Category Archives: History

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/

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

April 21, 2025

April 19, 2025

By daseger

So I made it to Lexington, Concord and Arlington for the big 250th commemorations on this past Saturday, although I missed the actual reenactments. I knew I would never get to Lexington at the crack of dawn, but I did have some hopes for Concord. Logistics (parking and road closures) dictated that I couldn’t get close until later, but I did find myself right in the midst of a festive parade! All in all, it was a really fun day, unseasonably warm, with engaged and happy people everywhere I went. I probably could have planned it better: the local news emphasized the size of the expected crowds and the fact that there would be NO parking on the streets of either Concord or Lexington, but I didn’t really listen. I thought I could sneak in on a back road and park whenever I pleased! NO WAY. I’ve never seen such parking enforcement in my life! If Salem really took its Halloween parking prohibitions seriously (which I do not really think it does), Concord and Lexington could offer a lesson or two. Anyway, I found parking so far outside Concord I basically followed the Acton Minutemen’s route into Concord on April 19, 1775, with the markers to prove it! And by the time I got to the North Bridge I was appropriately weary, and right on time for the big parade. The procession had everything and everyone: reenactors of different eras, marines, the Army Corps of Engineers, several fife and drum corps, the University of Massachusetts marching band, the Concord High School marching band, patriots on stilts, bagpipers, boy scouts, members of what seemed like every single Concord civic association, gardeners, “Concord Cousins” from Concords across America, and local militias from the surrounding towns. The crowd was HUGE on both sides of the bridge and the Charles River, and there were lots (but I didn’t think too many) of political signs as well, many in support of the National Park Service whose rangers were clearly working hard on this day.

On to Lexington where I had a friend’s driveway for parking but the closed roads made it difficult to get there! Again, poor planning on my part. Huge crowds here as well, lining up on Massachusetts Avenue for their big parade. Since I had already experienced one perfect parade, I decided to make my way to the Jacob Russell house in Arlington, which saw the bloodiest fighting of April 19, 1775 in which the one Salem participant, Benjamin Peirce, died. The house was open for tours and it was quite poignant to be inside, but for some weird reason all of my interior shots turned out dark and misty (maybe appropriately so). The desperate retreating British troops had war fever by this time of the day, and when Mrs. Russell returned home afterwards she found not only her husband dead but also eleven militiamen laid out in her kitchen, where the floor was “ankle deep” in blood.

A few scenes in Lexington and the Jason Russell house, with a bicentennial painting by Ruth Linnell Berry from the Arlington Historical Society. Mandy Warhol’s graphic images of Lexington (and Concord) Minutemen made perfect banners for the day and for this Patriots Day  (and longer, I hope).

9 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Culture, History

April 14, 2025

Salem is a No-Show at Lexington and Concord

By daseger

We are returning to the Revolution with the big Lexington & Concord 250th commemoration coming up next week! I find that I must revisit a question posed in a post several years ago: why didn’t Timothy Pickering and the Salem militiamen join the fight at Lexington or Concord or during the British retreat back to Boston? Pickering addressed this question many times during his life, and his failure to join the fray does not seem to have slowed him down: he went on to a distinguished career in service during the Revolution and after in a succession of appointed and elected Federal offices. His essential explanation? He thought it would all be over by the time he and his men marched to the front(s). I don’t think this is good enough, sorry, Colonel Pickering!

