October 27, 2025

“Salem is not a Theme Park”

By daseger

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

Here’s my argument for.

Some definitions of a “theme park”:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

October 20, 2025

Limning the Local

By daseger

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 13, 2025

So much WOOD!

By daseger

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

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

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

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

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

October 6, 2025

Words or Pictures or Numbers?

By daseger

This post is about the work of a venerable but new-to-me graphic designer, Seymour Chwast, but before I get to him I have to explain how I got to him. If you have been reading the blog over the past year or so, you might have perceived that I have become mildly obsessed with two images associated with Salem: the official Salem City Seal with its Sumatran trader, now likely on its way out after 180 years or so, and more recently a cartoon cat mascot chosen by the Mayor of Salem and the Salem 400+ Committee to represent our city’s “unique identity” for our upcoming Quadricentennial. The discussion, and in the latter case lack thereof, over both images has been perplexing. I’ve written quite a bit about the seal, and was going to write more about the mascot, but I now realize that such efforts are a waste of time. These images, deemed rascist or representative or not, will stand or fall according to the whims of five or six or maybe 20 people at best. That’s how Salem works: the average person has very little power over matters of civic identity or branding (or anything else for that matter.) Nevertheless, it’s been so interesting exploring the power of images over the past year or so in various ways. As a Renaissance historian, I’ve always been aware of the complexity of images, but if you want to consider their power in the present, that brings you into the realm of graphic design, and so that brought me to Seymour Chwast, briefly. And then he popped into my consciousness again just last week when I was searching for an image of the Battle of Sluys for a powerpoint lecture on the Hundred Years War. The search led to a compelling image of a medieval naval battle which was not Sluys but rather Chwast’s depiction of the Battle of Zonchio in 1499, fought between Venice and the Ottoman Empire. This is just one of nine hand-colored linocut battle scenes, paired with literary quotes on the opposing page, included in Chwast’s 1957 folio A Book of Battles. 

Chwast is in his 90s and still working, I think: his career is too prolific and illustrious to summarize here but I will take a stab. Over six decades he has published all sorts of images and illustrations, individually and on behalf of the Push Pin Studios (now Group) the graphic design firm he co-founded in the 1954. From magazine covers to posters to corporate advertising to packaging to theatrical backdrops to his own publications: he has done it all. Chwast is the author of 30 childrens’s books and four graphic novels, and he is also a typeface designer! Chwast’s career is marked by his intent and ability to utilize design as a political force on many occasions, and one theme seems to run through much of his editorial work from the beginning: pacifism. This was certainly the inspiration for his Book of Battles, as the juxtapositions of images and words make clear.

And then, in 2017, a capstone (or maybe not yet) anti-war book, At War with War: 5000 Years of Conquests, Invasions, and Terrorist Attacks. An Illustrated Timeline. More striking graphics and literary excerpts, but a timeline too, which means numbers. The (red) numbers somehow make the illustrations all the more menacing, especially as we proceed into the (modern?) information age in which casualties can be marked along with dates. It all packs a powerful punch.

 

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

September 29, 2025

Schoolhouse to Outhouse

By daseger

I had some obligations here in Salem so could not leave the Witch City for the weekend, but I did spend yesterday driving around a little part of our county stopping in at open houses for the annual Essex Heritage Trails and Sails event series, which features an array of heritage, cultural and nature events over three weekends every September. I do not like my city during this time of year, but I love my county! I do believe that Essex County has the most colonial houses of any region in the US, and even though I’ve been driving around it for thirty-odd years, I’m always discovering new-to-me ones. I started out my Sunday trip with a visit to the old schoolhouse on Newbury’s Lower Green, restored for the Bicentennial and full of treasures, and ended it at the Samuel Holten House in Danvers right next door to Salem, which has the cutest outhouse ever.I have admired it for years, and always thought it was some sort of shed, but no, outhouse it is. In between, I saw several structures in Georgetown, including a great old tavern, the town’s oldest house, an old firehouse and another schoolhouse, and a former famous inn. The buildings were all great, but what I particularly like about these open houses are the passionate introductions of their stewards, who are so eager to showcase them. In these places, the stewards were representatives of the Newburyport Historic Commission, the Georgetown Historical Society, and the Daughters of the American Revolution.

An 1877 schoolhouse in Newbury.

