September 23, 2024

Salem Can’t Lose Sumatra

By daseger

I’m still thinking and reading about Salem’s endangered city seal, so this is Part II of last week’s post. I promise there will be no part III (at least for a while) as I think I have resolved my feelings about this little scrap of paper, wood, or metal, which links past and present in very interesting ways. My present stance is: Salem can’t lose Sumatra. Let me first recap the issue and bring us up to date, as I was a bit sketchy in last week’s post about how we got here. Certain members of the Salem community find the figure on the 1839 seal, representing an early 19th century dignitary from the Aceh Province of Sumatra, offensive, and appealed to the city’s Race Equity Commission. This commission approved a recommendation to the City Council to redesign the seal unaminously in August. I don’t think there was any public awareness of this issue at the time (or much now, although there was an article in the Salem News last week). Thankfully, somewhere between the Race Equity Commission and the City Council emerged the idea of a task force, I think from the Mayor’s office, and that is what the City Council will be voting on this week. I am grateful that a public process is being considered, although I have yet to ascertain whether the task force will be a true gauge of public opinion or a rubber stamp.

I believe that this seal is unique in its provincial (vs. generic “oriental”) depiction and its global perspective for reasons I laid out in last week’s post. I subscribe to my former colleagues Dane Morrison’s and Nancy Schultz’s assertion that the aged Salem City Seal can still represent a relatively new cosmopolitanism in American Studies, as outlined in the preface to their authoritative volume on Salem history, Salem: Place, Myth and Memory. 

      “After Salem was incorporated in 1836, 210 years after its founding, the community imagined by city leaders was a much more globally connected entity than conventional histories have depicted. They called for a city motto, Divitis Indiae usque ad ultimum sinum—“To the farthest ports of the rich East”—that served as a reminder of Salem’s intimate connections with the trade of China, India, and Sumatra, the pepper-rich island in the South Pacific. The city council commissioned a design by pepper ship owner George Peabody to represent Salem’s global connections. It portrays an Atjehnese man, surrounded by palm trees and a pepper plant, holding a parasol to shade himself from the hot Sumatran sun, and wearing traditional attire—a flat red turban, red trousers and belt, a yellow kneelength robe, and a blue jacket—common to the Atjeh province of the island. In the background, a Salem vessel, with sails unfurled, navigates the harbor. Filling out the emblem are compass rose motifs and the image of a dove bearing an olive branch. The Salem City Seal may be read as text that illustrates this new direction in American Studies, offering a fresh way to envision cannections, not just between the local and the national, but also among the local, national, and global.”

Dane’s and Nancy’s preface, which is part of their instruction for students and teachers, instructed me to investigate the American meaning of the Salem-Sumatra connection, and boy did I find a lot! (and I’m sure there’s a lot more, but I actually have to work—when I found myself in the digital archives of the State Department at 2:00 in the morning I made myself stop). There are a lot of well-known facts: Sumatran-supplied pepper made Salem the 6th largest city in the US and its import duties 5% of the nation’s gross revenues, for example. There’s also well-known lore: so many Salem ships plied the Sumatran coast that the island’s residents thought SALEM was a country. But there’s much more. In 1905, the Merchant Marine Commission released a report to Congress with a striking summary statement that “only 10% of our vast seaborne commerce is now conducted in American ships” and a comparison from a century earlier, when that percentage was 91%. In the syndicated news stories that followed, published in newspapers across the country, Salem represented the earlier golden age of commerce when her pepper ships ruled the seas and transformed both the city and the nation. All of these stories featured the “romantic” narrative of Salem’s pepperdom, but they were also looking for lessons from the past—and equating Salem’s pepper ships with America’s merchant marine.

Then there are a succession of presidential references to Salem’s pepper trade and traders: daring free agents in a world of expanding European empires. This was the party line of presidents as diverse as James Monroe, Andrew Jackson (of course, he was very proud of his naval intervention in retaliation for a native attack on a Salem ship), Franklin Pierce, Zachary Taylor, William McKinley (a big jump!), Franklin Roosevelt, and most of all, John F. Kennedy. Kennedy clearly loved the Salem-Sumatra story: he referenced it when President Sukarno of Indonesia visited the US in 1961 and whenever he happened to be in a town or city called Salem.

Then-Senator Kennedy identified the image as an “Indian,” indicating that the Seal’s figure did not have an localized identification then as well as now. But the emphasis on “people of courage” still rings true, I think. His different Salem variations are interesting, but they all go back to Salem, Massachusetts, the connecting link between east and all the different wests. It would be so sad to lose this Salem, to a sanitized version of a witch’s hat (!!!!) or even the Custom House. We would be going back, I think, back to the provincial and away from the worldly. I am not of Asian descent, nor am I a politician or a human resources professional or a graphic designer so I have none of those perspectives: this is just one historian’s view: Salem can’t lose Sumatra.