National Portrait Gallery

Here’s as objective a summary of the events of the day as I could muster: Pickering, who was most definitely the chief beneficiary of town offices previously held be exiled Salem Loyalists, was in his office at the Registry of Deeds when Captain Samuel Epes from Danvers came in with the news of the conflict at Lexington and Concord on the morning of the 19th. Pickering was the Colonel of the Essex County Militia: he ordered Epes to gather his men and march, and Epes did so, mustering EIGHT Danvers companies. The Danvers men played a key role in harassing the British retreat at Menotomy and suffered significant casualties (7 men; more than any other town with the exception of Lexington) in the process, including Salem’s lone participant in the events of the day, Benjamin Peirce. Just to the north of Salem, militia men from four Beverly companies were on the road to Lexington fairly quickly that morning, also engaging the British at Menotomy (now Arlington). Pickering did not summon his soldiers immediately; rather he called for a meeting of Salem’s leading gentlemen in Webb’s tavern—and this would not be his only tavern stop of the day—to deliberate. His accounts of these deliberations are consistent: he did not think the Salem men could get to the action in time so was predisposed to remain on the North Shore. His was a minority view, however, as most of the Salem gentlemen believed that the Town had to demonstrate its willingness to fight. The Derby brothers, Elias and Richard, were particularly vehement on this point. So Pickering reluctantly marched, but not for long! Just past the Bell Tavern in Danvers, he halted for refreshments and recommended that the militia remain there until news of a British withdrawal came. His men were anxious, and so he relented, and they marched to Lynn, where they stopped at Newhall’s Tavern for more “refreshment.” Back on the road, there was a more determined march from Lynn to Medford, where they learned that the British were still in the process of retreating, and close by. On Winter Hill, Pickering actually saw “the (reinforced) British force marching from Cambridge to Charlestown…..and the smoke of musketry” and prepared to engage, but received orders from from Brigadier General William Heath not to, an important detail which Heath later disputed. And so the Salem men guarded a Medford bridge on April 19, and that was that.

Pickering’s tavern stops on April 19, 1775: Fireboard view of Court House Square by George Washington Felt at the Peabody Essex Museum; the Bell Tavern on the far left in “Eagle Corner and Washington Street” by Charles Dole, 1828 and a print from the collection of the Peabody Historical Society; the Newhall Tavern in a photograph and sketch from the collection of the Lynn Museum & Arts Center—thanks to Christopher Locke for sourcing these for me!

There was quite a bit of comment about Pickering’s “tardiness” and “timidity” from his contemporaries, and historians followed suit. The best indication of the former is the “Memorial” that the Town of Salem sent to the General Court of Massachusetts in August, which is included in the biography of Pickering by his youngest son, Octavius. This is such an incredible document that I’m going to include quite a bit of it, as Octavius Pickering did. He thought it was “vindication” for his father; I do not.

  • “The town of Salem humbly showeth, that, many calumnies and misrepresentations having been made and industriously propagated concerning the conduct of the town upon and since the 19th of April last, in consequence of which its character has been greatly injured and some of its inhabitants insulted and abused, the town thinks it a point of duty to take effectual steps to vindicate its innocence, and procure a redress of those grievances, which are too many and too heavy any longer silently to be endured, and therefore beg leave to give the following detail of facts : —
  • “On the 19th of April, very soon after authentic intelligence arrived of the barbarous deeds of the King’s troops at Lexington, the inhabitants mustered in arms, and near three hundred marched off, and directed their course according to the intelligence they were continually receiving on the road of the situation of the troops ; but, though they marched with as much despatch as was possible, consistent with their being fit for action after so long a march as they must necessarily make, yet they arrived in sight of the troops not till the last of them were marching up Bunker’s Hill. Why the inhabitants of Salem should be so highly censured for their conduct on this occasion, the town cannot conceive. Thousands of men, nearer, much nearer, the scene of action, either stayed at home or arrived no sooner than the Salem militia. From Milton and its environs, in particular, the militia got as far as Cambridge only, at the same time that the Salem militia arrived at Charlestown; yet, by a strange and unaccountable partiality, the inhabitants of Salem only are reproached; and the multitudes near at hand, who never stirred an inch, or, though they lived but at half the distance, arrived as late as the Salem militia, are entirely excused. In short, it is most absurdly declared by many, that, if the Salem militia had not been negligent and pusillanimous, the King’s troops must have been entirely cut off; that is, fewer than three hundred men could have done infinitely more in one or two hours, than the whole body of militia assembled had been able to perform that day.” [The Memorial then addresses another charge upon Salem: that British ships were being provisioned by the town!!! Must look into this!]
  • “This, may it please the Honorable Court is a brief, thorough faithful, narrative of facts; hence it may be judged how injuriously the town of Salem has been treated. The town cannot forbear to express its astonishment. What could occasion the reproach so liberally thrown upon us? What motives could be imagined sufficient to tempt us to neglect the duty we owe to ourselves, our posterity, and our country ? What proofs have we given of our insensibility, that we should neither dread the curses of slavery, nor feel the blessings of liberty? What could we have done more than we have done, to secure the latter to ourselves and all our dearest connections ? When the balance of public affairs was most doubtful, — when neither money nor the means of payment were provided, and the sentiments of the Continent were unknown, — then Salem furnished every needful supply in its power, as soon as the army’s wants were known ; how readily, and to how great amount, the Committee of Supplies and the Treasurer can inform. We have continued these supplies, and the town is drained. What more remains for us to do?”

