Category Archives: Salem

August 17, 2026

The Phillipses’ Library

By daseger

This is my third year working at the Phillips House of Historic New England once a week or so over the summer, and it’s been such a wonderful experience for several reasons. My colleagues are great: we’re all part-time old house people who are solely interested in showcasing the house and the family who lived there to the best of our abilities. We compare and work on our tours constantly. It has been a continuous learning experience: the house is filled to the brim with the varied possessions of this wealthy Salem family, all acquired over generations, so just capturing the contents of one corner of one room takes time. And it has been equally delightful meeting every single visitor to the house: most interested in a more comprehensive history of Salem, away from the witching crowd, but even those who wander in with little felt witch hats on seem delighted to see more or something else entirely.

When I’m working at the house, there’s always a time when there are no visitors, and that’s when I wander around and look at things with more focus and purpose. The first year, I was focused primarily on the general architecture and the McIntire woodwork in the front rooms. The second year, I studied the mirrors and artwork. And this year has been all about the books. Even though the house was constructed on Chestnut Street in 1820-21 we interpret the house about a century later, when the Phillips family moved in after an extensive renovation: it’s their house. Stephen Willard Phillips (1873-1955), his wife Anna Pingree Phillips (1870-1938) and their son “Stevie” Phillips (1907-1971) were all avid readers, and looking at their books is a great way to learn more about both them and the time in which they lived. There are about 3000 books in the house, most encased in glass-fronted bookcases. This is about half of their entire library; the remainder is in storage. I’m sure many of their books, like all of their possessions, were inherited, but there are sufficient quantity that were obviously chosen by them to reveal their personal interests. The Phillipses’ books offer an introduction to both the house and the household, as one of the first things visitors see when they enter the house is the massive Gothic Revival bookcase in the room designated as Mr. Phillips’ Library. It faces stiff competition from the McIntire mantel in the same room, but in my experience, always wins! People go right to it, and to the books within.

It’s difficult to photograph glass bookcases, but I think that you can see that there are broad swaths of color among the books, representing the classic series that most libraries of this era possess: the Harvard Classics, the Waverly novels, other “great” works. But if you look closer you see more ephemeral titles, lots of works by regional authors, lots of military history and New England history. Mr. Phillips was born in Hawaii, and assembled a large “Hawaiian Library” that he eventually donated to the other Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum, so that interest is not represented here.

Other bookcases reflect the same mixture of classics and topical, more contemporary texts, and as you move back and upstairs to the more private spaces the latter becomes more dominant. This is a family which lived through two world wars (well, Mrs. Phillips died in 1938) and so was clearly seeking explanations from observers (and participants) such as Winston Churchill. Mrs. Phillips liked to read novels, and you see lots of them on the second floor but very few on the first. She also clearly liked gardening books.

Stevie’s childhood books are encased in both his second-floor bedroom and first-floor playroom, reflecting interests in everything from fairies to pirates. I would really like to read The Battle of the Nations, apparently a “family-friendly” history of World War One, to determine how it manages to be just that, but it is behind glass doors. There is an adjoining boy’s history of the Battle of the Somme! Lots of sea stories in general and tales of pirates in particular.

My favorite bookcase is just outside the master bedroom on the second floor, in a hall which has its own door so it’s really kind of a suite and therefore quite private. There’s a key closet in there too. I like the bookcase because it does not have glass—instead, it just has a simple tapes running across the shelves, and for some reason this always gives me the feeling that the Phillipses just stepped away, leaving their possessions behind. One book in particular caught my attention one day, all about the Vanderbilts, and I thought wow, I guess rich families like to read about other rich families. The rest of the books in this case are an eclectic collection: biographies, novels, contemporary affairs, local history, pamphlets,  and also reference books that look well-read. These books are not as pretty as those in Mr. Phillips’ library, but they are perhaps more reflective of the Phillipses’ lives.

 

 

 

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in books, Historic Houses, Salem

August 10, 2026

The Salem Seal and Social History

By daseger

Thomas Carlyle: In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation

I probably promised that I would not write about the Salem city seal in a previous post but here I am again writing about the Salem city seal. I just can’t help myself: the process through which it will likely be discarded has resumed again with the Salem City Council and frankly, the seal and its context, past and present, is really the only Salem topic I’m inspired to write about these days. I’m working on a much longer piece for an academic journal, so I’m using the blog as a trial run, and consequently I would love your questions, comments, and critique!

A short introduction and recap because it’s been a while. If you are new to this blog and to Salem you might presume that our city seal would depict a witch on a broomstick. This image is everywhere, including on our police cars, but in fact our official city seal, marking city documents and correspondence, depicts an East Indian merchant at its center, flanked by a ship and a pepper tree with an olive-branch bearing dove above and an assertive motto (“To the Farthest Point of the Rich East”) below. Of these two Salem emblems, you would think that the witch would be the objectionable image: the victims of 1692 were not practicing witchcraft so why are we representing them with a figure of a witch? We killed them because of that identification; they died asserting their innocence. But no, it’s the figure at the top that has been deemed “harmful” because its central figure represents an Asian stereotype or caricature (both terms are used) and its pacifist dove conceals the violence that accompaned Salem’s incredibly prosperous trade with the East Indies in the first half of the nineteenth century. In this view, the First and Second Sumatran Expeditions of the U.S.. Navy (1832 and 1838), retaliatory campaigns after Malay attacks on American ships which were indeed very violent, block out the entire extent and impact of Salem’s lucrative 40-year pepper trade, the revenues from which literally built this city.

