Tag Archives: Architecture

September 26, 2023

Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered

By daseger

Love that song, although I never realized its lyrics were so risque (“horizontally speaking”)! The title is how I feel living in Salem most of the time now, especially bewildered. I don’t understand why our local government is trying to impose out-of-scale and ugly buildings on this beautiful city, relentlessly. I don’t understand why the city’s roads and sidewalks are maintained so poorly. I don’t understand anything about our tourism industry: its management, messaging and particularly the economic impact it has on our city, which seems shrouded in mystery. I don’t understand why everything in this city is named “witch” when the victims of 1692 were not witches. I don’t understand why two tattoo shops are located right next to each other on Essex Street and two pirate “museums” are located right across from each other on Derby Street. I could go on and on and on. I came here for the architecture decades ago, and I’m really out of it when it comes to all the rest: the bones, the black, the business of selling all things spooky. I’m so alienated that I have become increasingly detached from Salem, to the extent that my husband and I and the cats are moving up to Maine for the month of October. I’m not going for good, however (at least not yet) and I also have an academic-esque interest in figuring out what’s going on: unlike me, it’s clear that many, many people love to come to Salem in the fall and increasingly throughout the year. What are they looking for? Last week was interesting because I took a deep dive into social media to answer that question, intentionally and non-intentionally! The non-intentional dive when I posted a picture of the back of my house on a really nice facebook group called Our Old House. It was a beautful day, and we painted the back of the house this summer so it was looking good! I’ve been following this group for a while because the people on it are so appreciative and lovely: everyone loves their own old house and everyone else’s old houses! No facebook rudeness at all. You can learn a lot too: people share their restoration experiences and knowledge. Our house is such a mish-mash in back that I thought everyone would enjoy seeing the different additions: and they certainly did! Nearly 7000 likes and comments, with a serious thread of people expressing their praise of both my house and Salem: I love Salem, You’re so lucky to live in Salem, We go to Salem every Halloween, I really want to go to Salem (it was funny to read these comments as I was literally packing my bags for our departure next week).

How and when my Salem house was built.

So that was interesting, and even more informative was my dive into one of the many Salem tourist groups on facebook: I picked Things to do in Salem, but there are many others. A couple of weeks ago, USA Today named the Salem Witch Museum the second biggest tourist trap in the world, and I was interested in reading some reactions to that. I found a solid defense of this attraction, based mostly on nostalgia: apparently its interpretation and presentation is so dated that it has become “historical” itself. There’s this relatively new defense of Salem attractions, that they are not and should not be Disney-esque, which is offered up with complete unawareness that it was the Salem Witch Museum that started us down that path. Most people also seemed to believe that the Salem Witch “Museum” presented a straightforward and accurate account of the Trials in a historical and global context and did not want to hear otherwise. I disagree, but this was no place to have a discussion: there is no place in Salem to have such a discussion. The type of information that people are seeking in these groups is perhaps 90% non-historical: how to get to Salem, how long to stay here, where to park, where to eat, the best attractions for kids, all about Hocus Pocus, and whether or not certain attractions are “worth it”? When “history” is referenced, I’m not sure what the meaning is, actually—just a kind of general historical environment or atmosphere? Other forums may yield different results, but I don’t discern a great deal of historical curiosity, and even less interest in architecture (though just like my fellow old house owners, everyone is very excited and enthusiastic). So it seems like the biggest thing I don’t get about Salem is the attraction! Ah well, to each his own, best to retreat to Maine and my academic pursuits. I did take a nice long walk around Salem last weekend so I’ll leave you with some pictures (and annotations) of not-quite calm before the storm. There’s quite a bit of ironwork below as that was my orginal pursuit, but it kind of got crowded out.

First up in my neighborhood, I wanted to showcase these two houses whose owners have invested in a lot of work! Kudos to them! Both are on Chestnut. As you can see, the first house has a way to go, but its very impressive entrance was just re-attached. It’s such a great house, with an amazing garden. Nathaniel Hawthorne lived briefly in the blue house. A rare Salem front garden on Essex—and this house has been thoroughly renovated as well. Besides the Witch House and the House of the Seven Gables, the only historic house that Salem tourists seem interested in these days is the Ropes House, because it was featured in Hocus Pocus of course. The Ropes Garden is consequently very crowded in the fall, but I caught it during a relatively calm time: more ropes in the Ropes Garden than ever before. This gate on Federal Court started off my iron hunt–I’m obsessed with it.

 

Downtown is quite a vibrant shopping scene with more than occasional bones and bats, and porta-potties, of course. There are some very well curated shops amidst the general kitsch, particularly Diehl Marcus & Co. (great ironwork and a Bulfinch building to boot) and Emporium 32 (in the old Custom House) on Central Street, and I’m so impressed that the owner of the new Silly Bunny and enduring Wicked Good Books (on different blocks of Essex Street) has declined to carry Bill O’ Reilly’s Killing Witches that I’m going to go in and buy a big bundle of books before I leave for Maine. The Peabody Essex Museum has opened a pop-up shop called the Bat Box to highlight its current bats exhibition: it’s a cute shop featuring the works of some local makers, but (once again) I don’t understand the attraction of coasters featuring a famous murder any more than I do witch souvenirs in the location of a series of famous judicial murders of accused witches.