The Seat of War in New England, by an American Volunteer, 1775; Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon via ARGO: American Revolutionary Geographies Online [this is a great site–check it out!]

Timothy Pickering was the town’s secretary (one of many positions he held in Salem) so made a “true copy” of the memorandum after the town meeting; I don’t know if it was his initiative. But the tone of this composition is very defensive. Salem was a major Massachusetts town which had recently been the colonial capital and official port of entry; it was expected to lead and it had not lead; it’s not just about Pickering. As for the man himself, I think his actions demonstrate how difficult the position many Patriots were in and just how HUGE the conflict at Lexington, Concord, and Arlington was. Pickering was still, despite the all the antagonistic actions of General Gage in Salem the year before, a British citizen yearning for the rights enjoyed by his fellow Britons across the Atlantic. But Lexington & Concord and then Bunker Hill, altered that stance, that identity, irrevocably. I think some of his logistical concerns were valid at first, but I can’t explain all those tavern stops! There was another issue: there were British ships off Salem and Marblehead, raising defensive concerns, which (I think) kept the Marblehead men from marching. I don’t like to judge people in the past, but I do like to lay out as many of the conditions they faced as possible. When I look at Timothy Pickering in as much context as I can conjure up, he looks like someone who could easily have been a Loyalist, but he was not. He was quite the opposite: a leader of the revolutionary resistance in his town and region. But he was also just a man, responding to events as they occurred on one Spring day.

Appendix #1 Without a military presence at Lexington and Concord, I think the most important contribution of Salem to this epic event was likely printer-publisher Ezekiel Russell’s broadside Bloody Butchery by the British Troops, or, The Runaway Fight of the Regulars. Being the Particulars of the Victorious Battle fought at and near Concord … between Two Thousand Regular Troops, belonging to His Britannick Majesty, and a few Hundred Provincial Troops, a major propaganda coup. The Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum will be presenting an exhibition on Russell for the Salem’s quadricentennial next year, which is great news!

Appendix #2 I am giving my first Revolutionary talk next week for Historic New England’s Phillips House: excited and a little nervous! Pickering will be referenced, but not in relation to Lexington and Concord: he is very representative of an increasing Whig resistance to the royal government that created a deep division in Salem in the decade before the Revolution, what I am calling a “pre-revolutionary revolution.” On the 29th, my colleague Tad Baker will be giving a talk on some of the Salem Witch Trial references which surfaced in Revolutionary rhetoric—a very interesting topic! You can find more information and register here: https://www.historicnewengland.org/visit/events/.

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February 24, 2025

Leslie’s Retreat 250

By daseger

More local Revolutionary history! I know I have not been straying far from this focus lately, but this past weekend (well, really February 26) marked the 250th anniversary of Leslie’s Retreat here in Salem with several colorful events which definitely deserve a post. And fair warning, there will be more 1775 over the next few months: I’m giving a talk on Salem’s “pre-Revolutionary Revolution” for Historic New England in April and then there will be the big commemoration of Bunker Hill and then……….we’ll see. I promise to sneak some other topics in here, but for Massachusetts in the American Revolution, it’s really all about 1775, so there’s a lot going on. Saturday’s commemoration kicked off with a presentation at St. Peter’s Church which echoed the sequence of events in 1775 when the Sabbath was disturbed by the arrival of British soldiers in Salem in search of contraband cannon. I arrived a bit late for this event, as it was advertised as featuring “stakeholders” and I knew that meant politicians: that is the term that our previous mayor and present Lieutenant Governor, Kim Driscoll, used all the time during her tenure to distinguish VIPs from mere residents. It’s still used all the time in Salem, and I always bristle when I hear it, so my little rebellion was to stomp over to St. Peter’s late. By the time I arrived, there was a full church listening intently to the last of the stakeholders, our present Mayor Dominick Pangallo. Then we heard from Lt. Colonel Leslie himself, sang a hymn and listened to a timely sermon, and watched as the news of the marching soldiers (some of whom were apparently right next door) interrupted the everyday life a few colonial Salemites. And then we were off to the North Bridge!

