Category Archives: Salem

November 2, 2026

Halloween from my Salem Stoop

By daseger

It’s November! The long, long, long Salem Halloween is over. I was kind of chill this year for some reason, even though I spent a good part of the month at home. My “They were not Witches” door tag got a lot of attention, which pleased me, as did the opportunity to meet more architecturally-focused tourists at the Phillips House. I still don’t understand the celebratory aspect of this eternal event as it applies to Salem “history,” but I think I’ve come to realize that I never will! Regardless of how I feel about Salem Halloween, I have always enjoyed Halloween night in Salem, because it is essentially about children and families, and I have a front-row seat on Chestnut Street. Usually I invite my parents down from York Harbor as they get no trick-or-treaters and they really love to hand out candy to the crowds, but they are on a cruise so my husband and I were on our own with the able assistance of our tenant Jen. Thank goodness she came over, as there were definitely more trick-or-treaters than ever. We were exhausted! I thought I had enough candy going in, but the lights were off at 7:20 after we went through 16 big bags and there were still crowds outside. I hate to sound like a Halloween grinch here, because all in all it was a really fun night, but I think I might cut off the teens and adults next year—this is the one big change I’ve noticed over the years, in addition to the size of the crowds. But on the other hand, there were some very creative costumes MADE by the bigger people, so the least I can do is give them a butterfinger. Anyway, here are some of my favorite photos from my stoop, some a bit blurry as I kept fiddling with the motion setting.

I love November!

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

October 26, 2026

Mapping a Century of Salem

By daseger

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

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

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

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

 

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

October 20, 2026

Bewitched Miss Bly of Salem

By daseger

I was curious when I came across a Salem woman named Carrie Peabody Bly making headlines in national newspapers in the late summer and early fall of 1900. I love Nellie Bly and thought, wow, maybe Salem had a namesake intrepid journalist explorer! Bly is not a Salem name, but Peabody certainly is: could Carrie have adopted it to emulate her hero? But no, of course not, our Miss Bly was not an immersive reporter but rather an entranced “witch,” and a fly-by-night one at that (I think—she just disappears). Carrie Peabody Bly appears first in a series of articles first published by the Boston Post and picked up by the St. Louis Post Dispatch in August of 1900: her story went viral over the next six weeks or so but remained largely the same. She claimed to be a simple Salem girl who became a store clerk and milliner and then fell ill and woke up entranced and dwelling in the attic of the Witch House with regular visitors, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Roger Williams’ sister Betsy (the Witch House was then believed, incorrectly, to have been the residence of Roger Williams so Betsy was presumably familiar with it), and the “Salem witches.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne was Miss Bly’s chief spirit and “friend,” always referenced extensively in stories of her bewitchment. He appeared early on, while she was in the Witch House attic alone and about to enter one of her trance-like states. In her well-reported words, “all at once I saw a kind, benevolent looking gentleman standing in the doorway. He was a stranger to me, but the moment he spoke I knew it was Hawthorne.” The author/spirit told her to be patient in his “soft and clear” voice, as “you are to do great things. You may not wish to do them all, but remember your duty and you will be rewarded. Do them as Hester Prynne did her duty, as she patiently wore the scarlet letter on her breast.” From that moment on, he was with Carrie every day. A spiritualist Hester Prynne! With the big Hawthorne centenary only a few years away, this connection must have struck a chord with the public, and she gained more attention—too much attention, by her own admission. She preferred to dwell with the spirits.

I searched in vain for a quote from a member of the Hawthorne family about the conjuring of Nathaniel. I can’t imagine they were very happy about it, but Miss Bly might never have caught their attention. She wasn’t around for long: by November of 1900 there are no more headlines. In the following year, I could only find one reference to her, an announcement of her move to Marblehead, and then she disappears, into thin air. Though her fame was fleeting and never approached the notoriety of the “Salem Seer,” Charles H. Foster, before her or the “Witch of Lime Street,” Mina “Margery” Crandon, after her, her story is certainly a Salem one.

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

October 13, 2026

Matthew Stickney had a very good eye

By daseger

There were many important and influential Salem collectors, and among them Matthew Stickney (1805-1894) really stands out. He remains a revered figure among coin collectors, both for his pioneering activity and the breadth and depth of his collection. He had inherited a large amount of his Continental currency from his Patriot grandfather, which he was determined to supplement with all the most important American (and some foreign) issues, and he worked with the US Mint itself and early brokers to achieve this aim. The most sought-after US coins, including the 1804 dollar (which apparently does not date from 1804 but is still referred to as the “king of American coins”), and the storied 1787 Brasher Doubloon, which seems to have had a Maltese Falcon-like hold on mystery writers and filmmakers in the mid-20th century, were all part of the Stickney Collection.

Coins were his primary passion but Stickney did not confine himself to currency. He collected Americana before there really was such a category. Anything printed—-almanacs, autographs, newspapers, diaries, election sermons, pamphlets and printed images. He collected Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom he must have also known. He was a genealogist and a historian. Stickney was an Essex County native, and spent most of his life at 119 Essex Street in Salem, a building that has not survived. Following his death in 1894, his three unmarried daughters retained his collection for quite some time before consigning much of it to two very noteworthy auctions held in 1907: a coin sale in Philadelphia in the June, and all of the American collections in Boston in November. Both made considerable headlines and set price records. Christian Remick’s perspective of an occupied Boston Harbor seems to have been (re)discovered at this time, and the papers also took note of the pamphlet recording an important debate at Harvard University, A Forensic Dispute on the Legality of Enslaving Africans, held at the Public Commencement in Cambridge, New-England, July 21st, 1773.