 

Georgetown: the Brocklebank-Nelson-Beecher House and a few other structures.

 

Samuel Holten House in Danvers.

From these stewards, you’re going to learn a lot of lore and more. I learned that: literacy tests for voting were in place not only down South but also up here in the early 20th Century (the schoolhouse served as a polling place), Byfield, another village of Newbury, had lots of mills, and one still standing (I couldn’t find it), Georgetown had a little village in its midst called Marlborough as well as a trolley line, where the oldest house in Georgetown is (see above, dressed for Halloween), where the once-famous Bald Pate Inn is (see above), all about Patriot Samuel Holten, and that there was at least one enslaved person, named Cato, in his house (see under the eaves room above).

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

September 22, 2025

Escape to Old Newbury

By daseger

I had yet another “symbol trauma” (I have no other way to refer to it) on Friday when people starting sending me images of little anime cats with notes indicating that this was the new official mascot for Salem’s 400th commemoration, Salem 400+. Was this a joke? Apparently not. Here’s the press release text and the cat (in front of 1910 City Hall just to emphasize his/her official status).

Mayor Dominick Pangallo has announced an exciting new community engagment opportunity: a naming context for Salem 400+’s black cat mascot! Salem 400+ has unveiled a charming black cat character designed to strengthen the program’s connection with the community and celebrate Salem’s unique identity. Salem students in 3d through 8th grade have been invited to participate in naming this special mascot through a district-wide contest that opened a few weeks ago. “There was so much positive community spirit and creativity when it came to naming our new trash truck, Chicken Nugget, we wanted to open up this opportunity to our students as well, said Mayor Pangallo, “the Salem 400+ black cat will help represent Salem and this special moment, and we want our young students to be part of bringing it to life.” 

So of course engaging students in a naming contest is great but I’m sorry: the choice of this AI anime cat is not. He (or she—we don’t know yet!) is everything that Salem is not: superficial, generic, silly, not serious. I understand the political reality here (the Chicken Nugget roll-out was intense—it was very clear that whoever got in between the trash truck and a Salem politician was in trouble if photographers were nearby), but I’m just so tired of the triviality. There are always these gestures in Salem that go 3/4 of the way but never all the way: a Remond Park with incorrect information about where Salem’s 19th century African American residents actually lived, a Forten Park which loses Charlotte between gaudy installations and pirate murals. But this is a whole new dimension of dissing Salem history. Even my long-suffering husband, who has to hear me rant nearly every day, said wow. There’s nothing anyone can do but disengage, so when I woke up Saturday morning, I knew I had to get out of town. Fortunately it was a grand weekend of Revolutionary remembrance in Essex County, so up to Newburyport I went. It happened that this was the 250th anniversary of Benedict Arnold’s Quebec Expedition, in which Newburport played a large role. So I headed north, because even Benedict Arnold looked good to me.

The Quebec Expedition (I think the first poster is rather old) was a spectacular failure. With the new Continental Army ensconced in Cambridge, Colonel Arnold approached General Washington with the idea of an eastern invasion force aimed at Quebec City in concert with General Richard Montgomery’s western expedition from New York. Washington gave Arnold 1110 men, who sailed from Newburyport on September 19, 1775. Their destination was the mouth of the Kennebec River, from which they would progress upriver to Fort Western (Augusta, ME) after which they would navigate water, marsh and land to the Chaudiere and St. Lawrence Rivers and Quebec. They encountered so many difficulties along the way that ultimately a quarter of the regiment turned back (taking essential provisions with them), and Arnold arrived in Quebec with 600+ exhausted and starving men. A New Year’s Eve battle was a disastrous defeat, resulting in the death of General Montgomery, the injury of Arnold, and the capture of Captain Daniel Morgan and hundreds of his riflemen. Nevertheless, Arnold was promoted to Brigadier General for his leadership of the expedition. The weekend’s activities were definitely focused on Newburyport’s “early and ardent embrace of the Revolutionary cause” rather than on Arnold himself.