The “congregation” walked over to the site, now pretty unrecognizable or unimaginable if you know the historic terrain, where the parley which brought about, and constituted, Leslie’s Retreat, happened nearly 250 years ago. The major difference between this special commemoration and those of previous years was the presence of many more reenacting regiments, so the crowd and the soldiers were separated on two lanes of the bridge, with traffic blocked off (which was quite something, as route 114 is a major artery). In past years civilians and soldiers were mixed in together, and there was less of each. I couldn’t really see or hear the negotiations between Lt. Col. Leslie and the Salem men, but everything that transpired seemed to happen much quicker than was the case in 1775. Leslie retreated very quickly, followed by a few regiments of Colonials which had formed on the other side of the river. All I could really capture was the marching, to and from. A lot of players—I’m sure this took a lot of coordination. After witnessing this, I cannot imagine the complexities of the “curation” of the Battle of Bunker Hill in June.

There were trolley tours and a great exhibit at the Salem Armory Visitor’s Center, but I was focused on a fashionable event in the afternoon: “Fashion in the Season of Revolution: a Panel Discussion and Reenactor Promenade” at the Peabody Essex Museum. This was so interesting: I’m still kind of thinking about it. There were scholarly talks about Abigail Adams’ quilted petticoat and Eldridge Gerry’s sister’s wedding ensemble and the revolutionary preference for homespun as it related to shoes, and then there were questions for an ensemble of reenactors in the audience and on stage. Their answers were really thoughtful and fascinating, including those of a 14-year-old girl who had come up to Salem with her regiment for the day (I’m only 14 so I can’t carry a musket but I have a bugle. Who knew that musicians‘ uniforms had variant stripes?) I have to tell you that most academic historians have a bit of a snobby attitude towards reenectors: I would include myself in this company until the last few years. It’s the dominance of archival research in our profession, and an assumed exclusive association with military history, I think. Speaking for myself, I had always associated reenacting and “pageantry” with the Victorian romanticization of the pre-modern past, something I’ve always had to counter throughout my teaching career. But my perspective on this has changed over the years, especially as I’ve met local history enthusiasts in this region. I still really can’t handle a Renaissance Fair, but it’s clear to me that for many reenactors, who engage in the pursuit for decades, both their “kit” and their engagement in commemoration are ways to study and venerate the past at the same time. I clearly am craving a material connection to the past as well, as all I really want to do on most days is drive around and look at seventeenth-century houses: and I envy their comaraderie!

After all that, it was off to the Revolution Ball next door at Hamilton Hall. It took me a while to get dressed, as I had my own little reenactor “Caraco” jacket which laces up the front and a really nice dark red silk “petticoat” (skirt) which also took me a while to figure out. The ball was really magical: the Hall looked gorgeous, I hope you can get some sense of it in the photographs below. It was period dress/black tie, and it seemed liked it was about half and half. Dancing with a caller, cocktails, I even ate, which I never do at parties for some reason. There were quite a few people there that had participated in the events of the day, and who were part of other commemoration activities, so there quite a bit of festive camaraderie, so much so that I can justify using that word twice in one post.

N.B. Saturday was a fun celebration, but I woke up on Sunday to a flag hanging upside down at Yosemite National Park (where a former student works, still, I think), a distress signal from its rangers/stewards. So I have to add my hope that the revolutionary commemorations of 2025, 2026, and beyond can communicate to the American public the extreme sacrifices that the Revolutionary generation made for real freedom, not just lower consumer prices. Moreover, this long commemoration is itself threatened by this administration’s attack on federal employees in general and those of the National Park Service in particular: Salem Maritime National Historic Site historian Emily Murphy curated and presented the exhibit on Leslie’s Retreat which will be on view all spring, and obviously Minute Man National Historic Park will be center stage for the commemorations of Lexington and Concord in April. A comprehensive list of the Revolution 250 inititatives and events planned by Massachusetts National Historic sites and parks is here: please support their efforts and their personnel.