 

Ghosts might trump witches this year eveywhere but Salem, of course. The ironwork at the Peabody Essex’s Gardner-Pingree House (which is never open) is simply astounding! A very busy Common, as the annual Food Truck Festival was underway, but once you get into the realm of Salem Maritime along Derby Street, not so busy. I still haven’t been in the Derby House even though it has been open this summer. The last photo just above is to remind me that I want to plant that particular variety of clematis next year!

 

I finished up my walk on Charter Street, where the Witch Trial Memorial and Burying Ground is located. As soon as I entered the latter, I was confronted by these strange mannequins, propped up right against the Cemetery’s gate and stones! So Salem: the juxtaposition of the sacred and the tacky, remembrance and exploitation, enduring and ephemeral.

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

September 12, 2023

The Summer of Old Photographs

By daseger

I worked all summer long on my chapters for Salem’s Centuries and a few other projects, researching and writing, researching and writing, researching and writing. Once I’m on the trail, I’m a pretty steady worker, but I do take breaks: I’ve learned from other writing projects that you have to pause to let your mind absorb and process information. Sometimes the break might be at night when you’re asleep—I got into the habit of leaving a notebook by my bedside when I was writing my dissertation and when I woke up in the morning sometimes I would see notations inside that I didn’t even remember writing! That must have been one of the benefits of a younger mind because it didn’t happen this summer, when all my breaks were conscious. Every time I went up to the Phillips Library in Rowley, I would dutifully call up boring municipal records but also collections which contained old photographs of Salem. I’d pore over them a bit and photograph them for later perusal, and by the end of the summer I had quite a collection. The Phillips has digitized two of its largest collections of Salem photographs: the Frank Cousins and Samuel Chamberlain collections, but there remain many seldom-seen images within collections. Fortunately there are great finding aids to locate such images, but also some very miscellaneous collections which yielded surprises, at least for me! I loved schoolteacher Grace Hood’s shots of the Salem and Massachusetts celebrations in 1926-1930 (PHA 67; including some completely new-to-me views of the opening day of Pioneer Village in 1930) and an unknown photographer’s depictions of a very gritty Salem encased in a large composite collection entitled Photographs of interiors and exteriors of Salem, Mass., circa 1890-1950 (PHA 151). And there’s much more.

Phillips Library PHA 67 & 151.

My favorite collection was the first one I accessed, back in May: a treasure trove of images contained in the scrapbooks of Francis Henry Lee of 14 Chestnut Street, mostly from the 1880s (Phillips Library MSS 128). Lee was the son-in-law of the woman who lived in my house, and a committed architectural antiquarian focused on documenting the history of every house on Chestnut and adjoining streets. He did not rely on hearsay, but sent queries to anyone who ever lived in the neighborhood, and his scrapbooks are filled with detailed responses, some written on black-trimmed stationery indicating that their authors were in mourning. I was familiar with his articles in the Historical Collections of the Essex Institute, but surprised to find his research materials accompanied by so many wonderful photographs.

Some of my favorites: (I filtered those that were really hazy or damaged).

Chestnut, Summer & Norman Streets from two perspectives. I’ll never get over how wonderful Norman Street was!

Riding and looking north on Summer Street, and then south (Samuel McIntire’s house is on the extreme left of the last photograph).

Broad Street, looking west.

Cambridge Street, looking north and south.

Work on Bott’s Court.

Hamilton Street, looking north.

Chestnut Street Houses—what’s going on with that figure at the third-floor level of the third photo above, which I think is #26?

Warren Street, looking towards the “Turnpike” (Highland Avenue).

There were several photographs which were especially exciting to see among the Lee papers, including those which show the magnificent formal garden in the rear of the Cabot-Endicott-Low House on Essex Street, which extended to Chestnut before no. 30 Chestnut was built in 1896. This garden was quite famous: it was prominently featured in many horticultural publications and was by all accounts quite the tourist attraction, especially in the spring. A 1904 Boston Globe article on “Beautiful Old Gardens of Salem” reports that for many years the tulip bed was the greatest feature of this garden, and each spring, when these flowers were in perfection, and upper portion of the high fence on Chestnut was removed to enable the public to view the exhibit.

Even more exciting than this lost garden were two photographs of my own house that I had never seen before, including one sans the apartment that was added on in phases between 1890-1910. Our house is the right side of a double house built in 1827: both sides were identifical until the 1850s, when one of our owners expanded the house considerably in back and altered the interior to look more fashionable at the time—round mouldings rather than square ones! The big entrance alteration reflects the changes inside, but I did not know that this guy also put new mouldings over the windows, and disdained shutters as too colonial, I guess. Several owners later, there was a sequential addition on the side of the house: first as an office for a very well-know opthamologist who lived here, and then bedrooms were built above: this is our present-day 7 1/2, a really cute apartment with the best views of Chestnut Street. I assumed that it covered up windows which were on the side of our house, but it looks like there were none. As you can see from all of the other photos of the street, Chestnut was driveway-less in the nineteenth-century: the larger houses had carriage access on Warren or Essex: the property of our house actually wrapped around Hamilton Hall next door and so our carriage house—long- demolished—accessed Cambridge Street.