P.S. I’ve had a lot of emails and read comments elsewhere…..yes, I too am struck by our city government’s lack of awareness about the contradiction between the perceived stereotype of the Sumatran city seal and the obvious stereoptype of the Witch, Salem’s other official city seal (or patch?), and plan to write about this in a future post. Every single Witch Trial descendant who I know or have heard from is offended by this image, but their outrage, our outrage, has no representation or redress.

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

September 16, 2024

The Salem City Seal

By daseger

Last week, the Salem City Seal was an agenda item for a meeting of our City Council: apparently there are concerns about its representation and plans for its replacement. I don’t know much more than that, as I wasn’t able to attend the Council meeting or any of the previous subcommittee meetings that have brought us to this point. The Council sent the matter to another subcommittee, I believe, so hopefully a public process of deliberation will ensue. I do think it is appropriate and even useful for a community to reconsider past representations on seals, statues, and other expressions of collective heritage or identity, as long as those conversations are public, so I’m hoping to contextualize this discussion a bit. I’m also kind of curious about the history and reception of our city seal myself, as it always struck me as rather unusual. So I spent a few hours this past weekend digging into some primary and secondary sources—certainly not long enough! What follows is certainly an impressionistic history and a work in progress, but first, here IT is:

So as you can see, there are some variations of this image. The first seal is the official one, which I have taken from the city’s website, and it is accompanied by this description:

The City Seal was adopted as the insignia of the City in March 1839, three years after Salem was incorporated as a City and 213 years after its founding. The Seal depicts a ship under full sail approaching a coastal land in the East Indies. A native inhabitant in traditional garb stands in the middle, surrounded by plants of the region. A dove sits atop the scene, with an olive branch in its mouth. The City motto, “Divitis Indiae usque ad ultimum sinum” – “To the farthest port of the rich East” – is below. The Seal is ringed by the incorporation dates of both the Town of Salem, 1626, and the City of Salem, 1836.

The second seal is also from City Hall: I think it’s the watercolor image produced by Salem artist Ross Turner but the city’s art inventory is not very descriptive. An article in the Beverly Citizen from the spring of 1888 informs us that “Mr. Ross Turner, the artist, has made an interesting and handsome study of the city seal of Salem, designed half a century ago by Colonel George Peobody, who is still living. Mr. Turner adheres to the original design, which has suffered a great deal at the hands of engravers and others.” The third and fourth images are from a pediment carved for the President of State Street Bank which came up at auction a few years ago and the last is from a really fun book, Town and City Seals of Massachusetts by Allan Forbes and Ralph Eastman, which was published in 1950. If you browse through this last book, it’s immediately apparent how unusual the Salem seal is: it’s the only one recognizing a foreign identity and region as integral to the history of the city/town. Every other seal has a recognizable landmark or person or industry from that place—there are quite a few ships but Salem’s is the only one on the other side of the globe! I think it’s one of the oldest seals in the book, too: Massachusetts called for every town and city to come up with a seal only in 1899, when Salem’s was recognized as “ancient.”

The designer of the original seal in the 1830s was George Peabody, son of the wealthiest pepper trader in Salem, Joseph Peabody, and a city alderman. There were deliberations before its acceptance and commission, LOTS of deliberations due to “diversity of opinion”: you can read all about them in the March 1866 volume of the Historical Collections of the Essex Institute. There seems to have been universal agreement that the seal was to represent two things: Salem’s unrivalled prosperity and Salem as City of Peace. Given Peabody’s background, it’s understandable that he chose to depict the personage of a distinctly East Indian man from the Aceh province of Sumatra rather than a more generic “Eastern” figure: this region was the source of the pepper which had enabled Salem’s commercial ascendancy. Joseph Peabody alone is credited with 61 voyages (6.3% ot the total trade)  to Sumatra alone from 1802-1844, and 100 voyages (or 10%) with his son-in-law John Lowell Gardner): this was the family business. The pepper trade was also Salem’s major business between 1799 and 1846, with 179 ships engaged on multiple voyages. The 1866 account of the Salem seal’s approval concluded that “it was her shipping, fitly typified by this design, carrying the fame of her merchants as well as the flag of the country into unknown  areas, that made her name in the first half of this century, a synonym for commercial honor, enterprise and success, throughout the other hemisphere as well as this.”  The second theme of the seal, peace, symbolized by the dove bearing an olive branch, is a bit more of a tough sell in this specific historical context, given the fact that the 1830s was the decade which saw two U.S. military interventions in Sumatra in retaliation for native attacks on American shipping. The connection between peace and commercial prosperity was often emphasized in early nineteenth century newspaper accounts as it was very clear to everyone that Salem’s era of prosperity began after the American Revolution. The pepper trade had been a dangerous one from its beginnings at the turn of the century, but the 1831 attack on the Salem ship Friendship certainly brought things to a head with the first Sumatram intervention, often referred to as the “Battle of Qualah Battoo” (now Kuala Batee) in the following year. The broadside below (from the Phillips Library’s digitized collection) is representative of the “war fever” of the era, but it was printed in Portland, Maine rather than Salem. The Salem accounts are a little less “patriotic” and a lot more detailed: they note the precise number and names of those who were killed or wounded (five and six rather than “all”), everything that was taken, and call for restitution.

