Tag Archives: Architecture

August 31, 2026

Green Mountain Gothic

By daseger

I felt that I needed one more road trip before I start school later this week, so I headed to Vermont by myself to engage in some intensive “house hunting.” For me, a road trip has to have some kind of quest beyond just seeing the scenery and I’ve long wanted to chart Gothic Revival houses in Vermont. I spent my early childhood in Strafford, Vermont, where the Justin Morrill Homestead is located. This pink picturesque house became kind of the standard of “great” houses for me, as we had free rein in the village and I would visit it frequently. Later on we moved to southern Maine, and the nearby city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire with its colonial and Federal houses became my architectural ideal, and that focus eventually brought me to Salem. But my fascination for the more romantic Gothic continued, and I’m always seeking them out. We have a few Gothic Revivals here in Salem, including the very notable Brooks house, and down in New Bedford there are more, but in the back of my mind I’ve always associated that style with Vermont, so off I went to test my memory.

My ideal and my map.

Vermont is relatively small,  but I didn’t have time to survey the entire state, so I focused on its south central region, from Woodstock in the east, over to Poultney in the west, down to Manchester and back across to Putney. I did not confine myself to the highly detailed “Carpenter Gothic” style of the Morrill homestead, but looked for more general silhouettes. There’s a few churches here, but I think nearly every Vermont town has a Gothic-esque church with myriad variations of crenellated parapets instead of (or in addition to) spires. There is a lot of vernacular variation, and a lot of mixing of the two most prominent mid-nineteenth century styles, Gothic and Greek Revival. I based myself in Cavendish, and this was no accident, for I had seen real estate listing for an amazing mansion named Glimmerstone, and I drove straight from Salem to see it on Friday morning. What a bargain! (Be sure to look at the back in the listing)

Glimmerstone Mansion in Cavendish

Actually, I drove through the “Stone Village” of nearby Chester to get to Cavendish: this is a linear neighborhood of 1840s buildings constructed with the Scottish “snecked ashlar” technique and style, in which local rubblestone is used in varying large and small pieces to tie interior and exterior walls together: I think it’s a form of “Celtic Bond” but please feel free to correct me! In the midst of the Stone Village is a perfect little Gothic Revival church, but the rest of its buildings have a more classical style. The snecked ashlar technique clearly extended to Cavendish, and to Glimmerstone, as well as a few neighboring houses.

Chester and Cavendish: how great is this last house and terraced lawn!!!

And then I was off—across and around the state with some beautiful weather! Again, I could have taken many pictures of churches: the little white chapel in the western village of Wells below is very representative. There are also many versions of the “classic” white center gable house, sometimes with a porch, sometimes without, and with varying degrees of trim. Gothic Revival houses in Vermont are mostly made of wood (outside of Cavendish and Chester) but there was the occasional brick. Below is just a sampling, or a foundation on which I hope to build.

Gothic Revival variations in Vermont: Windsor (top three, front and back of the Townsend-McIndoe House), Rutland, Poultney, Wells, Manchester, Newfane.

11 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Architecture, Historic Houses

August 24, 2026

Old Bristol

By daseger

We’re on the Pemaquid peninsula in Maine and I finally feel that I have the terrain down. We’ve been alternating between the adjacent Boothbay peninsula and Pemaquid over the last few summers, and I drive around without navigation but just yesterday I came upon a peninsula off the peninsula which was still unknown territory and I have still not figured out all the islands. Pemaquid, extending south from Newcastle and Damariscotta, used to be just one big town, Bristol or “Old Bristol,” but is now divided between Bristol, South Bristol, and Bremen. Bristol has five villages: Bristol Mills, Pemaquid, New Harbor, Round Pond, and Chamberlain. South Bristol (separated and incorporated in 1915) has three villages: South Bristol, Christmas Cove, and Walpole. We’re staying in the latter, and even though it is located north of much of Bristol, it’s in South Bristol. Bremen, also located in the northern part of the peninsula but on the northeastern side, seems more distinct than the Bristols, and it was separated from Old Bristol in 1828.

The Pemaquid Peninsula is nameless on Frank and Ruth Taylor White’s  1935  pictorial map of Maine, created for Little, Brown’s national atlas (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection); an 1857 map of Old Bristol; our view from Walpole on the eastern shore of the Damariscotta River.