To address concerns about the seal, a Task Force was created by the Mayor and City Council and given the charge to conduct historical research, gather public input, and review design considerations before submitting a final report with recommendations. This committee was supposed to be comprised of 11 members and sit for 18 months; it had 8 members who deliberated for 6 months. As the first charge was deemed quite important, two historians were appointed to the task force, including an academic who is an internationally recognized expert on Islamic society and culture in Sumatra. In my view, historical documentation and analysis was given short shrift repeatedly in favor of nineteenth and twentieth century images (most of which dated after the seal’s creation) curated to demonstrate an increasingly negative western depiction of Asian people over the period. Things became very interesting last summer when a succession of people from Aceh, Sumatra’s westernmost province and the region where the pepper trade was the most active, began lobbing for the seal’s preservation with assertions that they were honored by this representation. Salem’s Acehnese figure showed up on the cover of an Indonesian book entitled The Pepper Coast. A Historical, Archaeological and Economic Study of the Spice Trade in Bandar Susoh and Kuala Batu. 

Nevertheless, critics of the seal maintain(ed) that this was a local issue. Even though they are the ones represented on the seal, the opinions of the Acehnese don’t count! So much for worldly Salem. The Task Force completed its report (which excluded all documentary footnotes originally—thankfully put back in as an appendix) and submitted it to the City Council with a recommendation to change the seal. Months went by and a practically new council was was elected, which took up the matter only last week. I attended the meeting expecting to hear a vigorous debate, but instead there was a successful motion to simply accept the Task Force report and recommendation and change the seal. Despite the historical research charge embedded in the original order, several councillors asserted that the historical context of the seal was irrelevant: my own ward councillor repeated the assertion that history shouldn’t matter several times. And here we are: there has to be another vote but I think Salem’s venerable seal is history.

I find it sad that these councillors can’t see a bigger picture, because the seal has opened up all sorts of windows for me, or I should say, the figure on the seal has inspired questions and the search for answers. Who is this person? Why does the clothing change in depictions? Why does the gender of the figure change in the mid-19th century, as it appears in print and other genres? The evolution of an 1830s Sumatran figure in the original seal (top left), featuring clothing that its creator, City councilor George Peabody, would have seen, to a more generalized Imperial China depiction in Ross Turner’s 1888 “refresh” (bottom left) is particularly fascinating. Turner hadn’t been to East Asia, presumably he based his depiction on images and textiles he saw in the Peabody Museum. People in Salem in 1888 were likely far less familiar with Asian people than their predecessors were a half-century before, and the next generation would be even more removed. But certainly not disinterested. We have a great chapter in Salem’s Centuries by my colleague Michele Louro and the Salem State Library Dean Elizabeth McKeigue on Walter G. Whitman, a professor of Physical Sciences at Salem State who spent a year at the University of Nanking in 1925. During that time he traveled throughout Asia and collected and created a portfolio of images which he presented in a series of popular slide lectures when he returned home. Whitman was just one local collector/connector, illustrating the continuing ties between Salem and the East in the twentieth century.

Walter G. Whitman papers (M.7) at Salem State University Archives and Special Collections.

But even back in the “Golden Era” of Salem’s trade with East Asia a century earlier there is more to know, more to explore. I’ve been captivated by a quote from Captain Stephen Phillips about the presence of Asian “Lascars” for years, and just a cursory glance at the digitized crew lists for Salem ships from 1799-1979 at the Mystic Seaport Museum indicates there were East Asian seamen onboard—and presumably in Salem. (“Lascar” is a British term for seamen from pretty much anywhere in the entire Indian Ocean region).  Of course I’d like to know a lot more about the “servants” Phillips references as well. Who were all these people? What are their stories? Did they remain in Salem or go elsewhere to find their fortunes? Are their descendants still around?

Stephen Phillips miniature, Historic New England; Salem Crew lists at the Mystic Seaport Museum.

For me, history is about people, so the new seal, likely stripped down to as few unobjectionable objects as possible, will cease to be inspirational. The councillors of nearly two centuries ago who approved our present city seal were seeking a human connection; our current councillors are looking for something else. I’m not sure what. I just hope they don’t employ AI as was the case with that damn anime cat chosen as the mascot for our 400th anniversary! I whipped up this slop in 2 seconds and am not impressed.