George Peabody’s seal was designed a mere four or five years after this engagement, and both his family and his city wanted to continue this valuable trade. When I look at this solitary Sumatran, I tend to identify him with Peabody family friend Po Adam, a local dignitary who warned the Americans about the coming attack on the Friendship and helped them recover their ship. This was a sacrifice on his part: he wrote to Joseph Peabody afterwards that his acts had earned him the “hatred and vengeance of my misguided countrymen” and that “the last of my property was set on fire and destroyed, and now, for having been the steadfast friend of the Americans, I am not only destitute, but an object of derision.” This identification is only conjecture on my part, but the original figure on the Salem seal was certainly more respectful recreation than stereotypical figure. The connection between Sumatra and Salem endured through the nineteenth century into the twentieth, even into the twenty-first. It was referenced in regard to the new (well not really) heritage trail or “yellow line” just a few years ago, and much more significantly after the terrible 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, when relief efforts on the North Shore were organized in deference to the “old ties” between Massachusetts and Sumatra. Almost 20 years later, it seems like these ties are broken, or about to be.

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

September 9, 2024

The Play’s the Thing

By daseger

I’ve always been curious about the local impact of the various initiatives of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s, and when I first looked into Salem’s experience I didn’t find much. Then I found more WPA projects, and published a mea culpa post. And now I think that the WPA program which had the biggest impact on Salem was the ambitious Federal Theater Project (FTP), which ran from 1935-39. The FTP had a dual mission: to provide work to unemployed actors and theater professionals by funding perfomances across the country and to engage a larger and more diverse audience for an art form that had been impacted dramatically not only by the Depression but also by the rise of the film industry. At its height, the FTP employed around 12,000 people and it subsidized 1200 productions over its four-year run, including a whole season of new plays performed in the Empire Theater in Salem. At the outset, Boston had been chosen as one of the regional centers of the FTP, but there were censorship challenges (“banned in Boston”) that affected productions there, so after a rocky first season in 1936-1937, Salem was chosen as the site of the second season’s offerings, and 26 plays were performed at the Empire in 1937-38. The FTP was conspicuous from its foundation for the perceived “radical” messaging of some of its plays, and while it’s difficult to think of Puritan Salem as more progressive than Brahmin Boston, that seems to have been the case in the 1930s!

All the posters above are from the Federal Theater Project collection at the Library of Congress, which also includes programs and other materials. Many of these plays, mounted weekly as you can see, were really big productions, with sizable casts and crew, and the programs indicate that Salem businesses also contributed to the production: furniture, flowers and textiles for the sets, food for the performers and stagehands. These performances (161 over the entire season!) must have been a boost to the entire community, which was also able to attend the performances at discounted prices.  The FTP also included the Negro Theater Project, specifically focused on providing employment for African American actors, stagehands and playwrights, who were part of several Salem productions. The Empire Theater was full for all five nights of each production throughout the season, and the popularity of the FTP productions in Salem led to the production of two world premieres as well as its selection as one of only four cities across the US (with Detroit, San Diego, and Des Moines) to feature Bernard Shaw’s popular play Arms and the Man. Through the dark days of the Depression in Salem, the Empire Theater, “home of the spoken drama,” was providing quite a bit of light in that one busy year.