Matthew Stickney and his collections are interesting subjects quite apart from their context, but if we widen the lens a bit we can appreciate the “collecting culture” that was present in Salem in the nineteenth century, and later, centered around one of the two founding institutions of the present Peabody Essex Museum: the Essex Institute. We hear more about the role of the other founding society, the Peabody Museum, which was established in 1799 as the museum for the East India Society and operated as a  “cabinet of natural and artificial curiosities” collected by the Salem sea captains on their voyages around the world. The Essex Institute’s origins were in the realms of local and natural history, and like the Peabody, its members were engaged in forming its collections, but also in a vibrant intellectual community focused on scholarship and the presentation of research on these same collections. Matthew Stickney did not go to university: he was born in Rowley, Massachusetts and educated in the public schools there. In his twenties, he headed south to Peabody and Salem and worked as a retailer of West India goods. Presumably he earned enough income to support his continuous collecting and then some: he retired in the 1850s and spent the next 40 years focusing on collecting and working at the Essex Institute. Mr. Stickney had a very good eye, but he was in good company too! He was a founding trustee, frequent contributor to its Proceedings, and according to his obituary, an “honored member” of the Institute who served as Librarian and Curator. I’ve seen the central role of the Essex Institute in fostering civic and scholarly engagement among Salem men and women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries time and time again. After the merger of the Institute and the Peabody Museum and the creation of the present Peabody Essex Museum in the early 1990s, I believe that the former’s historic role could have continued with the retention of its Phillips Library in Salem rather than its removal to a former factory in Stickney’s hometown of Rowley, but that just did not happen. The former buildings of the Essex Institute remain vacant, in the midst of busy Salem.

P.S. One blog post can’t do justice to the life and work of this man! For further research, the Stickney Family papers are located at the Phillips Library in Rowley, MA, of course.

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

September 29, 2026

Captain Lightfoot

By daseger

I was reading about the general lawlessness in England during the seventeenth century in general, and highwaymen in particular, when I asked myself: “I wonder if there were any highwaymen in colonial New England?” And then I immediately thought of New England’s most notorious highwayman, who of course has Salem ties: Captain Lightfoot! Born Michael Martin in Kilkenny County, Ireland, this colorful character served his brigand apprenticeship with John Doherty, aka Captain Thunderbolt, on the roads around Dublin before the situation became too hot and both emigrated to America. Martin arrived in Salem in June of 1819, spent a lengthy (for him—about a year) amount of time trying to earn an honest living working for Elias Hasket Derby, before returning to his life of crime on the roads of New England and bordering Canada. A brazen robbery in Medford, Massachusetts in the summer of 1821 led to a chase, his capture, trial, conviction, and execution under the newly-reinstated death penalty for highway robbery in December. In the months between his sentencing and execution, Martin offered up his “confessions” to Boston newspaperman Francis W. Waldo, and the result was a bestselling book, reprinted a century ago as the very first publication by George Francis Dow’s Wayside Press in Topsfield.

This book is a great read; I can understand why it was a bestseller. (You can read it yourself here, and the woodcut illustrations in this post are all from this edition). Martin is unapologetic and even entertaining in his confessions: they read like a stream of consciousness. About half of the book is dedicated to his life as a highwayman in Ireland and Scotland, then he’s off to America. While he may come off as a bit of an Irish patriot in the old country, in the new he is just dissolute. In Salem he tries to go straight, and obviously has a great deal of respect for Mr. Derby, but he just can’t stop himself from squandering his hard-earned money on frequent “blow outs” and then he is back to square one. After losing his job, he tried brewing in Salem and Portsmouth for a spell, but then was back to a life of lifting and robbing.

Martin “earned” and lost his passage back to Ireland several times over the next year or so, never to return. Salem definitely had a hold on him, because it was the location of a small Irish community with which remained in contact. He returned in August of 1821, determined to lay low following several conspicuous robberies up north, but nevertheless frequenting the taverns. Somehow, in the midst of intermittent blow outs, he caught wind of an upcoming dinner down in Medford at the home of Governor John Brooks, and thought that “there might be some fat ones among [the attendees].” He took off for Medford, was interrupted in his mission briefly when he ran into another of his countrymen from Salem and had to get reacquainted at a tavern, and then held up Major John Bray and his wife, who were returning home from the Governor’s dinner. Martin presented the pistol to Major Bray, demanded his money or his life, but swore that it was not cocked or loaded. Another point he wanted to emphasize was that when Mrs. Bray “began to conceal her watch-chain, I told her not to be uneasy—-that I never robbed ladies.” Neither detail worked towards his favor after his arrest or during his trial, and he was sentenced to death in October and executed in December.

Captain Lightfoot’s confessions seem to be pursuit of a folkloric outlaw status that I’m not sure he obtained in America: there was just too many moral objections to his unbridled lifestyle and there was nothing remotely Robin Hoodish about him. In Ireland, he was more of a rebel with a cause, and that is the theme of the W.R. Burnett novel Captain Lightfoot (1954) and its screen adaptation released in the following year starring Rock Hudson as the title character. In his final days, Michael Martin expressed concerns for his reputation back home, and I think he would be pleased by these twentieth-century depictions.

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Culture, History, 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.

19 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!

11 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