18 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in Culture, Salem

August 3, 2026

Salem’s Quadricentennial Parade

By daseger

I have been looking forward to Salem’s 400th anniversary parade all summer so my expectations were high and definitely a bit unrealistic when it finally unfolded on this past Saturday. I’ve been so steeped in Salem’s history in general, and the spectacular Salem Tercentenary in particular, that I expected a lot of elaborate floats about big historical moments, which was definitely the case in 1926. There was a lot of comparison between past and present in that year as well (very well represented by these two ladies featured on the Salem Gas Light Co. float below) and I thought I’d have the opportunity to compare 2026 and 1926. The parade was themed “Salem through the Centuries,” so my expectations were not completely unfounded, but it was also labeled as the return of the traditional Heritage Days parade, which had not been held for over twenty years.

There were a couple of floats and I saw a couple of dates pass by, but mostly it was just a community parade: local politicians, businesses, institutions, organizations, people. Marching bands, fire trucks, and Shriners: just what you expect to see in a summer parade in a small American city. There were also a lot of boats, as the parade ended at the Salem Maritime National Historic Park, which held its annual maritime festival and cardboard boat regatta and so several entries marched in the parade. Here’s a few shots from my spot on Lafayette Street: there were larger crowds downtown but I walked way up towards the beginning of the parade route. A highlight for me came fairly early in the parade: History Alive, Inc., which has been presenting immersive historical productions for Salem residents and tourists since 1992, outfitted an army of historical Salem people in crafted costumes. It was really thrilling to see John Remond, Luis Emilio, and Samuel McIntire stride down Lafayette Street.

The History Alive contingent: these costumes were gorgeous!

So I settled in to watch more people (and the occasional animal) pass by: a delegation from the venerable student exchange program between Salem and Ota, Japan, representatives of the Salem Chamber of Commerce, Salem Main Streets, the Essex National Heritage Area, the League of Women Voters, the Salem Boys and Girls Club, the House of the Seven Gables, the North Shore Asian American and Pacific Islander Coalition, and the Saint Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church. (this is not a complete list). Nathaniel Hawthorne represented the Salem Athenaeum. Marching Masons too!

Several notable businesses really showed up for the parade, including Rockefella’s Restaurant, which is located in the historical Daniel Low’s building which was also the original site of Salem’s First Church, the Hawthorne Hotel, Cinema Salem, and O’Donnell’s Funeral Home, which featured an antique horse-drawn hearse! There was an array of witches, of course, pink, green, and dancing, as well as the ever-present Halloween buskers, and the Salem Witch Museum featured a tree float representing the millions of descendants of Witch Trial victims. Two public departments, The Salem Parks, Recreation and City Services Department and the Salem Beautification Committee, went all out with their truck floats featuring the famous cement slide at Forest River Park and the Ladies of Salem figurehead installations.

And now for the vessels. Both the Peabody Essex Museum and the Salem Maritime National Historic Park featured ship floats and there was also the flotalla of cardboard creations destined for the regatta later in the day. I was so hot after the parade that I skipped that, but it has become a HUGE attraction over the past few years and I can see from various posts that it was bigger than ever this year. The parade was closed very appropriately and very well by the Salem High School Marching Band, but I didn’t get a good picture!

An Appendix: a group shot of all the History Alive parade stars! Kristina Stevick, artistic director of History Alive, is in front. The Company’s wardrobe manager is Carrie Midura. You can be sure that this photograph is going into the archives: I’m going to print it out and put it there!

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

June 29, 2026

Salem 250: Revolutionary Residences

By daseger

So many towns around us have had house and walking tours featuring houses connected to prominent patriots for this big anniversary year, but not Salem. It’s not surprising. The Witch Trials are an eclipse that darkens so much of our city’s history, and Salem’s myriad roles in the Revolution have been relatively ignored for the last century or so, not only by locals but also by academic historians. For overviews, there are some great journal articles, and now a book, by Richard J. Morris, and we made our author, Hans Schwartz, compress the entire Revolution (as well as Salem’s role as pre-revolutionary provincial capital) into a 5,000-word chapter in Salem’s Centuries. There are references to Salem’s pre-revolutionary resistance in several general texts on the Revolution, and an entire volume on Leslie’s Retreat by Peter Hoffer. Scholars cannot ignore the fact that Salem was a major, if not the major privateering port, so there’s some good coverage there. But that’s about it, and very little of this scholarship has impacted Salem’s public history, with the notable exception of the annual reenactments of Leslie’s Retreat. My deep dive into Salem history over the past few years has convinced me that the Revolution is the era of opportunity for Salem historians and I hope they step up! There are many stories which have yet to be told. In the meantime, however, I put together my own Revolutionary house tour, designed to highlight both prominent and not-so-prominent Salem patriots—and architecture, of course. This is by no means exhaustive, just a start really.