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

September 2, 2024

Revolutionary Remembrance

By daseger

Even more so than usual, this Labor Day weekend seemed like the end of summer to me. Actually, not just the end, but the finale. This was quite a productive summer, even though I didn’t really produce anything: there were more edits on Salem’s Centuries and the new experience of working as a guide at Historic New England’s Phillips House, but what I was really focused on was Salem’s experience of the American Revolution. I read really widely on this topic, and learned a lot: I honestly don’t think I’ve read as much history since graduate school. It actually felt like graduate school, but without the pressure. As I say all the time on this blog, I’m not an American historian, so to truly understand historical forces at work at any time in Salem’s history, I have to get up to speed by going through both the classic texts as well as more recent studies. For a topic as big as the AMERICAN REVOLUTION, “background” is going to involve reading a lot of books, and so I did. At the beginning of the summer, all I wanted was to understand Salem’s role as provincial capital during the summer of 1774, but I couldn’t really grasp that without some understanding of the forces (and people!) at play in British America in general and Massachusetts in particular during the period between the close of the Seven Years’ War and the Boston Tea Pary. I would finish one book on this era with the realization that I had to read two or three or four more. I had questions which led to more questions. And it was all so PERSONAL: I had to figure out all the networks as well. My “revolutionary Salem summer” reading project was also personal, but it had public validation: Massachusetts has been in revolution-commemoration mode for a while thanks to the efforts and organzation of Revolution250  so there were regional events all summer long and this is also the bicentennial year of the (General) Marquis de Lafayette’s triumphant return tour of the United States, an anniversary marked by a succession of reenactments in the towns and cities which he visited originally, including Salem this very weekend. For an early modern European historian, this kind of synchronicity seldom happens!

Waiting for the General/ Marquis at a Red, White, and Blue Picnic in Chestnut Street Park—in this last photo, a very chill cat on a leash captured everyone’s attention, especially this regency toddler!

Lafeyette arrived in Salem around 2:00 pm, there were formal welcomes and speeches and a few photo ops, and then he was on his way. This was a busy day for the Marquis/General: it started in Chelsea, and then he visited Marblehead, Salem, Beverly and ended up in Ipswich—just like August 31, 1824. This was a very enjoyable event, co-sponsored by nearly all of the non-witchy nonprofits of Salem: Hamilton Hall, The Salem Athenaeum, The Phillips House, and the Pickering House, as well as Essex Heritage and the Creative Collective, and the colorful assistance of the Danvers Alarm List Company. The 1824 tour of “the Nation’s Guest” was marked by a spirited public exuberance which sustained and even rekindled memories of the American Revolution; let’s hope this Bicentennial tour can do the same! If it does, it will be in large part due to the efforts of the American Friends of Lafayette, an organization which has been cultivating the General’s character and contributions since 1932. Even though it was just one pitstop on a long day for Lafayette in 1824, the preparations in Salem were detailed and complex: you can see John Remond’s catering accounts at the Phillips Library and read all about the lengthy cavalcade here. And Salem was not alone: for comparison’s sake (and to get inspired for this weekend), I went to see the Lexington Historical Society’s small exhibition, “The President and the General,” last week. While some of the exhibits clearly belonged to another time, others clearly have resonance in our own, like the banner that boldly states LIBERTY.

Couldn’t quite capture the T & the Y! An allegorical image of Lafayette returning to France with founding-father protectors; ribbon/sash, invitation, banners from the 1824 tour, Lexington Historical Society.

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

August 26, 2024

The Best Historical Series, Period.

By daseger

A newish friend of mine was going in for knee surgery a few weeks ago, to be followed by a period of still convalescence. She was preparing by assembling a stack of bedside books and a playlist of videos to stream, and so we were discussing her choices. They were all titles that I would have chosen for myself, but something was missing, so I piped up: what about North and South? I braced myself for the typical reaction whenever I mention this series, which is the 1980s miniseries about the Civil War with Patrick Swayze? YOU like that, Donna? But my friend smiled broadly and said she loved that series too and proceeded to talk about THE North and South, the 2004 BBC series based on Elizabeth Gaskill’s popular novel. And then we were off: she was pleased that she had someone to talk about this amazing four-part series, as was I. While North and South has an enthusiastic following in the the UK even 20 years after its broadcast, I rarely run into someone who has even seen it here in the US. We ran through our favorite scenes and our mutual admiration for leading actor Richard Armitrage joyfully. North and South is THE best period miniseries, even better than than that universal favorite, the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice (Colin Firth emerging from the lake!) in my humble opinion.

