three met their deaths before the end of that year. Mr. Knapp Sr. had already decamped for Wenham before these events, and he remained there until his death in 1847.

Frank Cousins photograph of the Knapp House in its original location on Essex Street (on the corner of Orange), John Mead Howells, Lost Examples of Colonial Architecture (1931). 

 

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in History, Houses, Salem

July 21, 2025

Happy Birthday Hawthorne Hotel

By daseger

This week marks the 100th anniversary of the opening of the Hawthorne Hotel, which has been at the center of so much of Salem’s social and civic life for a century. One thinks of a hotel as a place for visitors, and I suppose that has been the Hawthorne’s primary function, but its hospitality has long been extended to Salem residents as well through its many public spaces and busy calendar. I really can’t think of any other space/place in Salem where residents and tourists intersect so often and so naturally, except for perhaps the adjoining Salem Common. I was thinking about my own personal connection to the Hawthorne and I came up with an impressive list: in addition to attending many events there (including weddings, political debates, annual meetings, lectures, department retreats), I met my husband there! And more recently, I attended a memorable meeting over which then Attorney General (now Governor) Maura Healey presided, with then Mayor (now Lieutenant Governor) Kim Driscoll seated on her left, in which the fateful location of Salem’s archives was discussed. I could go on and on: I’m sure every Salem resident has their own Hawthorne Hotel list. The connection between Salem people and the Hawthorne has been strong from the beginning, as the Hotel was a Chamber of Commerce initiative with subscribed funding by more than 1000 residents, who turned out in force for its opening on July 23, 1925. For the 100th anniversary on this coming Wednesday, the Hotel is asking for public participation yet again: to recreate this first photo for 2025. I’m so happy about this idea, a rare example of Salem’s history actually being made public.

First photograph: Henry Theriault Collection, Salem State University Archives and Special Collections, Salem, Massachusetts; 2nd and 3rd, Nelson Dionne Salem History Collection, SSU Archives and Special Collections. SSU Archives and Special Collections maintains a Flickr album of Hawthorne Hotel images.

The Hotel got a HUGE response upon its opening. Headlines in all the local papers, including the society rag The North Shore Breeze which praised its Colonial decor and its multitudes of bathrooms and public spaces. The Breeze had a very elite “Gold Coast” perspective, so Salem only pops up in advertising for its many shops generally, but in the late July 1925 issue there was even a poem (or “picture-dream”) inspired by the Hawthorne!  A few years later, Architectural Forum published a portfolio on the hotel, formally credited to the architectural firm of “Smith & Walker and H.L. Stevens and Co., Associates” but widely acknowledged to be the work of Philip Horton Smith, who was putting his Colonial Revival stamp all over Salem in the 1920s. Of course the Salem Marine Society “club cabin” installed on the hotel’s top floor received rave reviews everywhere. The historical context is important for both the creation and reception of the new hotel: this was a decade after the Great Salem Fire, and the year before Salem’s much-anticipated tercentenary: the new hotel seemed to signal the message we’re back and we want you to come celebrate with us.

July 21-24, 1925 headlines in the Boston Glove and Lynn Daily Item; Flag-raising photo from the Hawthorne Hotel Collection at the SSU Archives and Special Collections & poem from North Shore Breeze, July 1925; Architectural Forum, December 1929.

In terms of marketing, the Hawthorne emphasized COLONIAL above all until the late twentieth century, but it’s interesting to survey other advertising adjectives. There was definitely an early emphasis on fire safety, given the experience and impact of the Fire. To be fireproof, a structure had to be modern, so the Hawthorne was deemed modern and colonial at the same time: one advertisement labeled it “the most modern hotel between Boston and Portland.” Even in its opening decade, the Hotel was appealing to motorists more so than train passengers, and it emphasized its “ample parking.” It was comfortable, convenient, and a the “centre of historic interest and famous traditions.” While there was a general colonial aura to its exteriors and interiors for decades after its opening, the Hawthorne clearly associated that word with Salem’s golden era of overseas trade, and it emphasized that connection in multiple ways, from the names of its public spaces (the “Main Brace” bar, the “Calico Tea House” restaurant, and the Zanzibar grillroom) to the “historicards” it sold in its lobby, created by Johnny Tremain author Viginia Grilley. I love these old menus—they are almost like reference works!