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

August 21, 2023

Salem’s Wooden Watchman

By daseger

Before there was Samuel McIntire, there was Lemon Beadle. Remember that name: Salem’s nineteenth-century antiquarians certainly wanted us to. Sometimes “Lemuel” is the spelling, but I’m going with Lemon, because Lemon Beadle!  On this past Thursday I went up to the Phillips Library in Rowley, source of most of Salem’s history in textual and material form, to look at some sources for the history of Town House Square, the subject of the last piece I have to write for our Salem’s Centuries book. I had ordered up a notebook entitled “Salem Estates and Localities 1629-1842” which included a “Chronological Chart of Churches in Salem, Mass.” mostly because I wanted to look at the latter (and it is pretty great). The notebook consitutes the notes of William Phineas Upham, the son of  Charles Upham, the first great historian of the Salem Witch Trials. William, who prepared what must be one of the most important maps in American history (perhaps an overstatement, but I live in Salem), a 1692 view of Salem Village for his father, was clearly gathering information for his own magnum opus. The notebook was filled with extraordinary detail about many structures in Salem, illustrated occasionally with marginalia drawings of little houses. I found it charming and informative, but not particularly relevant to my topic, and I was about to close it and move on when I came to William’s rather compelling depiction of Salem’s central 18th century watch house, with its life-sized watchman on top, carved by Lemon Beadle. 

From Phillips Library Fam. Mss. 1047, Salem Estates and Localities, 1629-1842 by William P. Upham.

This illustration really intrigued me: could the “soldier” (as Upham calls it above) or “watchman” (according to other sources) really have been that big? Were there any other depictions out there? Sadly, I have found none so far, but I did get more details from a variety of old Salem sources. This particular watch house was likely Salem’s second, and it was built on Schoolhouse Lane, later School Street and the present-day Washington Street, in 1712: the carved wooden figure on its roof bore the date Anno Regina 1712 in large gold letters. If it was not conspicuous enough, town records indicate the watchman/soldier was painted in 1725. Lemon Beadle was chosen for the commission because of his experience crafting figureheads, and the entire production seems to have been part of policy to improve and standardize the watch system and remind Salem men of their civic responsibilities. While real watchmen endured into the nineteenth century, I’m pretty sure that was not the case with their wooden representative; there are the references to the watch house’s survival fifty years after its construction, but that’s it. Upham clearly wanted to “see” and portray it in his notebook, along with its adjacent whipping post.

Upham’s whipping post and other Salem structures; a watchman by Albert Blaisdell; Salem printer Ezekiel Russell’s watch order, 1777, Sang Collection via Sotheby’s;  Salem Gazette.

Since my focus is on the watchman statue, I’m a little out of my depth and discipline, but I did find one text which asserted that Lemon Beadle’s work is “the first documentable piece of free-standing sculpture in Massachusetts” (Benno M. Forman, American Seating Furniture, 1630-1730: An Interpretive Catalogue, 1988). That’s a pretty big claim; I wonder if it’s still standing. Elias Hasket Derby commissioned woodcarvers John and Simeon Skillen to carve four “free standing figures of larger dimensions, ranging between 4 and 5 feet in height” for his summer estate near the end of the century, but I have to say that without a more detailed depiction, Upham’s watchman sketch reminds me more of the……….(searching for correct word here, can’t come up with anything really applicable) rather less elegant figures which “graced” the very notorious Timothy Dexter’s estate in Newburyport. There were 40, including one of Dexter himself, and the Reverend William Bentley was not impressed when he visited in 1803: “There is no horrid violation of proportion in the district objects but the vast columns, the gigantic figures, the extended arches, & absurd confusion of characters, tend to convince us of the abuse of riches….Dexter was within doors, drunk, having just suffered from a heavy beating from his drunken son, urged on by a drunken daughter.”

 I have no doubt that Lemon Beadle could have done better.

 John Rubens Smith (engraver), A View of the Mansion of the late LORD TIMOTHY DEXTER in High Street, Newburyport, 1810.