Actually, North and South is often compared to Pride and Prejudice in terms of their storylines and characters: both are romances between two people from different places and backgrounds who form first impressions which serve as an obstacle to their seemingly-inevitable union. But North and South is set decades later in Great Britain, in the midst of the Industrial Revolution and the early days of unionization, so its leading characters Margaret Hale (Daniela Denby-Ashe) and John Thornton (Armitrage) are much more engaged in the world around them than Elizabeth and Darcy. Margaret is a displaced young woman who is always reaching out: she has spent her entire life in the beautiful village of Helstone in the south of England, the only child of the local vicar and his more retiring wife. Her father loses his comfortable position because of his spiritual differences with the Church of England (he seems to have become a Unitarian) and so the entire family is forced to move north to the stark and colorless industrial city of Milton, a stand-in for Gaskill’s Manchester. They have the perfect Tudor vicarage in the South, and are reduced to a somewhat shabby townhouse in the North, with the Revolution right outside their door. There is no escape.

Everything in the South is filtered sunlight, golden green and fuzzy; everything in the North is gray yet still vivid. But, Margaret is not one to pout: she walks around her new city in her flat brown frisbee hat every day. That hat, it’s like the symbol of the series! (actually there are several–brown, black, and another of some indeterminate drab color)  She meets new people, and Milton seems to aquire more color the longer she is there (that’s another thing—the cinematography in North and South is amazing; it doesn’t look dated at all; whereas Pride and Prejudice definitely wears its age). Margaret’s mother (played by the great Lesley Manville) is “delicate” and miserable; her father (Tim Piggott-Smith) is quite naive, so their daughter has to step up and be practical in securing them a home and this is how she encounters both a cotton factory and its owner, John Thornton, at the same time. Her first view (and ours) of Thornton is not positive: he is beating one of his workers who is smoking amidst all that cotton, which is literally floating around in the air. I can’t imagine anything more dangerous than smoking in a Victorian cotton mill so I immediately excused him, but Margaret does not. There are other factors that keep them apart throughout the four episodes: her class and his awareness of it, her ignorance of “northern” manners, her increasing interest and intervention in the working conditions of the mill workers after she befriends the Higgins family (Brendan Coyle of Downton Abbey and Anna Maxwell-Martin of Death at Pemberley) and his role as the BOSS. But all will give way, eventually.

There are a lot of losses: Margaret loses both of her parents and her good friend Bessy Higgins; John loses the mill. In between all these setbacks, the plot becomes more focused on their relationship but we’re still very aware that they live in a world of dynamic change. A scene at the Great Exhibition of 1851 is a good reminder of this change, but I also took it as as a bit of foreshadowing for national, regional, and personal unity. It takes a while to gauge Margaret’s feelings because she’s not sure of her feelings, but increasingly, John wears his heart on his sleeve: he proposes, is rebuffed, is convinced that his lack of gentility is the reason, yet still pines for her. Armitrage is just a cauldron: you can feel his energy, agitation, desire and disappointment. Even his walk is magnetic. To my American ear, he’s got the perfect Northern British accent, and his fiercely-proud mother (played by Sinéad Cusack) an even better one. When Margaret returns to the South, he stares at her departing carriage and wills her to look back, and then goes South himself, to her former home in Helstone where he snips a flower and puts it in his pocket (Zuzu’s petals!) He is not looking for her, he believes it is over but wants to wallow in his feelings in a very forthright way for a bit longer. Eventually Margaret finds her way North again (after rebuffing yet another marriage proposal and inheriting a fortune from her father’s friend), while John is on his southern indulgence tour. Their trains meet at the same stop, and we are treated to a glorious, very romantic, ending in the perfect Victorian setting: a train platform. It’s so perfect.

Off with her hat and northward!

I envy all first-time watchers!

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

August 19, 2024

Quick About Their Business

By daseger

So I’m going back to the revolutionary summer of 1774, when Salem served as provincial capital and (with Marblehead) port of entry, Boston’s punishment for its Tea Party. Salem had a strong Tory contingent, but I think the Whigs were stronger: they prevented the new royal governor, General Thomas Gage, from even residing in the new capital. He was compelled to find housing in nearby Danvers, from where he issued a succession of proclamations, including one which prohibited “illegal combinations”. Once the Massachusetts Government Act came into effect on August 1, his power was increased dramatically: councillors previously chosen by election were now appointed by him, and town meetings could only occur with his call. Bristling under this royal representative, the most illegal of combinations, the various committees of correspondence across Massachusetts, called for county conventions to be held in September, and (illegal) town meetings to elect representatives to said conventions. This is the background to an incredible meeting that was held in Salem on August 24, right under General Gage’s watch. This notice from the Essex Gazette of August 16 represents the tensions in town: the 59th regiment were camped out at Salem Neck ready to defend Gage and royal prerogatives, and Salem’s Patriots were referring to those men who accepted appointments to the new Royal Council as “Sworn Enemies to the Sacred Rights of the good People of this Province.”