I was at first perplexed by the co-existence of two Colonial meeting houses on the peninsula, built just years apart in the 1770s and located just a few miles apart: the Walpole and Harrington meeting houses. Was there a huge schism? I just love Maine meeting houses–so unadorned and preserved in their spireless states (my favorite one is in Alna, just north of Pemaquid). Walpole is particularly famous, and it deserves to be, because it is beautiful. My confusion over the two proximate meeting houses is just a reflection of my Massachusetts bias regarding relative population density: because the distance was so great, there were actually three meeting houses built on Pemaquid in the 1770s: Walpole in the east, another one in Round Pond on the western side of the peninsula (no longer standing), and Harrington in the center. The Harrington meeting house is not really in the center now, as it was moved in 1840, and substantially altered at the same time. Apparently it’s been restored back to its Georgian form, but I didn’t get to go inside.

Another relic of the eighteenth century on the Pemaquid peninsula is the “Arch Bridge” in Bristol Mills, but I would say that Pemaquid has more of a late 19th century/early 20th century feel. Colonial Pemaquid includes the remains of the 17th-century Fort William Henry and an 18th-century fort house, but also a reproduction tower built in 1908. There are quite a few un-expanded and unadorned simple summer shingle cottages in every village, testifying to its continuing role as a summer place, but also wonderful capes and the full range of 19th-century vernacular styles evident of year-round  occupation, past and present. With the smaller scale of its working ports (unlike Boothbay across the way) Pemaquid seems to have found the perfect mix of tourism and residential occupation, although maybe locals would beg to differ one way or the other! I’m in my refugee-from-Salem season (which starts earlier and earlier every year, and grows longer and longer as well), so nearly everywhere looks perfect.

The Arch Bridge in Bristol Mills, Colonial Pemaquid, a house and its view from Pemaquid Harbor Road, a South Bristol cottage compound, a BEAUTIFUL house (+ barn) in New Harbor, Back Cove in New Harbor and Round Pond.

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

July 13, 2026

The Bryant Homestead

By daseger

This past weekend I drove out west to the lovely little town of Cummington, Massachusetts to see the summer home of journalist and poet William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878). A Federal farmhouse transformed into a Victorian “cottage” at the close of the Civil War, it possesses an impressive profile and situation and I’ve wanted to see the interior for quite a while. As a Trustees of Reservations property in a rather remote area of our state, it’s only open to the public a few times a year and I’ve never been able to make one of these dates, but I was free on July 11 so I hopped into the car. It was a beautiful, breezy, old-fashioned New England summer day, free of the humidity that seems to characterize our new climate, so PERFECT.

While I will drive miles to see any old house at any time, this is one of the few times when I was motivated by more than architectural curiosity. True to my post from a few months ago, I have indeed been reading poetry as a way to wean myself off Salem as it assumes its new role as headquarters of the Warren “Museum” and Bryant was, of course, first and foremost a poet. I can’t really say his poetry drew me to his house though; it was more his prose—and one particular observation in particular. In his Letters to a Traveler, he recounts an 1843 visit he made to his aunt, Charity Bryant in Vermont, where she lived with her long-time partner, Sylvia Drake, in a relationship that everybody, including William, seems to have recognized as a marriage:

“I passed a few days in the valley of one of those streams of northern Vermont, which find their way into Champlain. If I were permitted to draw aside the veil of private life, I would briefly give you the singular, and to me most interesting history of two maiden ladies who dwell in this valley.  I would tell you how, in their youthful days, they took each other as companions for life, and how this union, no less sacred to them than the tie of marriage, has subsisted, in uninterrupted harmony, for forty years, during which they have shared each other’s occupations and pleasures and works of charity while in health, and watched over each other tenderly in sickness; for sickness has made long and frequent visits to their dwelling. I could tell you how they slept on the same pillow and had a common purse, and adopted each other’s relations, and how one of them, more enterprising and spirited in her temper than the other, might be said to represent the male head of the family, and took upon herself their transactions with the world without, until at length her health failed, and she was tended by her gentle companion, as a fond wife attends her invalid husband. I could tell you of their dwelling, encircled with roses, which now in the days of their broken health, bloom wild without their tendance, and I would speak of the friendly attentions which their neighbors, people of kind hearts and simple manners, seem to take pleasure in bestowing upon them, but I have already said more than I fear they will forgive me for, if this should ever meet their eyes, and I must leave the subject.”