There is a marked subtlety in references to the Witch Trials in contrast to other Salem institutions, but that changes a bit after Bewitched came to town in 1970, which you can easily understand, as Samantha and Darren Stephens stayed at the Hawthorne, or the Hawthorne Motor Hotel, as it was called at the time. There are periodic name changes: I think the progression is Hotel Hawthorne, the Hawthorne, Hawthorne Motor Inn, Hawthorne Inn, Hawthorne Hotel, but I could be wrong. Like any professional and profitable hostelry, the Hawthorne has to welcome everyone, and so it seems that witches have overtaken mariners over these past few decades. The weddings, annual meetings, and convention continue, however, as does the hotel’s seemingly timeless appeal, enhanced by advantageous associations (particularly the Historic Hotels of America registry), interior updates, clever marketing, and that still-strong public connection. I dipped into one of the hospitality and tourism databases available to me at Salem State and found Hawthorne references to its impressive visitor stats, its haunted character (I’m not going there), its generous pet policy, and its rooftop ship’s cabin. The more things change the more things remain the same, and Salem’s now-venerable hotel seems poised for another busy century.

The Hawthorne from the 1920s through the 1990s: all images from the Hawthorne Hotel Collection at SSU Archives except for the 1930s (Visitor’s Guide to Salem, 1937) and 1950s (Phillips Library); a feature on the Salem Marine Society’s recreated ship’s cabin on the top floor of the Hawthorne in Yankee Magazine, 2015 (photo by Carl Tremblay); the Hotel’s 60th Anniversary celebration in 1985.

Hawthorne Hotel Birthday Block Party on July 23, 5:30-7:30: https://www.hawthornehotel.com/event/hawthorne-hotels-100th-anniversary-celebration/

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June 21, 2025

The Battle of Bunker Hill: it’s Personal

By daseger

A grand reenactment of the Battle of Bunker Hill to be staged at Gloucester’s Stage Fort Park has been in the planning for months to mark its 250th anniversary and I planned to go on this past Saturday until just a few days before. On the actual anniversary, June 17, I started reading some diaries of participants and observers and I soon realized that I wanted continue on with this personal commemoration rather than travel to an offsite reenactment—although I heard it was amazing! As always, I try to find the local angle on big events, and so I have three Bunker Hill Salem stories today. The first is a revisit: a few months back I returned to this post on Lieutenant Benjamin West, the sole Salem casualty at Bunker Hill. I had remembered a reference to a portrait of West, perhaps lodged in the collection of the Essex Institute/Peabody Essex Museum. Could it be found? The answer is YES. I emailed Dr. Ruthie Dibble, the Robert N. Shapiro Curator of American Decorative Art at the Peabody Essex Museum, who solicited the aid of her colleague Dr. Jeff Richmond-Moll, the George Putnam Curator of American Art, and very quickly HE appeared on my screen, in somewhat distressed condition, but still there. It was very poignant to see him.

Artist in the United States, Portrait of Lieutenant Benjamin West, 1774-1775. Pastel on paper. Gift of Mrs. Sarah C. Bacheller, 1922. 116640. Peabody Essex Museum.