Several successful privateers became even more successful merchants after the Revolution, and their houses have always been notable, so I’ll start with the Derby Street houses of Captains Simon Forrester and Edward Allen. Forrester is a storied privateer/merchant, and not only because he emigrated from Ireland on Daniel Hawthorne’s ship, married the captain’s daughter, and thus was connected to Nathaniel Hawthorne as “Old Simon Forrester.” The wealth that he attained both during and after the Revolution add to the story, as does his drinking, about which some of his memorialists get a bit defensive. But he commanded or had interests in 7 privateers during the Revolution, beginning with the very successful Rover. I’ve always thought that his house, at 188 Derby Street, is in the perfect location overlooking Salem Harbor. Further down the street and on the other side at #125 is the Capt. Edward Allen house, built by the commander of the South Carolina naval brigantine Comet: presumably he was rewarded with that command after bringing Charleston news of the Battles of Lexington and Concord in his Salem ship Industry. Both the Continental Congress and individual states commissioned naval ships during the Revolution, and Massachusetts was a center of recruitment for both. While I was in the Derby Street neighborhood, I searched for the house of the Lt. Colonel Samuel Carlton, my candidate for Salem’s most illustrious Revolutionary warrior. Carlton created his own company right after Bunker Hill, and was with Washington at Valley Forge. There, he wrote letters documenting the suffering of the troops; indeed he offers the most poignant characterizations of the suffering shoeless soldiers of Valley Forge. There, he suffered himself, so much so that he had to leave service and was paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, the Reverend William Bentley wrote that no man endured so much with greater patience upon his death. Carlton has a lovely gravestone in Howard Street Cemetery, but he deserves more: he definitely deserves his own post, an article, a book, a memorial. I couldn’t even find his house: Bentley refers to it as located on Union Street, and a genealogical account describes it as “three stories with narrow eaves,” so #s 8 1/2 and 22 are my best candidates, but it may be gone.

When “revolutionary remembrance” started in the 1820s and 1830s, the most famous Salem veterans were Timothy Pickering, Stephen Abbot and Jesse Smith. Pickering was successively a Colonel, Adjutant General and Quartermaster General during the Revolution, and Secretary of War and State afterwards, so his prominence made his family’s first-period house Salem’s key revolutionary touchstone and I think it remains so. Abbot served as a captain in several companies of the Massachusetts 15th Regiment from the beginning of the revolution through 1780, and founded Salem’s 2nd Corps of Cadets after the war, and was also appointed a major general in the Second Division of the Massachusetts Militia. President Washington visited both the Pickering and Abbot houses when he came to Salem in 1789, but Abbot’s house is long gone, from at least 1912, when its remains were incorporated into a Chestnut Street carriage house. Jesse Smith (1756-1844) was not a Salem native or soldier, but he moved to this town of opportunity in the later years of the Revolution, and really became famous for being a veteran decades later. He was at Lexington and Concord, and Bunker Hill, Brandywine, Germantown and Monmouth, after which he became a member of General Washington’s prestigious Life Guards. He became a shipmaster in Salem after the war, and because of both his service and  longevity, lived to see and represent Salem in a series of Revolutionary commemorations. He was not a wealthy man, but a prominent one, and while he lived out his last days boarding at 14 Beckford Street (third image below), his fellow citizens saw fit to erect an elaborate monument to him upon his death, with inscriptions of his service and a pillar topped by George Washington’s bust (which has since disappeared) in Salem’s newest and most fashionable cemetery, Harmony Grove.

Funerary monument of Jesse Smith, Harmony Grove Cemetery, c. 1890s, Frank Cousins Collection of Glass Plate Negatives, Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum, via Digital Commonwealth.

Next up, we have more humble “soldiers of the Massachusetts line”: you can find a concentration of their houses along Federal and River streets–in perfect proximity for a walking tour!

First up is this wonderful house at 114 Federal Street built in the last year of the Revolution by Colonel John Page. Page was a Marblehead native who signed up for John Glover’s regiment right after Lexington and Concord. He served for a year, then came back to Massachusetts and moved to Salem, where he become Colonel of the Militia. In that role, he volunteered for service in Samuel Flagg’s Company at the Battle of Rhode Island, the first joint military operation between American and French forces, in August of 1778. The next house is the rare double back-to-back Federal built by the famous Sanderson brothers, among Salem’s most famous and productive cabinent makers. Neither Elijah or Jacob were soldiers, but they were Lexington natives who were very much there during the Battles of Lexington and Concord, both in terms of engagment and testimony, so their house needs to be on a Revolutionary residence tour. Across the way, I’d love to include another post-revolutionary house (Salem experienced a major building boom in the 1780s and 1790s, largely because of privateering—compare to Marblehead!) built by Joseph Felt, but I can’t quite confirm that the builder/dweller was the same Joseph Felt who served in Capts. Benjamin Ward Jr.’s and Miles Greenwood’s Companies in 1776-1777.  Pinning down soldiers is difficult: we have digitized service, pension, and service records, but they contain ommissions and contradictions (and there are a lot of Felts.) The last house in the group below, at 175 Federal Street, was most definitely the dwelling of Joshua Cross, who served in Major-General Charles Lee’s Life Guard under the command of the heroic Benjamin Gould from Topsfield.

Circling back to adjacent River Street, there are the houses of Stephen Driver at #18 and John Chandler at #7. According to their pension applications, Driver was a corporal in two companies, Capt. Addison Richard’s and Capt. Joseph Swasey’s, from 1775-1777, and Chandler served as 2nd Lieutenant in John Crane’s and Capt. Drury’s companies in Henry Knox’s Regiment over a slightly shorter period. I thought Chandler might have been part of the Knox Artillery Train, but Crane (another super hero) stayed near Boston. All of these guys (including Knox) were in their twenties, and I am grateful for their service as well as these material reminders.