As you see, the view of the Patriots was that Lord North’s new assemblies were “unconstitutional,” and thus they went about forming their own. Shortly after the “Sacred Rights” piece was published, handbills appeared in public places in Salem, published under the auspices of the town’s Committee of Correspondence, asking the “merchants, freemen, and other inhabitants of Salem” to meet at the Town House Chamber on August 24 for the purpose of appointing deputies to the upcoming Ipswich Convention “to consider of and determine on such  as the late Acts of Parliament and our grievances render necessary.” Governor Gage issued a responsive proclamation on August 23. Thereby forbidden to meet, Salem’s Patriots met anyway, and were clearly ready to meet with any “ill consequences.”

On the next day, members of the Committee of Correspondence were summoned to a meeting with Governor Gage at 9:00 in the morning, but the town meeting had already assembled an hour before. Gage (whose office seems to have been literally two doors down from the Town House) ordered them to call it off, but it had already begun, and was essentially concluding while the conversation next door continued (despite Gage’s assertion that he was “not going to enter into a Conversation on the matter; I came to execute the Laws not dispute them”). The town meeting elected Richard Derby Jr., John Pickering, Jonathan Ropes, Timothy Pickering, Jonathan Gardner, and Richard Manning Jr. to represent the town at the Ipswich Convention in September and promptly adjourned. And thus a well-run meeting—and time management–had prevented a potential conflict, as two companies of the 59th Regiment of Foot encamped at Salem Neck were marching towards downtown Salem that very morning.

Gage ordered the 59th to return to camp, but on the following day the Governor had apparently resolved that this resistance required a response and so ordered Peter Frye, a well-known Loyalist and county Judge, to arrest the leaders of the Committee of Correspondence on charges of “unlawfully and seditiously causing the People to assemble without leave from the Governor, etc..” Two men posted bail upon their arrest, but the remaining five refused to recognize the legality of their arrests and threatened Gage with consequences of their own. This was no longer a local matter; given the rationale for the unprecedented town meeting, it really never was, but these particular proceedings brought forth “upwards of three thousand men” who converged on Salem from surrounding Essex County, “with full determination to rescue the Committee if they should be sent to prison, even if they were oblig’d to repel force with force, being sufficiently provided for such a purpose.” Both the Judge and the Governor backed down: “His Excellency has suspended the matter at Salem by dropping the prosecution. Seeing them resolute and the people so determinate, he was willing to give up a point rather than push matters to extremities” wrote Boston Merchant John Andrews to his brother-in-law in Philadelphia. The Governor could abandon rebellious Salem, and he did by the end of the month, but Peter Frye could not: his property and family were fully vested in a town that seemed to resent him fiercely. Despite his public apology and expressed “hope to be restored to that Friendship and Regard with my Fellow-Citizens and Countrymen which I heretofore enjoyed,” Andrews reported that “Colonel Frye, of Salem … has resigned all his posts of honor and profit. Indeed necessity obliged him to, as he and his family were in danger of starving; for the country people would not sell him any provisions, and the inhabitants……. dare not procure him any” in early September. And a month later, when another “illegal” assembly was convening in Salem, Frye’s Essex Street properties were torched, igniting the Great Salem Fire of 1774. Salem was a tinderbox, to be sure.

Peter Frye, one of Salem’s most conspicuous Tories (Portraits in the Essex Institute) and the consequences he suffered.

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

August 12, 2024

Nancy Drew & the Peabody Sisters of Salem

By daseger

What do a fictional detective and three very real women of mid-nineteenth century Salem have in common? Well, books have been written about them, and in certain editions of these books there are silhouette endpapers. That’s it, that’s the post. Well not really, there’s a bit more I want to say but mostly I want to show. When I was a girl my very favorite books after my Black Beauty and Little House on the Prairie phases were Nancy Drew mysteries. I had a whole bunch and always wanted more. Most of my Nancy Drews were later editions—1960s and 1970s I think—and they weren’t great- looking books to tell you the truth. Nancy was on the cover, in whatever setting she was dealing with in that volume, and inside were some boring oval portraits. So I didn’t really think about the books at all, just Nancy. Then someone gave me an older book, it must have been one of the first editions of the series, and inside were these amazing endpapers of orange silhouettes! I remember distinctly thinking at the time, wow, older is better, older is (more vivid, more creative, more rare, more CRAFTED) better. So then I wanted more older Nancy Drews, of course, Nancy Drew BOOKS, not just Nancy Drews. I had also become more concious of what a book was as an object, or I should say simply conscious. So I sought out the orange silhouette endpapers (and found some more red than orange), then black ones, which came a bit later, and then finally “the diggger” depictions which are not quite silhouettes but still cool.