Everywhere I went in Newburyport and adjoining Newbury I ran into people engaged in their history: the celebration of a new plaque recognizing the patriots of Newburyport at the Old South Church (above), a parade of participants making their way down High Street following a reenactment of the 1775 dedication for departing troops at the nearby First Parish Church, glanced from the doorway of Historic New England’s Swett–Ilsley House after the guide and I paused our tour. The Museum of Old Newbury set out its revolutionary artifacts in the rooms of its 1808 Cushing House, including a reconstructed Newburyport rum jug taken out of the ground in shards amidst the “Great Carrying Place,” a 13-mile portage trail between the Kennebec and Dead Rivers through which Arnold and his men passed 250 years ago. Actually, the jug was on a brief loan to the Museum from the Arnold Expedition Historical Society and Old Fort Western Museum and Executive Director Bethany Groff Dorau drove up to Maine to retrieve it for just this commemorative weekend., but the Museum is full of its own treasures and I’ve featured just a few of my favorites below. I’m looking forward to going back, and back again.

Rooms and Collections at the Swett-Ilsley and Cushing Houses in Newbury and Newburyport: that’s a portrait of Lafayette leading into the south parlor at Cushing—what a punch they made for him when he visited in 1824! And I am obsessed with the c. 1786 portrait of the Reverend John Murray by Christian Gullager. Great Liverpool jugs! The Museum is the historical sociey of Newbury, Newburyport, and West Newbury, so its collections are vast and varied.

And on the way home, I encountered a handtub muster on Newbury upper common! What could be better? Just a perfect day away.

8 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Culture

September 15, 2025

A Colonial Revival Dining Room

By daseger

I wrote the chapter on Salem’s Colonial Revival movement in our forthcoming book Salem’s Centuries, an effort that I think was pretty ballsy given that I am neither an American historican or an art/architectural historian. You can be sure that I had both types of experts read it before submission and it has been peer-reviewed several times before publication! I felt confident because I took a biographical and cultural history approach, utilizing the work and lives of Salem exemplars Frank Cousins, Mary Harrod Northend, George Francis Dow, and Caroline Emmerton. They were all so respectful of Salem’s material heritage and more than a bit fearful of change. What we now label the Colonial Revival does seem to have been a movement in Salem, fueled as much (I think!) by nostalgia as by a desire to preserve, and its connections to the fledgling preservation movement in the early twentieth century are what interest me particularly. So while I have a sense of the Colonial Revival as a cultural movement, I am far from any aesthetic understanding, although I think I have made some strides in that direction by working at Historic New England’s Phillips House over these past two summers. The house’s dining room, in particular, a great example of the assertive effort of Salem and Boston architect William Rantoul to “marry” its later-19th century back to its Samuel McIntire front, has become my ideal Colonial Revival room. It all started with the alcove for me. I had seen Rantoul’s colleague and contemporary Arthur Little’s alcove in Caroline Emmerton’s house on Essex Street in person and in renderings (the cyanotype below is from a Little & Browne album in the collections of Historic New England), and it just seemed so Colonial-esque to me, so when I saw some semblance of an alcove in the Phillips’ dining room, it all made sense.

As you can see, Rantoul’s alcove is not nearly as enclosed as that of Little, but the former still carved out that space, removing a staircase for the symmetrical china cabinets and fireplace, delineated from the rest of the room by that strident ceiling moulding. He had modernized the systems for the Phillips after their purchase of the house in 1911: there was no need for that fireplace other than to enhance the “colonial” ambiance, which is also provided by the great Joseph Badger portrait of Phillips relative Thomas Mason (c. 1770-75) with his pet squirrel. I’m not even sure you would call this space an alcove, much less a nook, but it’s the semblence that creates the aura of the past in this large light-filled room.

Frankly this chair annoys me but I understand why it’s there.

Of course, the furnishings set the scene as well, and authors of decorating books from the teens and twenties always advised their readers that they should avoid placing items “of a set” if they were to attain that authentic Colonial look. It was relatively easy for the Phillips’, with their multi-generational wealth and trove of possessions from different places and times, to achieve the desired layered look. Their dining room seems to have attained the general “Colonial feeling” recommended by Helen Koues in her popular manual On Decorating the House (1928), in which the walls and woodwork are light in value, the furniture is mahogany or brown mahogany, silver is shown, and side lights or chandeliers may be in silver with glass prisms, or some fixture Colonial in feeling. Andirons and fireirons are of brass or brass and iron, and the china displayed is of Wedgwood in patterns of the eighteenth century. Of course, Stephen and Anna Phillips were both from old Salem maritime families, so their Wedgwood (and Limoges) is supplemented by a dazzling display of East Asian ceramics.