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Architecture, Historic Trails, History, Salem

May 11, 2026

Preservation by the People

By daseger

I always like to have a preservation post for preservation month so here it is: a little populist spin on Salem’s experience of urban renewal in the 1960s and 1970s. This is a long and rather complicated story that I’ve written about here before, several times, and in Salem’s Centuries, so I’m going to streamline it considerably, I promise. I’ve been wanting to do a post like this for a while, because I’m a bit troubled by a trend I see in Salem today, one which has been emerged for several years, maybe even over a decade. It’s the tendency for anyone who is opposed to any policy coming out of City Hall to be denigrated and dismissed, in words spoken at public meetings by officials, and on social media. There’s no question in my mind that the latter is the culprit: social media has enabled us all to be so dismissive, and so unaccountable, I think. Nevertheless, I don’t like the trend, because sometimes you have to fight City Hall, and when City Hall doubled down on a very agressive, one might say radically so, policy of urban renewal in the 1960s, the people of Salem resisted it—and ultimately won a battle (this is a word used by contemporaries again and again) for preservation.

The story you generally hear today in Salem is that Ada Louise Huxtable, the notable architectural critic for the New York Times, set her sights on Salem and transformed the process of renewal through demolition into one of rehabilitation almost single-handedly, or how Samuel Zoll, elected Mayor of Salem in 1969, brought about the same transformation with a resolute will. Huxtable and Zoll were indeed very important players in saving Salem from near-annihilation, and their efforts should not be under-estimated but neither should those of many more anonymous Salem people who really showed up, setting the scene for Zoll’s election and everything that followed. I certainly don’t have all their names but I have some of them, but first let’s look at some headlines from the 1960s.

“Bulldozer job”: this is not an accusation by Salem preservationists but rather the term that the head of the agency charged with implementing urban renewal, the Salem Redevelopment Authory (SRA), used to describe what was coming in 1965! The Executive Director of the SRA, John W. Barrett (who was appointed by Salem’s mayor Francis X. Collins), responded to an “overflow throng” of Salem residents in the summer of 1965 with the admission that in the beginning we did say we would not use the bulldozer approach to Salem in our planning. However, we no longer say that and went on to admit that “from 80% to 90% of structures in the central business district” would be demolished under the present plan. This meeting was sponsored by Historic Salem, Inc., (HSI) which would go on to lead a feisty opposition to the bulldozers over the next eight years. Elizabeth Reardon, President of HSI, moderated regular meetings like this at the same time she was serving on the city’s Historic District committee following the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966. Her successor, Donald Koleman, sued the SRA for not complying with Salem’s original urban renewal plan, which stressed rehabilitation as well as demolition. Prominent architect James Ballou gave an impassioned speech before the Salem Chamber of Commerce urging business leaders to advocate for preservation over demolition. Elizabeth Hunt, Bill Burns, Bob Murray, Deirdre Henderson, and others pressed for preservation consistently in myriad ways, ultimately winning several concessions, first the creation of a consulting blue ribbon panel of professionals chosen by the brand new National Trust for Historic Preservation, and later the formation of the Design Review Board for the SRA, consisting of architectural and preservation professionals appointed by local organizations like Historic Salem, the Peabody Museum and the Essex Institute.

Lynn Daily Item, 4.12.1966

This GREAT poster is among the Salem Redevelopment Authority records at the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum, in Rowley, Massachusetts. We used some of these records for our chapter on the 20th century development of Salem, but not all—they could form the foundation of a great thesis, dissertation, or book!

I’d really like to say that all these efforts, including the very personal protest of Bessie Munroe, the elderly resident of an elegant Ash Street home who refused to vacate her home when the bulldozers were really busy in 1969, turned the tide, but the fact is I think it was the destruction itself, especially when no developers popped up to rebuild. Over 60 buildings swept away, but not 147, Barrett’s greatest goal. After Samuel Zoll became mayor in 1970, he made new appointments to the Salem Redevelopment Authority, and new ideas like facade easements for the rehabilitation of buildings rather than their automatic demolition came with these new appointees. The end result was a “workable urban renewal” in Zoll’s words, facilitated in collaboration with Salem’s residences rather than in opposition to them.

“Old Salem” and “restored”:  this phrase and this word were not goals in the 1960s, but a decade later, they were! A big victory for Salem preservationists.

Blog notes: I’m off to Ireland for the rest of May so no blog posts until June. I’m thinking about some changes to the blog after so many (15!) years, some serious Salem fatigue, and several new projects. Would love to hear your thoughts, so please comment below or feel free to email me if you have any about topics and directions at dseger@salemstate.edu. Enjoy the month–it’s my favorite.