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

July 24, 2023

Preservation Polaroids

By daseger

I have heard, and read about, Salem’s experience with urban renewal many times, including first-hand accounts, so I thought I understood its causes, course and impact pretty well, but when you write about something, you have to engage on another level and come to your own understanding in order to explain it to others. It’s the same with teaching. One of the chapters for Salem’s Centuries that I’ve been working on this summer is about the city’s development over the twentieth century and so I really had to dig deep into urban renewal. I decided to start fresh with primary sources, so I went through all the records of the Salem Redevelopment Authority (SRA) located up at the Phillips Library in Rowley (these are public records, which should be in Salem, but I’m actually glad they are in Rowley because the City’s digitized records are impossible to search and I don’t know how one might access the paper). The SRA was the agency created to oversee urban renewal in Salem’s downtown and it still has jurisdiction: its composition was incredibly important and remains so. I’m going to be quite succinct here, because the narrative is rather complex and therefore quite boring to read or write about, but here’s the gist of what happened: after conducting a comprehensive study in the early 1960s the City created the SRA and put forward a very ambitious urban renewal plan which was overwhelmingly focused on clearance, including the demolition of between 120-140 buildings in Salem’s downtown area. The goal was to create a new pedestrian shopping plaza, to compete with the new Northshore Shopping Center just miles away in Peabody. The focus was on Parking, Parking, and more Parking. What I did not know before I delved into this research was that at the same time that this plan was brewing, Salem also had another committee looking at the downtown: an Historic District Study Committee, which was surveying all of central Salem’s buildings for inclusion in potential historic districts. What a clash! The “before” photos that you see below, candid polaroids, were taken by members of the Study Committee in 1965, the same year that the SRA was rolling out its demolition plan. Among the SRA records up in Rowley, there is a mimeographed document entitled a “Do it Yourself Walking Tour” prepared by John Barrett, Executive Director of the SRA, for Historic Salem, Inc., Salem’s preservation organization, then and now. It’s a remarkable document, because Barrett basically takes the Study Committee’s inventory and turns it into a hit list: this is what we’re going to demolish! Take a tour and see for yourself! There were 119 building slated for demolition, a number that would expand to over 140 over the next few years. The polaroids represent buildings that Salem’s preservationists were trying to save: they were successful in some cases, but not in others. Their resistance resulted in a far less destructive approach to “renewal”, however, which focused more on rehabilitation than destruction, as these images illustrate well.

This doesn’t line up perfectly, but what a great restoration +addition by Salem architect Oscar Padjen: very representative of the creativity of  “Plan B”!

As these photos also illustrate, once rehabilitation became an objective, several key buildings were restored in exemplary fashion, by local Salem architects and utilizing the new means of facade easements. If you compare past facades of these building with the present, urban renewal looks great, particularly with the hardscaping design of landscape architect John Collins of Philadelphia, whose work is also representative of the “Plan B” approach. What is more difficult to illustrate are the great wide swaths of buildings that were taken down, principally on the main Essex and Federal Streets but also on St. Peter and Brown Streets, while Plan A was still operational. We can never see these buildings restored, they were just swept away. What remains are parking lots and ghastly modern buildings. I’m not a fan of what was called the East India Mall in its orginal incarnation, but its colonnaded side entrance (not quite sure what to call it???) was quite distinctive, and it was butchered under the auspices of the SRA in the 1990s so now we have the Witch City Mall. I think Front Street (below) it probably the most perfect example of Plan B, along with Derby Square, but Central Street (just above) is pretty representative too.

Washington Street was the boundary of “Heritage Plaza East,” where most of the renewal activity happened in both phases, but it did not experience as much demolition as it had already weathered a major tunnel project just a decade before. That’s another realization for me: I somehow never put Salem’s “Big Dig,” during which its railroad tunnel was constructed and depot demolished in the 1950s, in such close chronological proximity to its experience with urban renewal in the 1960s. This generation of Salem residents weathered a lot of construction and dislocation: as always, past experiences temper the present. If you shift the perspective even further back, to the 1930s, when the new Post Office was built after an entire neighborhood was cleared out, you can understand why there is so much concern about the lack of housing downtown today: 51 buildings gone in the 1930s, 87 in the 1960s. Salem’s long “plaza policy” certainly took its toll, but I remain grateful to those residents who persevered in their preservation efforts for what remains.

Strking transformations on Washington Street.

NB: I’m confident in most of these past-and-present pairings, but not all, because streets numbers can change—not quite sure about the Subway market on Front Street for example……….

 

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

July 9, 2023

Sedgwick Sanctuary

By daseger

Yesterday I learned a new word, drumlin, a long, flat-topped hill formed by glaciers, during my visit to the appropriately-named Long Hill in Beverly, one of the properties of the Trustees of Reservations. At the top of this drumlin, away from the “gold coast” where many of their Boston friends summered, Ellery and Mabel Cabot Sedgwick built a Federal Revival House with bricks harvested from an Ipswich mill and detailed woodwork crafted by enslaved workers from a Charleston mansion. They planted a copper beech tree to mark the spot of their new summer home, and after it was built, kept on clearing and planting, crafting a series of inter-connected gardens around it, designed to frame the home and also blend in with the 100+ acres of woodland and meadows beyond. It’s a spectacular site in so many ways: I’ve visited it many times and posted it about here too, but the Trustees have been engaged in a garden revitalization initiative for their properties, and so I wanted to give Long Hill another look. I took a proper tour rather than just wandering around (highly recommended: it was particularly important for me as I know quite a bit about plants but nothing about trees, and Long Hill has some very unsusual specimens) and now I have a whole new appreciation for this amazing space, and the amazing women who created it.