These lines are so endearing, so out of their time, at least as I understand the mid-nineteenth century. I found them particularly so as I was reading about a current controversy which has arisen because the first historian of this relationship, Rachel Hope Cleves, is accusing cartoonist Tillie Walden of taking liberties with her research and archival reconstruction in a new graphic novel issued under the very same title, Charity and Sylvia. You can read more about this dispute here if you like; I’m still grappling with it but once I read Bryant’s view of this now storied relationship I preferred to stick with him. And so off to his house I went, where I found another impactful same-sex relationship! But first the house, which was a much smaller and more humble dwelling when Bryant purchased it in 1865. It was his family’s homestead but, but the Bryant farmers had gone west decades before so he was returning to his roots. He raised it up, added a floor and on and on, and created a pastoral summer retreat from his beloved New York City where he spent the last ten summers of his life.

This house has the simplicity of a summer residence, emphasized by all the old wicker and spindle furniture, cotton runners and curtains, and pumpkin painted floors. And it’s not “done”: only the dining room and Bryant’s first-floor study could be called “decorated” and only with family possessions. Everything else looks casually placed—and the bedrooms look like someone just hastily made their bed and stepped out! It’s a hand-me down house with two notable transactions in its history: Bryant’s (re-) purchase in 1865 and his grandaugher Minna Godwin Goddard’s (re-) purchase of the estate from her aunt’s companion in 1917. Bryant died in 1875 and left the property to his two daughters, Frances Bryant Godwin and Julia Sands Bryant. After her sister’s death, Julia was sole owner and left the homestead to her cousin, companion and “chum,” (the word used in Julia’s obituary in the New York Times) Anna R. Fairchild, from whom Minna purchased it, donating it to the Trustees a decade later.

I loved the wallpapers: several looked original, complete with water stains. And that general air of they just stepped away, evident throughout the house but particularly so in the upper rooms. Cool closets! The Trustees guide let us go everywhere, even into the room (and there always is one) with all the chairs lined up (alas, too dark for a photo). I had other places to see in the area, but you could certainly make a day of the Bryant Homestead, as the grounds are lovely and extensive: there are two more dates for house tours, in August and September.

 

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Architecture, Historic Houses, New England

June 29, 2026

Salem 250: Revolutionary Residences

By daseger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 8, 2026

Three Irish Takeaways

By daseger

How to summarize a long trip all around Ireland? I’ve got lots of photos—and thoughts—but I always think it’s better to focus when presenting anything, any way, so I’ve narrowed much of it down to three takeaways covering three topics that I feature on this blog consistently: architecture, gardens, and public history. So here I go with: more Pugin please, highlights from the Wild Atlantic Way, and bifurcated Belfast. If you’ve been following the blog for a while you know that I’m not really one who goes on and on about the glories of nature, but the coast of Ireland is so beautiful that I couldn’t top myself from taking lots of photos on the trip or sharing them now, so this is a bit of a dump, I’m afraid!

More Pugin please. 

I’ve always loved the Gothic Revival style which is so associated with the English architect Augustus Welby Pugin in nineteenth-century England as well as Ireland, where he designed around 18 buildings, mostly ecclesiatical commissions, between 1837 and 1850. Under British rule, the building of Catholic Churches in Ireland was restricted until the 18th century, but Catholic emancipation in 1829 initiated a building boom consisting of over 3000 churches. I was always looking for these “new” churches in every town and city we visited, right from the beginning of our trip when I became entranced by a Dublin church designed not by Augustus Pugin, but rather by his son and successor, Edward Welby Pugin: St. Augustine and St. John the Baptist Church (generally referred to as John’s Lane Church). I had made my way through the (crowded) Anglican St. Patrick’s and Christ Church Cathedrals when I saw the spire of Pugin’s church soaring in the near distance and went right there, where I was wowed. The pictures are not going to do the interior justice: there was something about the medieval motifs and smaller scale (than an actual medieval church) that was stirring.