Lieutenant West, and all the Salem men who were at (or near) Bunker Hill on that day, did not march in a Salem regiment but rather with other companies. Apparently Salem’s chief military officer Timothy Pickering, who left very late for Lexington and Concord and saw no action, did not respond to the Bunker Hill call at all. But another man living in Salem did, for both professional and personal reasons. Dr. John Warren, the younger brother of General (and Dr.) Joseph Warren, saw and heard the fire in the direction of Charlestown and saddled up in the middle of the night. The younger Dr. Warren had moved up from Boston to study with the eminent Salem physician Dr. Edward Holyoke several years before, eventually establishing his own practice, by all accounts popular but not especially renumerative. His brother set an example for him in both his profession and patriotism, and the younger Warren volunteered for military medical service right after the Boston Tea Party. On his ride south on the night of the 17th, Warren stopped in Medford, where he “received the melancholy and distressing tidings that my brother was missing.” He continued to Cambridge, where he heard differing accounts of his brother’s fate.“This perplexed me almost to distraction,” he confessed, [amd so] “I went on inquiring, with a solicitude which was such a mixture of hope and fear as none but one who has felt it can form any conception of. In this manner I passed several days, every day’s information diminishing the probability of his safety.” And so a brother learns of a martyrdom, gradually. The surviving Dr. Warren left his Salem practice immediately and carried on the life and work of an army surgeon until 1777, after which he returned to Boston, married, and eventually resumed his civilian practice. Dr. John Warren went on to become was one of the founders and first professors at Harvard Medical School, and a President of the Massachusetts Medical Society. In the year of his marriage (which produced 17 children!) he adopted his brother’s four children, who had become a patriotic cause unto themselves after their father’s heroic death, with even Benedict Arnold contributing funds to their care and upkeep. Sometimes the world of Revolutionary movers and shakers seems very small and personal indeed. (Consider that Dr. Joseph Warren saved John Quincy Adams’ finger from amputation—the latter could never attend a Bunker Hill “celebration” afterwards—and that his remains were finally identified by the presence of a tooth fashioned for him by Paul Revere).

Portrait of Joseph Warren by John Singleton Copley, 1765, and John Trumball’s The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill June 17, 1775, Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Portrait of John Warren by Rembrandt Peale, Harvard Art Museums. Dr. John Warren was also Grand Master of all the Lodges of Freemasons in Massachusetts, and appropriately his medical trunk is in the collection of the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library. John Warren’s journal entries are in a volume edited by his son, John Collins Warren (also a prominent physician) entitled Genealogy of Warren : with some historical sketches (1854).

The hero surviver of Bunker Hill was Colonel William Prescott: he’s right there in the Trumball painting above, in the midst of the Patriot contingent behind the fallen Warren. It happens that Prescott’s grandson is Salem’s most esteemed historian (well maybe excepting one or two of my colleagues at Salem State), William Hickling Prescott. The bronze statue of Colonel Prescott was actually created by Salem-born sculptor William Wetmore Story with the aid of a photograph of his grandson. When William H. Prescott married Susan Amory in 1820, he was gifted by her uncle a sword owned by his father Captain John Linzee, a British naval commander fighting on the opposite side on June 17, 1775!  (Linzee does not seem to have been as heroic, or perhaps as successful, as Prescott according to this account). This sword was donated by Prescott to the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Linzee sword was later donated by his wife to the same institution so that they might not be separated. And thus they exist together at the Society, a personal and public memento of conflict, cohabitation, and commemoration.

Plaque with Crossed Swords, Massachusetts Historical Society. Silver-hilted small-sword belonging to Col. William Prescott, created by Jacob Hurd, circa 1730-1750 and small-sword for an officer of the Royal Navy, belonging to Capt. John Linzee, created by unidentified maker, circa 1780s. More description here.

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June 16, 2025

Patriot Properties

By daseger

An eventful weekend—one of several coming up this summer! I’m going to focus on one event out of several I participated in—a house tour of Patriots’ homes in Marblehead—simply because it yielded the best pictures. Having done this a couple of times myself, I am always grateful to homeowners who open up their houses to the public. As I am focusing on Marblehead, right next door to Salem, today, I have to admit that I’m feeling a bit envious of our neighbor for three essential reasons these days. First of all, it seems to have a very engaged electorate which has much more power than we do in Salem. I had an appointment there last week which happened to fall on local election day, and saw tons of people and signs out and about. Marblehead residents elect their board and commission members and city clerk, while in Salem we only elect a Mayor and city councillors, and the former appoints all the commissioners with the rubber stamp of the latter. There are often uncontested elections in Salem and the voter turnout is very low: 28% in the last mayoral election I believe. Marblehead is a town so they have town meetings! I feel quite disenfranchised by comparison. The second reason I envy Marblehead is its Revolutionary fort, Fort Sewall, which is perfectly preserved and well-maintained in contrast to Fort Pickering, Salem’s major historic fort, which has been left to rot and ruin by the City of Salem. This is, I believe, another example of civic engagement or the lack thereof. The third reason I envy Marblehead, pretty much every single day, is that it has a professional historical society, unlike Salem. The Marblehead Museum was established as the Marblehead Historical Society in 1898, and it continues its mission “to preserve, protect, and promote Marblehead’s past as a means of enriching the present” today. Salem has no such institution; it failed to develop one as the Essex Institute served that role for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, before its assimilation into the Peabody Essex Museum. The Marblehead Museum combines its stewardship roles (of both Marblehead’s historic record and its three properties) in conjuction with a very active calendar of interpretive events, including this weekend’s house tour, which couldn’t have been more timely.