8 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Architecture, Salem

April 13, 2026

I’d Rather Read Poetry

By daseger

Over the past few weeks Salem residents have learned that our city will become the site of yet another dark attraction, styled a museum of course, an establishment that seems even worse than the last arrival in terms of tackiness, kitschiness, darkness, and removal from anything to do with our past or present. I’m not going to name it as I don’t want to shower any publicity on the horrid thing, but you can read about it here. I got all revved up as I usually do, but then found that I could not act (write). All the work on the book, all the anxiety about the launch of the book, all the presentations I’ve been giving on the book, all of my immersion in Salem’s history for years just sort of emptied me, I think. And I truly felt despair. Usually rant writing revives me, but I had nothing to give, nothing to write, and I knew it wouldn’t matter anyway. So I was just kind of stuck. And then, for some inexplicable reason, I picked up an old poetry anthology and started reading it, and one poem led to another and then to another and so I experienced sort of a poetry immersion/conversion over the last week. I say conversion because I’ve had a notable lack of appreciation for poetry my entire life. I remember calling up my father, an English professor and a poet, when I was in college and complaining that I had to read Gerard Manley Hopkins and his work was awful and my father swearing at me in frustration, after which we both hung up and then he called back and calmly explained to me why Hopkins’ work was not awful, and I said ok, but basically I’ve been faking it since then. But the words that I have read over the past week–expressing sorrow over the loss of place, the trivilization of tragedy, and just general futility–really helped me. I discovered all sort of new poets and perspectives and I’m going back for more, but these are some of my favorite lines so far, set against the soon-to-be location of Salem’s newest “museum.”

I’ve always tried to find answers for what has happened and is happening to Salem in academic literature: there is now quite a robust discussion about “dark tourism” and the lure and exploitation of tragedy in general and the Salem scenario in particular. My colleagues Margo Shea and Drew Darien have contributed insightful chapters on tourism to Salem’s Centuries, both with personal and local perspectives (and Salem’s verty first Poet Laureate, J.D. Scrimgeour, closes our book). But it seems to me that Salem has gone way beyond just exploiting the Witch Trials of 1692: an entirely new layer of commodified horror seems to have been grafted onto the city’s identity, completely detached from its human history. I don’t have the tools or the patience to deal with this erasure, so I think I’ll stick to my poetry regimen.

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

March 23, 2026

Remembering the Ladies: Two Talks in Salem

By daseger

A promotional post today: I’ve got two events coming up at the end of this week and the beginning of next on women’s history in Salem for the close of Women’s History Month. Both are free and all are welcome. The first is on Saturday at Old Town Hall, and very squarely focused on women’s organized philanthropy over the centuries, but particularly in the nineteenth. Because this year is the 400th anniversary of Salem’s European founding, I am going back into the seventeenth century but the nineteenth century is so busy I have labeled it the era of “benevolent activism”! This is certainly not a discovery on my part; anyone who glances at an archival list of Salem sources is going to see that Salem women were really busy in that particular century. So many organizations were founded, and with due diligence, quite a few have survived to the present. We really wanted to include a chapter on this topic in Salem’s Centuries, but it just didn’t happen, so I’m happy to focus in on it now even though it took a bit of work for sure. To tell you the truth, I think all of the women associated with all of the organizations you see on this flyer know the history of their institutions better than I do, so I’m just providing a bit of comparative context and a more sweeping view afforded by four centuries of perspective.

Salem Woman’s Friend Society Collection, Salem State University Archives and Special Collections.

My other event is a bit more about women’s political history in Salem, though I definitely developed an appreciation for how political philanthropic work can be, as well as even more respect for disenfranchised women, when working on the charity talk. Just think about one decade for Salem women, 1920-1920: they provided care during several major epidemics (smallpox, tuburculosis) and relief after the Great Salem Fire of 1914, lost a crucial state vote on suffrage in 1915, participated in several “preparedness” initiatives during World War I and ministered to the sick during the “Spanish” Flu, and then finally won the vote in 1920. Just incredible: I would have been pretty darn mad following that 1915 referendum and retreated to my bedroom or study.

“Remember the Ladies” is a tea at the Hawthorne Hotel on March 31st at 4 (again, free and all are invited) in which I will focus more directly on women’s political activities. As the flyer asserts, the  “school suffrage”  election of 1879, when women across Massachusetts were allowed to run for, and vote in, elections for school boards, will definitely be a highlight. Salem women really turned out and won four seats, the most in the Commonwealth, and they continued to hold seats right up until 1920 and beyond. But because this is the 400th anniversary, I’m going to go back and forth from 1879. This event is the initiative of my friend Jane, a former Salem city councillor, and she chose the date because it it the 250th anniversary of Abigail Adams’ “Remember the Ladies” letter to her husband in Philadelphia. So I’m definitely going to shine a spotlight on this epistolary moment and also compare Abigail to her near-exact contemporary in Salem, Mary Toppan Pickman. Different women of the same age and time in very similar situations for very different reasons! Both minding the farm and their families while their husbands were absent: John on patriotic business and Benjamin Pickman in London hanging out with other conspicuous Loyalists.

In closing to what I intend to be BRIEF remarks, I’ll move forward to the bicentennial year of 1976, in which the first two women elected to the Salem City Council, ward councillor Frances Grace and councillor-at-large Jean-Marie Rochna, took their seats. Just as those women elected to the School Board in 1879 probably expected the vote a bit sooner than 1920, I bet those women who voted in 1920 likely thought that their city would see a female councilor before 1976, but as we all know, change takes time, and effort. But continuity does too.