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February 17, 2025

Leslie’s Retreat: How an Incident became an Event

By daseger

Next weekend here in Salem a whirlwind of events will commemorate the 250th anniversary of Leslie’s Retreat, including reenactments of the Redcoats’ march towards the North Bridge and the negotiations/resistance that followed, a variety of tours, an exhibit, a concert, a play at Old Town Hall, a presentation on revolutionary and reenactment clothing at the Peabody Essex Museum, and a ball at Hamilton Hall! A group of stalwart history enthusiasts and educators organized a Retreat reenactment nearly a decade ago and the event has been growing in popularity every since, but this year is BIG because of the 250th anniversary, and the city has jumped on the bandwagon. I’m grateful to those “First Reenactors” as February 26th (or thereabouts) has become a conspicuous non-witchy event on the Salem calendar, so I feel like commemorating them, but their efforts are part of a long tradition: Salem has long celebrated its brief, shining moment of Revolutionary resistance. I’ve posted quite about what the event called “Leslie’s Retreat” was so this year I thought I’d write in response to a slightly different prompt: how did this “incident at the North Bridge in Salem” became the event we call “Leslie’s Retreat?” I’m also interested in how it became known as “the first armed resistance to British troops” when it clearly wasn’t, but I suspect the answer to that question is because they just kept saying it was so I don’t want to waste too much time on that.

Wonderful etching of Salem’s North Bridge in the 1880s by George Merwanjee White, Phillips Library (the shores looks so close!); various mid-century pictorial maps with the “first” claim.

So before I go into all the factors which made Leslie’s Retreat LESLIE’S RETREAT, here’s a very brief summary of what happened on February 26, 1775. VERY BRIEF. You can search for my other Leslie’s Retreat posts or, if you want all the details and the most probing analysis, go to J.L. Bell’s amazing blog Boston 1775, which imho and that of many others is the absolutely best source for pre-revolutionary Boston and its environs. Bell is giving a talk for the Marblehead Museum on February 27 which I am very much looking forward to as I have managed to miss all his other presentations on Leslie’s Retreat. Until I am enlightened further by him, here is my summary:

“Leslie’s Retreat” represents the unsuccessful attempt of the 64th Regiment of Foot under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Leslie to commandeer cannon in Salem. Said cannon were likely 17 twelve-pounders secured by Colonel David Mason, who had commissioned blacksmith Robert Forster to mount them to carriages. Royal Governor Thomas Gage, who had essentially been kicked out of Salem the previous August as the town was serving as the provincial capital (but who clearly still had his contacts) caught wind of this clandestine cannon and ordered Lt. Col. Leslie and his troops to sail from Fort William in Boston Harbor to Marblehead, and from there march to Salem and “take possession of the rebel cannon in the name of His Majesty.” The operation was planned for a sleepy Sabbath Sunday, but as soon as the Regulars landed in Marblehead word got out, and the alarm was sounded not only in Salem but in other Essex County towns. Leslie marched to what was then called the North Field Bridge, which was a drawbridge firmly fixed in the up position which prevented him from crossing the North River to Forster’s forge and foundry. A crowd formed and negotiations began between a frustrated Leslie, several Salem residents and militiamen, and a local pastor, Thomas Barnard. With darkness (and militiamen throughout Essex County) advancing, a compromise was reached: the bridge was lowered and Leslie and his men were able to cross and inspect, but the cannon were long gone. So they retreated back to Marblehead and Boston. 

[Interuption/disruption: in longer narratives of Leslie’s Retreat, a woman named Sarah Tarrant is generally referenced, as she taunted Leslie and his soldiers from her open window. That’s fine, I’m sure Sarah was very brave, but Colonel Mason’s wife Hannah and her two daughters made 5000 FLANNEL CARTRIDGES for the cannon in the preceding month. So I think Hannah Symmes Mason and her daughters Hannah and Susan deserve some glory too.]

John Muller’s authoritative Treatise on Artillery, which Mason no doubt possessed, contains detailed instructions for making cannon cartridges as well as all types of carriages. 

So here are the major factors and forces which transformed Leslie’s Retreat from mere incident to major event: it was a chronological process, of course!