I WAS wowed by the Pugin (Jr.) church, and it influenced me to search out more Pugin and more mid-19th century Gothic structures in Ireland, like St. Mary’s Cathedral in Killarney and these gatehouses. But I shouldn’t diminish St. Patrick’s (last picture above),  or Christ Church, which are both epic, of course, and I want to shout out the 

Along the Wild Atlantic Way:

The “Wild Atlantic Way” proceeds along the western coast from Cork to Donegal, which we did as well, but we couldn’t drive around ALL those peninsulas and we took some other shortcuts. Next time, I think I will follow it more precisely because it is a stunning coastline, interspersed with cliffs, beaches, colorful towns, island views and lots and lots of sheep. We used the inland town of Killarney as a base, went all around the Dingle peninsula, and then took the ferry over the river Shannon so did not go to Limerick. Then it was up to Galway, via the Cliffs of Moher in County Clare. Galway seemed like the New Orleans of Ireland to me on this particular trip, but I loved its very new (1965) cathedral, the last great stone cathedral built in Europe. It seemed very Romanesque revival to me, but I have to say I was less impressed by the Normanesque Kylemore Abbey up the coast (weird AI interpretation) but I did love its walled garden and cute little Gothic Revival cottage. Three medieval revivals in quick succession! Then it was on to Donegal Town and Northern Ireland.

In Kenmare, and Ross Castle in Killarney. Inch Beach on the Dingle peninsula and more Dingle coastline. The one llama on this Dingle sheep farm cracked me up; he was watching the herding from above as we watched below. Cliffs of Moher and Galway City. Kylemore Abbey and its Victorian walled garden. Classibawn Castle in County Sligo, and the parish church of Donegal Town.

Bifurcated Belfast:

I have not been in Northern Ireland for twenty years, and its major cities, (London)Derry and Belfast, struck me as thriving compared to my last visit, although Derry was a little quiet as we walked along its walls on a Bank Holiday Monday. Belfast was bustling, and of course it’s much bigger. I’m using the word “bifurcated” to describe it in this post because I was so struck by the two stories it presents to visitors: the Troubles and the Titanic. Two very different stories, but the city seems to embrace them both! Its massive City Hall seemed to me to occupy a central space between the West Belfast murals and the rising Titanic Quarter but I was very centered on downtown with the exception of a foray out to Queen’s University. I wasn’t really looking forward to going to the City’s biggest attraction, Titanic Belfast, because I thought it would just be a Disney experience, and it is essentially was (complete with a ride inside), but its interpretation also drew in the more comprehensive recent history of the city, for “Linenopolis” to the near-present. I just didn’t have enought time in Belfast; I need to go back, which is exactly how you want to feel when you leave a place.

6 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in Culture, Historic Trails, Travel

March 16, 2026

Camellia Days

By daseger

Nineteenth-century monied New Englanders loved camellias and living embodiments of their desire exist at the Lyman Estate greenhouses of Historic New England, which hosts “Camellia Days” in February and March when these old trees are in bloom. Somehow I miss this event every year, but not this year. I drove to Waltham on Wednesday and had a quick view of the Lyman Estate mansion followed by some alone time with the camellias. The Lyman greenhouses are old (1804), and as close as I can get to Salem’s greenhouse era, when there were at least eight (maybe more—my count is ever-evolving) right in the middle of the city. Camellia Days extends to the mansion, which was designed originally by Samuel McIntire, so there’s a more direct Salem connection there too. I was never really a fan of this rambling structure, but now I realize that is because of its robust Victorian additions rather than its original design. McIntire’s plans reveal a charming two-story house unblemished by those bays. I can certainly understand why Arthur Lyman wanted to expand the house in the 1880s, however: he had a large family who enjoyed this bucolic estate as an escape from busy Boston. And I do love the relocated staircase and vaulted ceiling of the added third storey.

The mansion was built in 1793 and expanded and altered in 1882-83, but the Lyman family retained McIntire’s Federal ballroom (which they used as a library) and oval “bow parlor”. The relocated stairway with its Palladian window oversees the grounds and greenhouses.

I really liked the very Victorian library as well, but my heart stopped when I entered the adjacent china room with cabinets full to brimming with purple transferware! “My” Waterhouse wallpaper adorned one of the bedrooms upstairs so that was nice too. It’s a lovely summer estate with a preserved landscape in the midst of now-busy Waltham.

But I was there for the camellias and they did not disappoint! These are lush, heirloom varieties. I’m partial to less showy plants in the bright light of summer, but in the very dim light of late winter these bright blooms are just what you need. The Lyman greenhouses are accessible all year long actually (and there are great plant sales), but Camellia Days provide extra enticement.