When Ellery and Mabel Cabot Sedgwick purchased the Long Hill property in 1916, he was in the first phase of his long and successful run as owner and editor of the Atlantic Monthly, which extended to 1938. But she was pretty famous too, having published a popular (and still very useful) gardening guide entitle The Garden Month–By–Month in 1907. The pull-out color chart from The Garden graces Long Hill’s library, framed by silhouettes of Mabel and the second Mrs. Sedgwick, the former Marjorie Russell, who was also an accomplished plantswoman. Together, in succession, they built the spectacular Long Hill gardens, Mabel establishing the integrated “garden rooms” format and Marjorie adding more exotic varieties of plant material—and also focusing on plant propagation and experimentation, often in collaboration with Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. The property served as the summer retreat for the the entire Sedgwick family, including the four children of Mabel and Ellery and their children, until the death of Marjorie Sedgwick in 1978, after which Theodore Sedwick Bond, Henrietta Sedgwick Lockwood, S. Cabot Sedgwick, and Ellery Sedgwick, Jr. donated Long Hill to the Trustees. It still feels a bit like a family house, even with an event tent on site: accessible rather than stately.

 

One way the Trustees has enhanced the accessibility of the property is to emphasize the fact that it is a place of activity, still a work in progress as it was under the administration of the two Mrs. Sedgwicks. There’s a cutting garden, a greenhouse and horticultural center, cold frames, ongoing plant propagation, workshops, and for those that don’t want to get their hands dirty, the horticultural library in the house. There are also trails for those who want to explore the rest of the 114-acre property, the “world” beyond cultivation. The overall message is appreciate and act.

plant propagation in action for those who don’t recognize it—like me!

I’m going to conclude with some of the spectacular trees on the property, just a sampling for sure. I’m just starting to look at trees after a lifetime of being unblissfully unaware, and this is one of the reasons I wanted to revisit Long Hill and will continue to do so. There’s a lot to learn, but yesterday I was just kind of awestruck by some of the textures and colors of the bark, let along the flowers and leaves. It got increasingly humid as we made our way through the garden(s), and so a weeping hemlock was a welcome rest stop, as it was 10 degrees cooling under its dense branches.

These last two amber trees are a Tall Stewartia and a Paperbark Maple.

A few last photos: the house is beautiful, but it’s really just an orientation center for the garden now—-BUT I want you to see this beautiful wallpaper in the center hall, purchased by the Sedgwicks in London during their house furnishing tours in the 1920s, as well an example of “enslaved craftsmanship,” a mantle from the Isaac Ball House in Charleston.

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

July 1, 2023

Colorways: a Parade of Portsmouth Doors

By daseger

I’ve been in York Harbor all June and just returned to Salem. It was a very productive month removed from daily tasks and diversions, but I missed certain things and people: my husband (I brought the cats), my garden, my street. Certainly not the tour guides and groups though: they were in part what drove me away. Of course I found the usual Dunkin iced-coffee cup propped up on my stoop the moment I got home. Salem is busy and festive all year long now it seems; while the incessant witch tourism annoys me the other celebrations are great, and June is a particularly festive month with its mix of private and public celebrations: weddings and graduations, Juneteenth and Pride. Salem goes all out for Pride and  I missed that, and definitely craved some color amidst our rainy and foggy weather, so I took off for Portsmouth late last week seeking flags but finding doors. When I was growing up across river, Portsmouth was a much shabbier place: now you are hard-pressed to find an old house that is not in perfect condition. I expanded my usual downtown walk to include neighborhoods a bit more outlying like that bordering Christian Shore and the South End, and found so many lovely houses, all with very colorful entries. Red was an exotic front-door color before; now there is a veritable rainbow of Portsmouth doors. And I’ve got some flags here too.

Ok, I think I have the whole spectrum represented! It was surprisingly difficult to find white doors: as you see, one is hiding behind a tree. I wasn’t sure where to put taupe, so I paired it with brown. There are no painted brown doors, just various shades of natural woodwork. Not too many black doors either, but lots of green, and lots of yellow. Do not tell me that one of my purple doors is blue; it is purple. Portsmouth is the best walking city ever: beautiful neighborhoods, dynamic downtown, tons of historical markers, pocket parks, well-maintained sidewalks. More rainbows are there for the making!

Some singular Portsmouth doors: two-tone green and Happy Fourth!