1820s Patriotism. Here in the Boston area, there was clearly some intensifying patriotism focused on the Revolution in the 1820s, the result of a combination of forces, including the upcoming fiftieth aniversary, the visit of General Lafayette, and above all, the movement to commemorate the Battle of Bunker Hill. I was not surprised to see the first public reference to “Col. Leslie’s Retreat” in this decade, though I bet it was a term in use before then. It seems that the loyal citizens of North Salem took matters into their own hands in 1823, and I really would like to see this elaborate staff with an eagle and a bust of George Washington. The Bunker Hill Monument Association was established that same summer, and Lafayette laid the cornerstone for the monument in 1825. It was not completed until 1843, but at the Whig Bunker Hill Convention of 1840, a grand historical parade around the monument-in-progress featured 1200 marchers from Salem bearing a Leslie’s Retreat banner asserting we were the first to defeat our oppression in 1775—we shall be the last to yield to them in 1840.

The Essex Institute. Founded in 1848 and serving as Salem’s de facto historical society until its assimilation into the Peabody Essex Museum in 1992, the Essex Institute commissioned TWO items which are essential to the history, interpretation, and identification of Leslie’s Retreat, Samuel Morse Endicott’s Account of Leslie’s Retreat at the North Bridge in Salem on Sunday Feby’y 26, 1775 (1856) and Lewis Jesse Bridgman’s watercolor of Repulse of Leslie at the  North Bridge (1901). Endicott’s Account became an instant classic and as it was issued in a very nice edition after its first publication in the Collections of the Essex Institute it became even more valuable with age: a brief survey of book auction catalogs from the early twentieth century indicates it was in every gentleman’s library. And as I have written here many times before: it’s difficult to “imprint” anything or anybody in people’s minds without an image, so the Bridgman painting has been equally valuable. It was reproduced everywhere, including as a hugh wall mural donated to Salem High School by the Daughters of the American Revolution, North Bridge Branch, in 1910.

The Civil War. There are numerous “memory” connections between the Revolution and the Civil War, but I think the most important one in Salem’s history is Governor Andrew’s identification of the North Bridge as one of the key places in Massachusetts to fire off a salute in celebration of the ratification of the thirteenth amendment. The bridge had received a new “Liberty Pole” in 1862, so its identification with liberty was pretty established by that time. There’s no question that the North Bridge was a much more hallowed place than it is now: overpasses just don’t conjure up heritage like bridges.

The Big Anniversaries. The years 1875-1876 were similiar to 1975-1976 and 2025-2026, with the convergence of the 100th, 200th and 250th anniversaries of Leslie’s Retreat and the beginning of the American Revolution. “Triumphal arches” were erected on the North Bridge in 1876 and again in 1926, for Salem’s Tercentenary. There were just so many occasions to mark and remember Leslie’s Retreat, and when there wasn’t an occasion, one was made up! The Leslie’s Retreat monument, now under the bridge rather than on it, was erected in 1887, and a quarter of a century later the “Pageant of Salem” dramatized the narrative (as if it wasn’t dramatic enough). I must say, the 1975 reenactment looks like it was really fun.

The 1926 Salem Tercentenary Leslie’s Retreat Float was sponsored by the DAR, North River Branch. Salem State University Archives and Special Collections; Col. Leslie by Racket Shreve in Salem’s wonderful Bicentennial Illustrated Guide Book.

These big anniversaries were important, but they were only highlights in a long history of commemoration: from at least the 1850s, there was some kind of speech or moment recognizing Leslie’s Retreat every year, all through the 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s and 1920s. After that, it’s a bit more occasional, but you can still find references. The longest period where there are the fewest mentions in the press was from the Bicentennial to 2017, when the “First Reenactors” reengaged with the event and its impact. I wonder (not really) how Salem changed during these thirty years? We are certainly not in the period where, as one of the commenters on a previous post asserted, “every 8th grader in Salem had to write a paper on Leslie’s Retreat” for better or for worse. But thanks to those First Reenactors of 2017 (or 2016??? I can’t seem to remember) we are in a much better place for commemorating 1775 than we would be without their efforts, so hat’s off and huzzah to them!

Charlie Newhall, Jonathan Streff & Jeffrey Barz Snell and a BIG crowd in 2017.