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

September 8, 2025

Houses are History

By daseger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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September 1, 2025

Fall Reading 2025

By daseger

The stars seem to have aligned and I am all set for a fall full of reading. Salem’s Centuries is in production (and out on January 6), my new saffron project hasn’t taken flight yet, and I have a course release for the semester. I’ve written two books in five years and now is the time to ingest. Escaping into book worlds is another way of avoiding my least favorite season in Salem as well. So I have a long list, already about a quarter devoured. As usual with my book lists, it’s very light on fiction, heavy on history, and reflective of the odd ephemeral interest. So let’s go: it will be interesting to see how I group these rather disparate texts.

I think I’ll start out with broad, cultural histories as they might have the most general appeal: I’m always reading “commodity histories” and this year will be no exception, but I have to tell you that Robert Hellyer’s Green with Milk and Sugar has a bit more depth and dimension than most books about tea—and there are a lot of books about this particular commodity. I had the difference between black and green teas down, but did not discern between different types of the latter (and their impact) until I read this very interesting book. Another important global commodity, sugar, has also received quite a bit of attention from scholars (beginning with Sidney Mintz’s classic Sweetness and Power) but the latest effort, the Dutch economic historian Ulbe Bosma’s World of Sugar, is supposed to be particularly comprehensive. I bought it last year but haven’t delved into it yet. Super excited to read Catland: how can it not be amazing? I’m not sure where to put Chanterelle Dreams, Amanita Nightmares, a book I discovered in the gift shop of the Coastal Maine Botanical Garden a few weeks ago solely for its title (+ lore), in this post so I guess I’ll put it here: it is kind of a broad cultural history of human perceptions of muchrooms. It’s also very much a “pick up and read a bit” book.

I find that I am reading new books on the Atlantic Slave Trade regularly because we are in the midst of a golden age of research into the history of this terrible trade and provocative analyses of its cascading impacts are published every year.  Traders in Men and Plantation Goods are on my fall list but I should have read them this summer, in advance of teaching my Introduction to European History course. Instead, I had a “Roman interlude” prompted by a re-reading of Suetonius’s Twelve Ceasars last spring. So two half-read Roman books are on my fall list too: a very accessible history by Anthony Barrett about Emperor Nero and the burning of Rome and a book by Roland Mayer about Roman ruins which is more about later perceptions of Rome than Rome itself. The Mayer book probably belongs with the broad cultural history books above. I have started Traders in Men and Plantation Goods (as you will discern by now, I read books in phases, concurrently with other books, a habit I’ve been trying to break but cannot) and my assessment so far would be: both very important and well-sourced studies, with Plantation Goods probably more accessible as it focuses on the basic. It is very much a “material history.”

There are several books which were recently published in my scholarly fields which now sit beside my bed in a stack: first up is Inventing the Renaissance and then we have two books on major late Tudor/Jacobean players: George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, and Robert Cecil. I’ll read these for myself, but also to discern whether or not I’ll assign them to students. Stephen Alford (author of All His Spies)’s previous book, London’s Triumph, was a big hit among my grad students this past summer. I suspect that Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance will be great for historiographical discussions in both undergrad and grad courses. And because it was set in my period and in an interesting period in Mary, Queen of Scots’ life, I actually read a novel all the way through this summer: Flora Carr’s The Tower.

Finally, books on more topical interests which are preoccuping me constantly and/or currently. I’m always interested in architecture, and I read one book this summer which I loved: Thomas Heatherwick’s Humanise (it’s spelled Humanize in its American edition but I prefer the British one’s cover). I don’t think many architects like this book as it is quite critical of contemporary architecture not so much on the basis of design but of craftsmanship. Heatherwick has provoked a reaction among architects in the UK (I’m not sure about here) as he is not an architect himself and does not hold back on characterizing much present-day building as both soul-crushing and soulless (generally because it is so boring) and has launched a campaign to bring joy and craftsmanship back to construction. He’s a real crusader! I’ve been interested in the urban planning idea of the “15-minute city” for a while, so I picked up Shrink the City to learn more about it. The whole idea of meeting all your needs within a 15-minute radius could work for a city with the infrastructure of Salem, but not if we continue our comprehensive commitment to witchcraft tourism, which has resulted in a multitude of witch shops replacing those selling clothing and groceries. As this past year I seem to have become preoccupied with symbols and emblems, first because of the ongoing discussion over the Salem city seal and more recently by the dumbing-down of the Massachusetts state seal and flag, I’ve really been searching more insights into visual culture and graphic design. It’s like another language which I don’t understand. One book that has really helped me is the classic Megg’s History of Graphic Design, but I welcome suggestions. I have yet to find a thoughtful or even interesting book on vexillology.