7 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Architecture, Travel

April 18, 2023

Connecticut Calm (Waters)

By daseger

I’m generally anxious around this time of year, approaching the end of the semester, but this year I am particularly so: I seem to be uneasy in general and in Salem in particular. The nice weather has kicked off the tourist season earlier than ever, or maybe it never ended? This means large tour groups just outside my house as late as 10:00 at night, with guides speaking about the ancient “ankle breaker” stones along the sidewalk that my neighbors and I installed in the last decade or so. Run, run, to the back of the house, I tell myself, so I don’t have to hear any more, but sometimes I just don’t want to get off the couch—and one guy is so loud I can even hear him way out back. A change of scenery (and perspective) was definitely needed, so for the long Patriots Day weekend my husband and I took off for one of the prettiest towns in Connecticut (a state with many pretty towns): Essex, near the mouth of the Connecticut River. We stayed at the old Griswold Inn, in one of its newer suites, and ate and drank and looked at old houses and the river. It was very foggy, but there were daffodils everywhere, and I do feel a bit cheerier now that I’m back home (or in Salem).

Welcome to Essex, Connecticut!

I started decompressing as soon as we got on one of my favorite Connecticut small roads: Route 169. Well, before, really: right over the state line in Thompson, which has a great common surrounded by wonderful houses (including the resurrected Gothic Revival long neglected by the famous interior designer Mario Buatta). Route 169 leads you through Woodstock, and by Roseland Cottage, to Canterbury, where the amazing Prudence Crandall opened her school for African-American girls (what an amazing woman! I need to know much more about her), to Norwich, where we turned south and drove by the decaying buildings of the long-abandoned Norwich State Hospital which are such a sharp contrast to the shiny Mohegan Sun casino across the river.

The road to Essex: Thompson houses, Roseland Cottage (which I visited just last summer), Prudence Crandall’s school in Canterbury, and one of the derelict buildings of the former Norwich State Hospital (with a glimpse of Mohegan Sun across the river).

I think my husband thinks that Essex is a bit “Truman Show-esque” but it was just what I needed:  a lovely town with clean sidewalks that is proud of its history rather than seeking to sell it 24/7. The houses are pretty perfect, but they are not mansions. It’s really all about watercraft in Essex: this was a rather quiet time but its harbor will be full to brimming in a month or so. Essex built a famous warship for the Revolution named the Oliver Cromwell (which was renamed the Restoration when it was captured by the British in 1779!), it endured the burning of 27 of its privateering ships when the British raided the harbor in April of 1814, the storied schooner yacht Dauntless ended her career on the Essex waterfront at the turn of the last century, and famous steamships line the walls of the Griswold Inn. The wonderful Connecticut River Museum, housed in an old steamship warehouse, explores the layers of local maritime history through art, artifacts and narratives in such an engaging way that I really felt the connection of water to land over history and now I’m absolutely inspired to take another New England road trip: a longer one, up the entire length of the River from Saybrook to Canada.

An array of Essex houses (birdhouses are big in this town too); the Onrust, a replica of a Dutch colonial ship, is moored in front of the Connecticut River Museum (my husband John is looking for me, I think); the Turtle, a Revolutionary-era submarine, which was built just up the River. I love the caption of this c. 1860 painting of Captain and Mrs. Samuel L. Spencer: “Captain Spencer of Old Saybrook, shown with the most important females in his life: his wife and his ship. He was captain of Daniel Webster of the London Line of packets for more than twenty years.” The Connecticut River Museum’s exhibition of Watercraft at Work made even BARGES interesting, and among the items I found my very favorite ship name of all time: of the schooner “Tansy Bitters”.

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

March 21, 2023

Little Brick Houses

By daseger

Last week was my spring break, and I was determined to get away after spending the past three right here at home during the prolonged Covid Time. I wanted to drive off alone so I could indulge myself with days of endless historic house-spotting: my husband needs a destination and a drink after too much of that! First I planned an extensive trip around revolutionary taverns along much of the east coast, and then I narrowed down my target area to the short-lived colony of New Sweden, incorporating areas of New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania (and even a bit of Maryland, I think). This trip was further restricted by a delayed departure and the big snowstorm that hit many parts of the northeast: I ended up snowed in at my brother’s house in Rhinebeck, New York. And then I was off, bound for New Castle, Delaware, a small historic city that I had always passed through too quickly. This would be the center of my exploration, but along the way, right before I passed over the Delaware Memorial Bridge, I decided to get off the turnpike and explore Salem County, one of the counties of southern New Jersey that borders Delaware Bay. The sun was shining and it was warm: it seemed as if I had passed from winter into spring, and from the North into the South. I had never been in this region of Jersey, but I had heard about some of its revolutionary history and seen pictures of some of its distinct 18th century houses built of patterned brick, dated and decoratively embellished on one side. I wanted to see one, and I did, and then I wanted to see more: and so I drove down rural roads for hours to do so. Before I knew it, it was dusk, and then I had to drive over that damn bridge in the dark (I have a mild bridge phobia issue and a much stronger tunnel one). New Castle was charming at night and the next morning, when I saw rows of little brick town houses. So forget about any theme of history or function: my spring break (or what was left of it) was just going to be all about little brick houses—and some big brick houses too.

The Dickinson and Oakford Houses, Alloway Township, Salem County New Jersey; the collage is all New Castle houses, with the exception of the conjoined houses in the center–which are in Salem TOWN, New Jersey (more about this other Salem below); New Castle’s old library; this 18th century map shows my travels–on both sides of the Delaware.