I’m not sure if this is the 1976 or 1977 Salem City Council, but it is from the Salem News Collection at Salem State University Archives and Special Collections.

More information for “Organizing Generosity,” March 28, Old Town Hall @ 10: https://www.womansfriendsociety.org/events-1/organizing-generosity-centuries-of-women-supporting-women-in-salem

More information for “Remember the Ladies,” March 31, Hawthorne Hotel @ 4: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/remember-the-ladies-tickets-1985348533909?aff=ebdssbdestsearch

 

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February 23, 2026

A Major Revolutionary Engraver

By daseger

So many untold revolutionary stories in Salem’s history. SO MANY. I started thinking about Joseph Hiller, a soldier (Major, in fact), watchmaker, engraver, and Collector of the Port of Salem and Beverly, last week and put together a little visual sketch of his life, just to have everything in one place and illustrate how he both impacted and reflected his time. Hiller (1748-1814) was a Boston man, who came to Salem for reasons that are unclear to me, probably business. He is generally referred to as a watchmaker and sometimes a silversmith, though several sources refer to his more general “mechanical” abilities. In 1775, he became a Revolutionary player, in several ways. He is referenced as an officer in one of the Salem companies, and some sources indicate that he was at Lexington and Concord. I’m not sure about that, but his other early Revolutionary role is well-documented: he became an engraver and thus a disseminator of Patriot portraits. Just two weeks after the Battle of Bunker Hill, Hiller produced one of the earliest portrait prints of the Revolution: a mezzotint ot Major General Israel Putnam as portrayed in pastel by his fellow Salemite Benjamin Blythe. European publishers had been producing portrait prints for decades, and now Hiller was tapping into an emerging American market.

American Revolution Institute of the Society of the Cincinnati. More about this print, Blythe, and Putnam here.

Hiller was in the right place at the right time to engage in patriotic publishing. He followed up the popular Putnam print with one of John Hancock, based on the John Singleton Copley portrait, and possibly (several of Hiller’s prints are “possibly by” or “attributed to” as we don’t always see the definitive signatures visible on the Putnam and Hancock prints above) with prints of the martyr of Bunker Hill, Major General Joseph Warren, and General George and “Lady” Martha Washington, based on portraits made by Charles Willson Peale for John Hancock in 1776. The smoking battlefield of Bunker Hill is in the background of George Washington’s portrait, placing him at Dorchester Heights in the foreground, ready to drive the British out of Boston in March 1776. There is no dramatic/poetic narrative to attach to him, but Hiller seems Revere-sque in his commercial pursuits.

“The Hon. John Hancock Esquire” mezzotint after Copley, 1775, Christies; Major Joseph Warren mezzotint after Copley, possibly Joseph Hiller, Yale University Art Gallery; His Excellency George Washington and Lady Washington, McAlpin Collection, New York Public Library.

The uncertainty of several of Hiller’s attributions might be one reason we don’t hear more about him. Even though I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on printing, I think art historians are far more equipped to analyze the transformation of portraits into prints, and there has been quite a lot of discussion among them over the attribution of the portraits I am featuring in this post. Context and connections must be considered. For the Blyth(e) portraits, I’m looking forward to reading a recently-published book by Bettina Norton entitled Benjamin Blyth, Salem’s 18th-Century Limner at a Time of Radical Upheaval, (Tidepool Press, available here and here) as it was she who identified the Bunker Hill-Dorchester Heights George Washington connection noted above. But for Hiller, publishing is only part of the story. After the Revolution, he was appointed Naval Officer for the port of Salem by Governor John Hancock and Collector by President George Washington thereafter: from 1783 until 1802, a busy time for the port, Hiller was Salem’s chief Customs official. Don’t let Nathaniel Hawthorne’s disdain for this post a half century later color its importance: during Hiller’s time import duties represented the vast majority of Federal revenues. A portrait in the Custom House is a testimony to his tenure, and his name is on a lot of paper, generally with more famous names! By all accounts Hiller was a professional officeholder, but he was also a conspicuous Federalist, so subject to the Jeffersonian purge. After he left his post, he left Salem for various locales, eventually ending up in Lancaster, where he died in 1814.

Hiller’s portrait in the Custom House (1819) built after his tenure and death, Salem Maritime National Historic Park; Cover of 1789 letter from Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton to Hiller, Smithsonian/National Postal Musuem; Crop of 1794 Sea Letter for Two Friends signed by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and countersigned by Hiller, Library of Congress. Hiller’s various obituaries reference Lexington and Concord, but I can’t place him there—I am always eager to find ANY Salem soldier present on that day so if you have more information, let me know! More interesting details of Hiller’s life: he was a prominent Mason and Swedenborgian convert.

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February 16, 2026

Was Andrew Jackson a Welcome Guest in Salem in 1833?