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January 27, 2025

Headline History

By daseger

I went up to the Phillips Library in Rowley to look through some scrapbooks memorializing the Salem Tercentenary of 1926 late last week and found myself enchanted by the presentation and curation of one particular album put together by a certain Frank Reynolds. There were two big scrapbooks actually, and while I was expecting photographs (I guess that would be an album, rather than a scrapbook), there were only newspaper articles pasted in in a meticulous and chronological manner with attached white labels. At first I was disappointed, but then I went with it, and found the juxtaposition of the headlines really interesting. Then I came upon one particular article that really illustrated the concept of “headline history” and then I had my post.

Thus inspired, I divided my Tercentenary headlines into several categories:  1) The Big Row; 2) Getting Ready; 3) Advice to Tourists; 4) Dress Up; 5)) Crowds; 6) Presidential Address.

The Big Row was over the date of the founding of Salem, actually no, it was over what “founding” meant. Everyone knew that Roger Conant came down from Gloucester to Salem in 1626 with the “Old Planters” but William Crowninshield Endicott, Jr., the President of the Essex Institute, insisted that Conant and his colleagues were mere “fishermen and squatters” and Salem wasn’t really founded until his ancestor John Endecott arrived with the first royal charter in 1628. So Salem’s Tercentenary should be delayed for two years. The most eminent Salem historian of the time, Sidney Perley, made it clear that this was a ridiculous stance, and resigned in protest from his curatorial postition at the Essex Institute. Then Endicott resigned, and that was the situation in March of 1926, only a few months before the celebrations were to begin. I’m really not sure how it was resolved, but it took a lot of meetings and made a lot of headlines. Endicott went on to become President of the Massachusetts Historical Society, so maybe all the Boston Brahmins got together and offered him a bigger prize to back down.

Full speed ahead! We get some great headlines about getting ready. A lot of focus on cleaning Salem up. There was one big new project—a pineapple-topped bandstand on Salem Common—but much more of an emphasis on restoring and scrubbing (reports on parades later on often noted how clean Salem’s streets were). Hamilton Hall was stripped of its paint; the massive train depot was sandblasted.

There were some interesting marketing campaigns associated with the Tercententary. Every Salem store seems to have dressed up its windows with historical scenes; Parker Brothers reissued its first board game, The Mansion of Happiness. There seems to have been an outreach to Quebec, because of Salem’s large Franco-American population, but also to other areas of the country, and I think that might explain these odd witch headlines. The Salem Tourist Camp at Forest River Park seems extraordinary to me: this very same space hosted a refugee camp after the Great Salem Fire just twelve years earlier (and no, the Fire was not “kind to the city.”)

So many “antiques”! The word is used very broadly: houses, dresses, furnishings, all on display. There was a great opening of houses throughout Salem, and also a great opening of attics. While the parades presented a broad overview of Salem’s centuries, the open houses and performances were very focused on the Colonial: and its revival.

The entire July week was jam-packed: THREE parades, a big bonfire on the fourth in the Salem tradition, fireworks in the Willows along with a triple parachute jump from a hot air balloon and then an attempted quadruple jump two days later by Louise Gardner (who would fall to her death before an Atlanta crowd of 15,000 two years later), athletic competitions, lectures, a ball, all sorts of exhibitions. The Massachusetts papers covered everything in detail, as did some national papers, and there were a lot of headlines about crowds. For the Historical and Floral parade at the end of the week, the participants were estimated at 10,000 and the crowds at nearly 100,000.

By all accounts the Salem Tercentenary was a resounding success, but clearly there was a need for a presidential nod to cap it off. I had always thought that Calvin Coolidge was dissing Salem by not attending the big event as he always summered nearby, but apparently this year he was in another part of the country. So he sent Vice-President Charles Dawes, who interrupted his annual fishing trip to Maine. The Vice-President reviewed the first tercentenary parade, and gave a speech on how the radio could safeguard the constitution from rampant populism. But even that sounds better than President Coolidge’s note, below. So enthusiastic: “even if Salem ships no longer circle the world and the life of the community goes on in less picturesque and spectacular channels” Salem still has its history! You’d think Silent Cal would have congratulated the city on putting on such a big party, but no. The President does make the point that anniversary of the Declaration of Independence was being celebrated in the Salem year as Salem’s 300th and this year we have another concurrence with the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the American Revolution. From what I’ve seen so far, I think Revolution 250 is going to leave Salem 400+ in the dust, but we shall see.

Tercentenary font? Quincy is up this year: you can check out their schedule here.

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