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August 25, 2025

Up North for a Spell

By daseger

Sorry for the longer time between posts; I generally try (and succeed!) to post once a week but I was on vacation up in Maine and forgot my power cord, which might have been a good thing. I had my Fall Reading List all ready to post, but now I think I’ll save that for next week and just post my Maine pictures this week. We were based in East Boothbay on the Mid Coast, where we have been very casually house-hunting for a summer house. That was supposed to be the mission of this week as well but really it was just a family vacation as both my parents and my brother and brother-in-law joined us, along with a friend from Salem. We had a big beautiful farmhouse right on the water with spectacular sunsets each night. Great New England Summer weather; none of the swampy heat we’ve had in Massachusetts for most of the summer. I had my very first visit to Monhegan Island, which as inspired artists for generations. The other highlight, at least for me, was a visit to one of the National Park Service’s newest monuments, the Frances Perkins homestead in Newcastle. And the capstone was a oyster farming tour of the Damariascotta River given by my stepson Allen, who works at Muscongus Bay in nearby Edgecombe. Just a great week! Posting vacation pictures is definitely low-effort blogging, but I hope you’ll forgive me as I am now in the dreaded syllabus week before the beginning of the semester.

“Our” House with view and sunsets; around East Boothbay.

I could not resist putting my husband John’s lobster pasta in here as he seems to be on a lifelong quest to create the perfect lobster pasta and this was very good!

The Frances Perkins National Monument in Newcastle, with the sign that greeted us in the parking lot!

Maine is very intertwined with Canada, and I heard concerns about few Canadian visitors everwhere I went: given the hostile rhetoric from our President, it was nice to see this welcoming sign. Frances Perkins was a fierce social justice warrior and the first female cabinet member in U.S. history who served as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor throughout his terms. She was integral to the passage of Social Security. This house along the Damariascotta River was in her family for over 250 years: though she was not raised here (her father moved south to Massachusetts for more opportunities, leaving her uncle to carry on the farm) she visited it often. It became a National Historic Landmark in 2014, and President Biden signed its official designation as an NPS Monument in December of 2024. It was quite poignant to visit this place given events recent and past, and there were quite a few people there—-hopefully Americans and Canadians! After we left the Perkins homestead, we drove out to Pemaquid Point, and this is the best picture I have ever taken of that locale so I had to include it.

Monhegan Island. I can’t believe I have never been there but now I have.

Monhegan is just one of thousands of Maine islands, but it is very storied. About ten miles and an hour and a half off the mainland, it’s about a mile in acreage, divided into a small village and lots of forest. Except for an unfortunate experience with sheep, the islanders seem to have been very intent with their land and pursuits, and the result is a very pictorial islandscape which has been captured by a succession of artists for more than a century. I absolutely loved the Monhegan Museum of Art & History, which blended art and history in nearly every exhibit: seemingly there was always an artist around to create posters for lighthouses (Alexander Parris), tea gardens, and baseball games (Frederic Dorr Steele), along with door panels (Karl Schmidt) and tea cups (Rockwell Kent). I could not leave out the lobster claw composition.

Oyster Farming on the Damariascotta River:

My stepson Allen got permission from his boss at Muscongus Bay Aquaculture to take us on a river tour at their Newcastle farm–just down the road from the Frances Perkins Homestead. It was fascinating, and this is seems like such an important industry for Maine (and all of coastal New England I think) right now: the neighboring Glidden Point farm was just featured in an article in the New York Times, and an oyster farmer is running against Senator Susan Collins in the upcoming election. I captured several “oystermobiles” as I drove around, but the one on Georgetown Island in the last photo above is the best.

Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay. The one cloudy day we had was perfect for pictures.

Lots of late summer color and the famous trolls–very popular but I did manage to get a few alone.

7 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in New England, Travel