My Nancy Drew endpaper obsession continued on for quite some time, but I progressed to other books, including Louise Hall  Tharp’s Peabody Sisters of Salem, about Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody of Salem, who had interesting Salem childhoods with their teacher parents and led quite engaging adult lives.. Elizabeth was an early childhood education pioneer and Transcendentalist, Mary was also very focused on educational reform, and wrote several books, though she is perhaps best known as the second wife of the “father of public education” Horace Mann. Sophia was an artist before her marriage to her fellow Salemite Nathaniel Hawthorne. (Sophia always seemed like the least interesting of the three sisters to me, but as she was married to Hawthorne she gets more attention). A more scholarly book on the Peabody sisters was published by Megan Marshall in 2005, but my heart belongs to the Tharp book, which I read and reread as a teenager. I was captivated by her ability to capture the sisters’ world (s), and I’ve always had a rather undistinguished copy in my bedside bookshelf. But last month, I came across a special sleeved 1980 Book of the Month Club/The American Past edition online, and promptly purchased it (books in sleeves are always a treat). When it arrived, I was thrilled to see its beautiful Salem-silhouette cover, but inside, a big surprise: endpaper silhouettes of the entire Peabody family! Apparently these are from a selection of  “Dr. Nathaniel Peabody & Family. Profiles drawn from life Nov. 8, 1835” in the collection of the former Essex Institute/current Peabody Essex Museum. I just love them: a special summer surprise.

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in books, Culture, Salem

August 5, 2024

The Bowman House

By daseger

We were vacationing in midcoast Maine last week so I took the opportunity to visit Historic New England’s newest property, the Bowman House, with a few friends. We also saw the nearby Pownalborough Court House, which is one of the most extraordinary Colonial buildings I have ever encountered. The Bowman House is in Dresden, right on what was a very busy Kennebec River short at the time of its construction in the mid-eighteenth century. Now it sits amongst tranquil rolling lawn: this photograph is of the rear, of course; the front entrance looks upon the River.

The house is a very high-style Georgian construction, the type you see built in shipbuilding centers. It has a very charming air about it, partially provided by the architecture, but also by the restoration and decoration, which was the work of Bill Waters, who worked and lived in the house for decades. He died in 2016, after having donated the house to Historic New England with the qualification of lifetime tenure. So even though this house was built in 1762 for Joshua Bowman, a judge with Hancock connections, it really felt like Bill Water’s 21st century Georgian house: his personality shined through both his preservation efforts and his possessions. Since I’ve been working for Historic New England myself this summer, I’ve been thinking about the differences between the work of a tour guide and a professor, and one major one is that the work of the former is a lot more personal: you’re talking to and with smaller groups about more intimate stories rather than trends, causes and consequences. Historic New England’s interpretion focuses on the people who lived in its houses as much as their architectural history, and “Bill’s house” is a great example. (Although our guide did introduce us to local master builder Gershom Flagg, who built both the Bowman House and the Pownalborough Courthouses, and now I am obsessed!) Bill Waters came to the house through the Burrage sisters, Mildred and Madeleine, notable artists and world travelers who moved to Wiscasset in 1962 and became interested in the region’s historic architecture. In 1961 they purchased the Bowman House, and sold it to Waters several years later, and he and his life partner Cyrus Pinkham began their life’s (house) work. 

Bill Waters with Bowman descendant Florence Bixby and the Burrage Sisters in 1968 (Maine Historical Society), and more recently.

So let’s go into the house, shall we? You enter through a single-story sun room which was likely a nineteenth-century addition (the house served as the office for an ice-supply business in the later 19th century) and then into the kitchen and a series of first-floor parlors and dining room adjoining a spacious central hallway—wonderful reproduction wallpapers throughout, including the pillar-and-arch paper that I think is also in Hamilton House? Throughout his tenure, Waters worked to bring as many period-appropriate and/or Bowen furnishings into the house, and everything seems perfect and very colorful, but also very, very livable.

There are several spaces in which he seems like he just stepped away…….like the bar (above) and lots of whimsy, like the feathers on his canopy bed (below). Artful assembly throughout, and very special mirrors!

We exited through the sunroom, a very comfortable space which reveals Waters’ appreciation of trade signs (as well as his southern roots, represented by a small image of General Robert E. Lee) and then drove down the road to the Courthouse: wow! Photographs don’t quite represent the scale of this 1761 building.