The tour of five houses was self-guided, and so the first house for myself and my friend Liz was the Robert Hooper House on Washington Street, a 1769 reconstruction of an earlier home which I always thought was a Federal house. It has recently been restored so we were both eager to get in, and once inside you could immediately tell it was pre-Revolutionary even with its vibrant decoration. The carriage house was open too, and the views down to its terraced garden were spectacular, even on a rainy day. At first, I was a bit confused as to why this house was on a tour of homes associated with Patriots as I had my Marblehead Robert Hoopers mixed up: the owner of this house was NOT the famouse Loyalist Robert “King” Hooper, whose house is located just across the way, but rather another Robert Hooper. It was also confusing to read that George Washington visited this house during his 1789 visit to Marblehead: I don’t think this is the case as he is recorded as having been greeted at the Lee Mansion just down the street. But Robert “NO KING” Hooper’s son, also named Robert Hooper, was married to a daughter of Marblehead’s most illustrious Revolutionary general, John Glover, and as they inherited the house after his father’s death in 1814 that’s quite enough of a patriot connection for me.

Then we walked over to Franklin Street and the Devereux House, a very classical Georgian house built in 1764 by Marblehead merchant Joseph Homan. Persons enslaved by him likely lived here before Homan sold the property to Eldridge Gerry of “Gerrymandering” fame. Gerry gifted the house to his sister Elizabeth, the wife of Selectman Burrill Devereux who welcomed President Washington to town in 1789. A lovely house, well-maintained over the years and now the home of another Patriot, with whom we discussed the Army’s (rather than the President’s) big birthday.

The most famous Marblehead Patriot (who was born in Salem) is undoubtedly General John Glover, who ferried General Washington and his troops across the Delaware on Christmas night 1776 in advance of their big victory at Trenton. There is a Glover Square named after him, and in the midst of this square is the house most closely associated with him. Like the Devereux House, it’s on the National Register, and features yet another impressive Georgian entrance hall.

On our way back to our final stop, the Jeremiah Lee Mansion, we realized we had missed a house, which is of course a capital crime on any house tour. So we made a little detour to see the Martin-Hulen-Lemaster House on Washington Street. Its generous owner allowed us to see the entire 1755 house, and you could really appreciate the space created by its gambrel roof on the third floor. Marblehead ship captain Elias Hulen, Jr., whose father served on the Seacoast Guards and as a privateer during the Revolution, owned and occupied this house after its orginal owners departed for Maine in the 1770s.

We finished up the tour at the 1768 Jeremiah Lee Mansion, a museum property which I’ve toured before and posted about here. It’s an amazing edifice, with interiors impressive in both detail and scale. Only the first floor was open for the tour so I took some photos of decorative details that I didn’t think I captured in my earlier post, and looked out the tall windows at the archeaological and structural evidence of the Marblehead Museum’s ambitious ongoing project, a $1.4 million renovation of Lee’s Brick Kitchen & Slave Quarters next door. When completed, this project will expand the Museum’s archival, office, and exhibition space in addition to revealing and interpreting spaces of enslavement and labor, a logical extension of the Museum’s continuous efforts to identify and document the lives of African American and Indigenous peoples in Marblehead’s history.

A few photos of the Jeremiah Lee Mansion interiors and the Brick Kitchen/Slave Quarters project behind and adjacent to the Mansion. The only king I was interested in this past weekend was the King of Prussia, as I was just fascinated by this plate! 