Established in 1651 by the Dutch, New Castle was at the center of shifting colonial sovereignties in the middle of the seventeenth century: it became part of a the short-lived colony of New Sweden in 1654, but was recaptured by the Dutch within the year, and in 1680 it was included in the land grant of William Penn, along with the rest of Delaware. New Castle was the capital of the Delaware colony until the Revolution, but before and after it was a center of trade and transportation due to its strategic location on the river. Its pre-revolutionary and pre-industrial wealth created a beautiful city that survives today relatively intact. I don’t really agree with its chamber-of-commerce description: thanks to preservation efforts, this vibrant, fully occupied community remains one of the most important Colonial/Federal villages in America—second only to Williamsburg, Virginia in the number and authenticiy of its historic structures. Williamsburg is a creation, an open-air museum: New Castle is a living city. Though they both have that fixed-in-time feeling, I saw the residents walking around engaged in all sorts of tasks as I walked the streets of New Castle, and they weren’t in colonial costume, like the “residents” of Williamsburg. New Castle is real, but almost too perfect: perfectly-preserved buildings, perfect signage, perfectly laid and -maintained brick sidewalks (it’s like an opposite-word of Salem: they seem to be letting their asphalt sidewalks languish as they replace with brick!), no litter in sight. And while late colonial and federal houses rule, they come in different sizes and were built with different materials: rows of modest brick and wooden houses were just as perfectly maintained as more stately structures. And there are new houses too, built with an obvious mandate to integrate with the old.

Just perfect New Castle, on a perfect day! These are all residences: I’m going to show the museums in my next post. The last two photos show a new house rising on the Strand, and the very old Anglican/Episcopalian Church, Immanuel on the Green, the parish of which has been operating continuously since 1689.

I spent a couple of days in New Castle and then drove lightly northeast into the Brandywine Valley, ostensibly to do some research at the Winterthur library, but I spent more time in the museum and (you guess it) driving around looking for little stone houses. And on my way back home, I turned off the bridge right after I crossed into Jersey rather than before I crossed into Delawar: I wanted to go back to Salem County to hunt for more houses and see the city of Salem as well: I had driven through it days before but didn’t stop. It’s somewhat blighted, with boarded up houses on the main street, but other houses were perfectly restored: it seemed to have quite a bit of integrity and potential. Of course, this Salem has a historical society, and a completely over-the-top but unfortunately former city hall: I wonder what will become of it?

Salem, New Jersey: historical society, murals, and the “exuberant Queen Anne” former municipal building.

One last stop in old New Jersey and then I turned northward. Most of the patterned brick houses are in private hands and hard to find, but one has been turned into a state park: the Hancock House, in Alloway Township, or more particularly a little village within called Hancock’s Bridge. On this very day in 1778, raiding British rangers under the command of Major John Simcoe raided the house and bayoneted as many people as they could find inside: at the very least ten Patriot milita men and also the owner of the house, Judge William Hancock, who was a Loyalist and also, as a Quaker, a pacifist. This became known as the Massacre at Hancock’s Bridge, and just as I was arriving at the house on Saturday morning regiments of reenactors were as well, for the annual commemoration of the massacre. I couldn’t stay around, unfortunately, but I have borrowed a photograph from the HM 17th Regiment of Infantry in America’s facebook page, below. Then I drove home to Massachusetts, making just one stop along the way: at Guilford, Connecticut to see another very old stone house, the 1639 Henry Whitefield House.

Above: The Hancock House, 1734 and members of the HM 17th Regiment of Infantry in America, 1775-1784 on Saturday. Just two streets over, the Quaker Meeting House, built on land donated to the community by Judge Hancock, who was slain on March 21, 1778.

Below: Bonus round. Two little stone houses in Pennsylvania and Connecticut: the John Chads House in Chadds Ford, and the Whitefield House in Guilford.

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March 14, 2023

The Golden Ball Tavern

By daseger

It’s spring break week and I’m slowly making my way down to “New Sweden” but as I write this I’m stuck in a snowstorm at my brother’s house in New York! I should be able to get out tomorrow and want to spend three or four days looking at old houses in Delaware, south Jersey, and Pennsylvania. This was supposed to be a Revolutionary tavern tour, but I think it’s going to be a bit more general: we’ll see! But because it was supposed to be a tavern tour, I did visit a tavern back in Massachusetts on Sunday: a sunny day which seems like it was weeks away rather than days away. I’ve driven by the Golden Ball Tavern Museum on the old Boston Post Road in Weston for years but never ventured inside before, and decided to take advanage of its monthly second Sunday open houses to take a tour. It was very interesting: a spacious eighteenth-century building left quite deliberately in a lived-in, layered condition. Weston is a very wealthy town, and I expected the house to be in mint restored condition but that is not the approach here: the ceilings were sloping in places, patchy plaster was everywhere, and I read a cautionary note on the central stairway: “original avocado paint—do not paint.” This house museum is an independent, self-sustaining operation which is staffed by enthusiastic docents who appeared to be discovering the house right alongside its visitors: it all felt very personal, like we were all just dropping in, or into a house built by tavern-keeper Isaac Jones in 1768 which sheltered six successive generations of his family. In the heated environment of the early 1770s, Jones gave shelter and sustenance (in the form of tea!) to British soldiers, prompting his neighbors to attack the tavern on March 28, 1774 in what later became known as the “Weston Tea Party.” He later came around to the right side, but the interpretive identity of the Tavern as museum seems to be focused on family history and Loyalist history. And layers, literally. If you’re into material textures, this tavern is the place for you: the historic paint, paper, and hardware was on full revelatory display.