By daseger

Here I am with another Presidents’ Day post which I shall begin with my usual rant about Presidents’ Day: if you merge them all (or Washington and Lincoln) into one day of remembrance you’re going to forget some singular details. Not a fan of generic Presidents’ Day, although I realize we can’t have myriad Mondays off. That said, today I’m posting about one of everyone’s least favorite presidents, Andrew Jackson, who came to Salem at the beginning of his second term in the summer of 1833 as part of a New England tour (just like Washington decades before). Unlike Washington, the concensus is that Jackson was not popular in New England, but reading through some of the contemporary press accounts, I can’t quite tell if that’s the case. This post, probably like several this year, is an extension of research for Salem’s Centuries: I wrote a chapter on John Remond, who catered the big dinner for the President, and my research brought up several complaints about said dinner (not Remond’s cooking, but the guest of honor) and so I thought I’d “pull on this narrative thread” (to use my co-editor’s phrase) for a bit.

New England (and especially southern New England) did not support Jackson in either the 1828 or 1832 elections and so it might seem that the region was hostile territory, but it’s difficult to know whether it was the man or his policies which were unpopular. Jackson was a known enslaver but it was early days in Salem’s abolitionist movement, and while he was criticized for his policies towards Native Americans conspicuously by the genteel Elizabeth Elkins Sanders of Salem in her Conversations, Principally on the Aborigines of North America (1828), I’m not sure that was a general view at this time either. No one seems to have anything to say about the First Sumatran Expedition of just the year before. While Jackson’s response to South Carolina’s strident assertion of states’ rights during the more recent “Nullification Crisis” was popular in the North, John Quincy Adams and his friends and supporters in Massachusetts seemed to aim more personal criticism at him, generally at his lack of education and uncouth behavior. The former president went so far as to refer to the current one as a “barbarian” when he learned that Harvard University would be granting Jackson an honorary degree during his New England tour. The President of Harvard, Josiah Quincy, proceeded with the investiture nonetheless and found himself rather charmed by Jackson, admitting that “I was not prepared to be favorably impressed with a man who was simply intolerable to the Brahmin caste of my native state……”

Election maps from the Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library; Bernhardt Wall, Following Andrew Jackson 1767-1845 (1937).

After his Harvard reception, the President rode up to Salem through Lynn and Marblehead on June 26 in a cavalcade and was met at the town line by a reception of dignitaries; he did not stop to chat, but rather traveled directly to Nathaniel West’s Mansion House  on Essex Street where he would spend the night. He was not well, and would not make it to Remond’s dinner. Since the idea for this post started with the dinner, I think I should say a bit more about it. Compared to other events catered by Remond, the menu was not as elaborate or the preparations made as far in advance. According to the Remond family papers at the Phillips Library, Remond made the contract only on June 20, less than a week before the President’s arrival. He promised a “handsome good dinner including mock turtle soup for 150 people” and the host party requested a few additions, including cherries, strawberries, sherry, champagne and cigars. Everything else was left to Remond’s discretion. (This just seems a little casual compared to Remond’s other extravaganzas—were they dissing Jackson?) The dinner did go on even in the President’s absence, with an afterparty on Chestnut Street. There are hints that Jackson’s frequent illnesses were convenient or of his own making (which are wrong—Jackson was ill). In his Memoirs (IX, 5), John Quincy Adams asserts that Jackson’s illness was “politic……he is so ravenous of notoriety that he craves the sympathy for sickness as a portion of his glory….fourth-fifths of his sickness is trickery, and the other fifth mere fatique.” The next day he was up for a little trip around town in a barouche, however, for which people really turned out according to the Salem Gazette (June 28, 1833): “the crowd of Spectators was greater than has been witnessed in this place since the visit of Lafayette.”

Salem Directory, 1857 (two years before the Mansion House burned down).

You can’t gauge public opinion from mere numbers, so I’m not sure I can answer the question in my title. The Salem crowd was well-behaved by all acounts, but not exuberant. The most revealing detail of the Salem Gazette account was the lack of apparent intoxication among the spectators: we believe no serious accident occurred to mar the festivities of the day. And although we had frequent opportunities to examine the crowd of many thousands, we did not discover a single instance of intoxication, or disorderly conduct of any kind. And that was it, after the parade was over, President Jackson set off for Lowell and no more was said about him. In the following year, however, there was a notable incident that might reveal some sentiment towards Jackson in greater Massachusetts: the venerable USS Constitution was fitted out with a new figurehead depicting Jackson and while anchored in Boston harbor a local sea captain rowed out and cut off its head! In the print below, demons are doing the dirty work. Much later, of course, Jackson’s reputation deteriorated more dramatically, in Massachusetts and elsewhere. Even though Salem City Hall was built with surplus funds distributed to local governments during his administration, Mayor (now Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor) Kimberley Driscoll moved to remove Andrew Jackson’s portrait from the City Council Chambers in 2019, and it was eventually replaced by a striking portrait of the seventeenth-century Naumkeag/Pawtucket leaders Squaw Sachem and Nanepashemet by Indigenous artist Chris Pappan.

Crop of  “The Decapitation of a Great Blockhead by the Mysterious Agency of the Claret Coloured Coat,” (Boston?, 1834), Swann Auction Galleries.

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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.

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