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July 29, 2024

Miss Abbott’s Albums

By daseger

Summers have been about old Salem photographs for the past several years. I go up to the Phillips Library to research something, order up a few old photograph albums to give myself a break, and then just dive in to another world, another Salem. Last year I really had to restrict myself as I was still wrting chapters for our forthcoming book Salem’s Centuries; this year the book is essentially done so I’m just looking for a few images to illustrate it, or so I tell myself. Really, I just like to look at old photographs. Last week I looked through the three albums of Miss Lilly S. Abbott, a librarian at the Salem Public Library, who began her tenure in 1925 and rose through the positions of assistant, children’s librarian, reference librarian, acting director and assistant director over her 47 years at the library. She was obviously a committed collector and curator of photographs, choosing very important images for her albums, and labeling them on the front or back. She supplied photographs to the Salem Evening News, and also to the Salem Cultural Council’s exhibition of “Salem Streets and People” in 1971. Some of her photos I had seen before, but many were new to me. I sharpened up a few photographs below, but most of her photos were very clear and had been processed from lantern slides very effectively. Unlike a lot of Salem photographers and photography collectors, she was obviously more focused on Salem streets and people than on structures: most of her album photos feature downtown, and she obviously loved the Willows too.

Here are some of my favorites: first, a group of photos of downtown Salem—some are dated, most are not, but I think they’re from about 1900-1920, beginning with this great photo of Ash Street in 1900. Urban Renewal wiped Ash Street out, and now it only has one house!

Ash Street, Crombie Street, Essex Street, Norman Street, North Street and Bridge, Washington Street.

Here’s a few of Derby Street, including the Philadelphia wharf—-I was very excited to see this as it was built by the man who lived in my house. Plus, David Little on his “Little Steamer,” Salem’s first automobile! (Miss Abbott seems to have been very interested in transportation).

On to the Willows: including interior and exterior shots of the famous Brown’s Flying Horses carousel, in situ in Salem until 1945.

Some odds and ends: the only photos of famed Chestnut Street in Miss Abbott’s albums are very different: a car driving west, which to us will look like the wrong way, as it is one-way the other way now, and the day after the fire that destroyed Samuel McIntire’s Second Church in 1903. I’ve never seen this. Then there’s the Tontine building on Warren Street, destroyed by the Great Salem Fire in 1914, and a great photo of the Gedney House on High Street before its acquisition and restoration by Historic New England. Finally, Old Home Week, always a BIG celebration in Salem, in 1909. I’m grateful to Miss Abbott for preserving these wonderful images of Salem streets and people.

Town House Square, 1909.

Lily S. Abbott Photographic Albums (PHA 113). Couresy of Miss Abbott and the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum, Rowley, Massachusetts. Miss Abbott donated the albums to the Essex Institute in Salem in 1981 in memory of her brother, William.

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July 22, 2024

The Troublesome Girls

By daseger

A few weeks ago, a social media post popped up on my feeds from Destination Salem, our city’s official tourism office, featuring two young women dressed in garish costumes with giggly grins. They were/are wannabe “girl historians” (actually not historians at all) visiting Salem to promote their current podcast series, a comedy on the Salem Witch Trials. I was taken aback; you see and hear all sorts of exploitative expressions about 1692 in Salem, but seldom from “official” parties, which tend to walk a finer line. I reposted, along with a statement about how absolutely funny the witch trials were, and the next day the post disappeared. I had captured a screen shot, however, and here it is.

I was kind of angry when I captured the screen shot, but over the following week I just forgot about it. I really didn’t want to invest much time into something that seemed kind of silly. I tried to listen to the “girls,” but all I can say is: there are many great history podcasts, a lot of great podcasts by real historians who happen to be women, and several great podcasts on the Salem witch trials, and their podcast falls into none of those categories. But it’s not about them, really; it’s about Salem, because Destination Salem represents the City, and by extension, its residents. The photograph above kept dwelling in the back of my mind (rent-free!) and after a while I realized that it was conjuring up memories of another photograph, or series of photographs. There was a huge spread in Life magazine in September of 1949 on Marian Starkey’s groundbreaking new book, The Devil in Massachusetts: a Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials, which featured very evocative photographs of Salem sites and the “Salem girls” by photographer Nina Leen. Now these photos were dress-up promotion, just like the photo of the “girl historians” above, but what a difference! The subtlety and poignancy and starkness represent respect of a tragedy, rather than the craven commercialization of a “comedy”. The promotion of an insignificant podcast seems so small, pathetic actually, when compared with a multi-page spread in a national periodical, so much so that the event itself seems reduced in significance. Funny how that happened.

Nina Leen photographs, Life Magazine, September 1949.

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