One more object of Marblehead envy popped up while I was looking at the Marblehead Museum’s website: the town retains reference to the original Pawtucket Tribe of our region in its land acknowledgement statement, while Salem’s excludes any reference to these native peoples in favor of the Massachusetts Tribe. I wish we could acknowledge the Pawtucket.

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April 28, 2025

Salem Silk Swatches

By daseger

Periodically I dip into the papers of Salem supercargo Benjamin Shreve (1780-1839), which offer interesting and insider perspectives on Salem’s early 19th century global trade. Fortunately these sources have been digitized by the Phillips Library, but even before they were available to the general public I had access through an Adam Matthew source collection, to which the Salem State Library has subscribed for quite some time. Benjamin Shreve is interesting, as he is not from one of those old Salem families (nor is he attached to the Shreves of Crump and Low): in the Boston Weekly Magazine for July of 1804, he is described as a “merchant of Alexandria” in the notice of his marriage to Miss Mary Goodhue of Salem, but he quickly made his mark in his wife’s native city. Shreve opens a window into a world of trading logistics and trends through his meticulous commercial correspondence: he’s a numbers guy for sure but also a diplomat of sorts, negotiating the best price and quality for his Salem purchasers back home from his suppliers in South America, East Asia, and Europe. Wherever he goes, he has to fulfill large orders but also buy smaller items for all the wives of his employers back home, as well as for his own. He writes everything down, sometimes in duplicate or triplicate. If I dig into his papers for long my head will start to swirl, so I have to be pretty focused, and this time I was focused on silk. I’m in the exciting stage of research on my next book, which is on saffron in the late medieval and early modern eras, and there are some interesting parallels between it and silk, so that’s where I was coming from, but how I ended up in 19th-century Salem I do not know; I guess it’s just that persistent Salem tug on my time! Anyway, I was looking through a bound book of Shreve’s miscellaneous memoranda from 1809-30 when I came across these cool silk samples in the midst of much drier fare: I was caught!

Benjamin Shreve Papers (MH 20), Trade Memoranda, 1809-1830, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum.

These are samples of Italian silks sent to Shreve by a friend in letter packets, with advice on how and where to buy silk in Italy. It’s 1819; Shreve has certainly been buying silk in China for a while, but he was always looking to expand his sources. I think this is so interesting because I have long thought that Salem’s trade with Europe as compared to Asia has been under-represented in the scholarship. Italy and France were great suppliers of silk so why not buy there if the price was right? And Shreve himself is also under-represented in the scholarship! Why isn’t there a book on him, using all of his amazing accessible papers? He is best represented in China Trade expert Carl Crossman’s book, The China Trade: Export Paintings, Furniture, Silver and Other Objects, 1785-1865, which was published in 1972 and reprinted several times afterwords. Crossman knew the collections of the Peabody (now Peabody Essex) Museum and its library very well and drew on them heavily—I learn a ton of stuff whenever I pick up his book. And as I was just reading about Shreve there, I found two other “Salem silk swatches” from the Shreve papers included by Crossman as illustrations: two sheets of silk samples from the Chinese merchant Eshing given by Pickering Dodge of Salem, owner of the Governor Endicott, to Shreve as a buying guide for Canton, and a letter with some strands of raw silk from Dudley Pickman to Shreve–plus a miniature portrait of our man Shreve on ivory! Crossman digs even deeper into some of the Shreve sources for his last book, The Decorative Arts of the China Trade: Paintings, Furnishings, and Exotic Curiosities (1991). Encouraged by Crossman, I went back to Shreve (for just a bit!) and found one more silk swatch among the Government Endicott papers, a sample of black “Levantine” silk. 

Not for the first time, my title is a bit deceptive: swatch books from the early modern era and after are numerous and generally refer to sample books offered up by producers rather than buyers. The Victoria & Albert Museum has several in its collection, including my favorite, a confiscated traveling salesman’s book of silk samples from Lyon, reproduced in the amazing book Selling Silks. A Merchant’s Sample Book 1763 by textile curator Leslie Ellis Miller. Shreve’s snippets of cloth, embedded in commercial paper, can’t compare to a comprehensive collection such as this, but they certainly offer some visual insights into the global trade of this conspicuous commodity in the early nineteenth century.

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