8 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in Culture, Historic Houses, New England

January 26, 2026

Frosty Salem

By daseger

So I was going to bring you some photographs of Salem during yesterday’s snowstorm today, but that would have necessitated actually going out and walking around, and just a few steps from my backyard out onto Chestnut Street at midday were enough to convince me that I didn’t want to do that. So I have images of snowstorms past, mostly new discoveries, and most from the Peabody Essex Museum’s Phillips Library, which possesses the largest collection of famed photographers Frank Cousins and Samuel Chamberlain, as well as images by amateur photographers in family papers. True to their promises of several years ago, the Phillips librarians have been steadily digitizing their local collections and everytime I go their digital collections page I see new-to-me things. If you’re new to Salem photo-sleuthing, you can just start with their very accessible “Salem Streets” collection, culled from a variety of sources. And of course all the glass plate negatives of Frank Cousins were digitized quite a while ago, and can also be found at Digital Commonwealth. My title is from Cousins, who assembled several of his favorite images for an 1891 collage, which I imagine was hung in the window of his Bee-Hive shop that very winter. Then I’m going to double back and proceed in chronological order.

So let’s go back a decade into the 1880s, when we really start to see a lot of photographs of Salem streets and buildings, both commercially published and popping up in family papers. I’ll never forget opening up the volumes of the Francis Lee papers a few summers ago at the Phillips Library in Rowley and seeing all of these gorgeous photographs from the mid-1880s. The photos below are from the same time period—1884-86—and this first amazing one is taken from the vantage point of Lee’s house, 14 Chestnut Street. No filter! Isn’t this a striking image? This photo and those that follow are attributed to John Robinson, a Salem author and horticulturalist and trustee of pretty much every single civic institution in the city at the time. I wasn’t aware that he was a photographer as well; I don’t know if had commissioned these images for some future publication? The last one of this group is from the vantage point of his house on Summer Street, and so we have two striking views of Samuel McIntire’s South Church, which burned to the ground in 1903.

Chestnut Street winters, Salem Streets collection, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum.

The 1890s: was Frank Cousins’ most productive decade as a photographer. He loved to photograph Chestnut Street too, but he branched out, all over the city, as his “Frosty Salem” poster illustrates. I love his winter shots because many of them include people, while his more formal architectural photographs decidedly do not.

Essex Street, the Common, Dearborn and Lafayette Streets,1890s, Frank Cousins Glass Plate Negative Collection, Phillips Library via Digital Commonwealth.

Also from the 1890s are several photographs by amateur photographers of an uprooted (Elm?) tree on Chestnut Street, with every possible angle captured!  I have looked in vain for more views of dealing with the snow, but this is as close as I could get. Closing out this decade are several beautiful photographs of the Pickering and Bartlett houses on Broad Street which are somehow connected to (taken by?) a certain Katherine A. Pond. I need to know more about her.

Chestnut and Broad Streets, 1890s, Phillips Library Digital Collections.

The 1920s: when I was looking for photos of Salem’s 1926 Tercentenary in various family albums at the Phillips, I came across the photos of the winter of 1924-25 in Francis Tuckerman Parker’s album. Again, these are not professional, and they are not digitized—I just took photos of the snapshots myself—so they not that great quality, but they are so interesting for what they show. The first image shows the intersection of Chestnut, Summer, and Norman Streets and on the extreme right is what I think is the last photograph of Samuel McIntire’s house before its demolition. The second, looking up Chestunt in the other direction, shows the church that replaced McIntire’s South Church, which was later demolished. Then we have a snow trolley on Essex, and a very messy intersection at the Essex and Summer.

Salem in the winter of 1924-25, Parker Family Photograph Album, Phillips Library.

1930s: the Phillips Library also possesses the huge negative collection of Samuel Chamberlain, a very important mid-century photographer of New England architecture and scenery, which is accessible at Digital Commonwealth. Chamberlain published Historic Salem in Four Seasons in 1938, so I assume these photos are from that time, but the collection encompasses his entire career. Pioneer Village, Salem’s outdoor living-history museum, was in its first decade, and Chamberlain photographed its buildings and landscape lavishly.

Pioneer Village by Samuel Chamberlain, Digital Commonwealth.

And finally, a street view of Broad Street in 1956 and an aerial view of Chestnut in 1972, both after the storms. The latter is included in a feature in Life magazine in that year, prompted by President Nixon’s visit to China. Eastern-oriented Salem seemed like a good place to examine American perspectives on Asia at that time; I don’t think that would be the first Salem association now.

Salem in 1956 and 1972: William F. Abbott collection at the Phillips Library and Life magazine, 1972.

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

October 13, 2025

So much WOOD!

By daseger

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

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

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

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

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September 15, 2025

A Colonial Revival Dining Room

By daseger

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

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

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

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

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September 8, 2025

Houses are History

By daseger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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