The first floor of the Golden Ball Tavern: proceeding from the rear old kitchen, with many layers exposed, towards the tavern room in the front. LOVED this little Sheraton settee! Original paint and plaster in the central hallway and the right-side parlor and bedroom have been refinished.

Upstairs there are bedrooms, of course, but also a room which was used for more public purposes: and consequently it has one of the most interesting and practical architectural details I have ever seen. Doors that open up to the ceiling and are affixed to hooks! Hooks which are still there! And right across from this room is that in which poor Mrs. Jones was lying in bed with her newborn infant when her neighbors broke in in search of her Tory husband (these little notes are everwhere in the tavern, another aspect of its very personal presentation). I really loved all the colors and textures in this room, including the adjacent “office” and stairways upstairs and downstairs. So many details in this one space, just a corner of this one house.

Details, details, details! The door on the ceiling, hooks, paint, stairs, and a colonial filing system.

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March 8, 2023

March Memorials in Boston

By daseger

This past Sunday, the anniversary of the Boston Massacre, I went into Boston to take the “Massacre and Memory” tour offered by Revolutionary Spaces, the newish organization that maintains and interprets both the Old State House and Old South Meeting House. I always enjoyed going to Massacre reenactments at the former on March 5, but this tour was a whole other dimension of historic interpretation. I was rather amazed at the guide’s ability to present: a) the events of that day in 1770; b) deep background and wide context for the events of the day; c) the divergent sources which presented the events of the day afterwards; d) the day’s immediate and long-term “remembrance”; e) the use of the remembrance of the day by abolition activists in the mid-19th century and anti-busing activists in the twentieth century; f) a very strong sense of both the geography of Revolutionary-era Boston as well as the purposes and perceptions of the revolutionary spaces which we visited; and g) a consideration of how we might tell interpret historic events in the future as we proceed through our digital age. All that in about 2 hours! This was the first tour of the season for our young guide, and she was on fire. No Salem simplistic storyteller was she (what I hear out my front windows when it’s warm: and then Giles Corey was pressed to death (MORE WEIGHT), and then this happened, and then this happened): instead she offered us layers and layers of history: its creation, dissemination, legacy and utility.

Revolutionary spaces indeed: The Old State House, Faneuil Hall (where the first post-massacre meetings were held), and the Old South Meeting House, with George Washington and Andrew Oliver standing by. So many markers in Boston! All in copper and bronze: in the street, on buildings, everywhere. 

The Tour began at the Old State House, before which the Massacre took place, and ended at the Old South Meeting House, where the first memorial massacre orations were held. I had a lot to think about after this layered presentation, so I wanted to go back to Old State House and consider the exhibitions there: the tour ticket included admission to both Revolutionary Spaces buildings. But when I got back to the Old State House, there wasn’t really open admission: there were other scheduled tours which I didn’t want to take so I stomped off in my fashion. I was in a very bitchy mood for about ten minutes as I strode down Tremont Street, because I wanted to process the Boston Massacre on my own terms, this very day, and somehow I felt I was prevented from doing that. But then I came to the Old Granary Burying Ground, and the marker to the five victims of the Massacre therein, which led me to their monument on the Boston Common, and as I was gazing at Crispus Attucks’ prone figure on its plaque, I saw the new memorial to Martin Luther King, The Embrace, in the corner of my eye. So off I went to the presence of The Embrace, which has received rather mixed reviews in our area since its debut in January. I wasn’t sure how I would respond to it—it looks rather intimidating in media images—but I really liked it: it’s smaller in scale and more detailed in reality. And it was fun to see people reacting to it: touching it, walking under it, taking selfies all around it. The engagement with and around this installation reminded me of the very active engagement of Bostonians with the living memory of the Massacre: weeks later and centuries later. And then I walked up the hill to another engaging memorial: Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ masterful monument to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th right across from the Massachusetts State House. What a memorial trifecta! The thread between these three memorials was African-American history of course, but I didn’t really think about it that was as I was making connections in my mind on my walk. I just felt grounded in Boston history, Massachusetts history, American history.

Memorials: a circle of remembrance from Old Granary to the (new) State House.

[N.B. When I was all worked up I noted my frustration with my exclusion from the Old State House on Facebook: Revolution Spaces staff almost immediately reached out and offered me free admission at my convenience. So now I’m a bit embarassed but impressed with their professionalism!]

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