Tag Archives: Architecture

December 23, 2024

Merry Christmas from Salem

By daseger

No deep dive here, just some photographs of Salem at Christmas time: my neighborhood, my house, other houses. It’s been a tough semester and a tough month, and I’m tired. I did Thanksgiving, so my brother and brother-in-law are on for Christmas and we’re off to the Hudson River Valley tomorrow. Many of us in Salem have experienced a loss today, and these pictures make me happy: I hope they give pleasure to you as well. Salem is really beautiful in December in general and at Christmas time in particular: at that other holiday she is wearing a costume and not her true self.

Love this wreath!

We were fortunate to be invited to a dinner at the Pickering House before the Hamilton Hall dance, which has been held since at least World War II, with similar events before—way before! I hope these two ladies don’t mind their inclusion in this post, I was just so impressed by their gowns–and their purses!

Home–and away we go. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

P.S. MANTELS! Thanks, Patricia.

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December 9, 2024

Christmas in Salem 2024

By daseger

This past weekend was very busy: there was the annual Christmas in Salem tour of historic homes decorated for the holidays, Christmas teas at the Phillips House, and my new neighbors hosted a very festive party across the street. I love the Christmas season in Salem: it commences a period of relative radio silence by the witch-profiteers although we definitely have more dark stores than light in Salem now. The Christmas in Salem tour is venerable: it has been the major fundraiser for our even more venerable preservation organization, Historic Salem, Inc. (HSI), for decades, and before that it was run by the Visiting Nurses Association. It’s always been the best alternative/corrective to Witch City and it is popular: it’s a tradition for many Salem residents but also visitors from across New England. I’ve served as a guide or house captain for years, I’ve had two houses on the tour, and I seldom miss it: a couple of years ago I was housebound with sciatica and miserable, both because I was in pain and missing out. It’s a huge effort, both by Historic Salem in general and its Christmas in Salem committee in particular, and of course by the homeowners; an amazing expression of generosity and community by all. The tour varies its neighborhood focus and theme every year and this year it was centered on the core of the McIntire Historic District, Federal and Essex Streets, and named “Brick by Brick”. This name wasn’t entirely clear to me (because I was thinking brick houses) until I got the program, which highlights Salem’s brick sidewalks, which have been quite endangered up to the formation of Historic Salem’s Brick Committee and are now experiencing some much-needed restoration. So that’s another initiative to thank HSI for.

The Tour headquarters was the Assembly House, one of the Peabody Essex Museum houses which I haven’t been in for years. So I was excited, but it seems to have lost much of the texture which I remembered, so we didn’t linger long. The second-floor landing was always one of my favorite architectural features and that seemed the same. In general, the Federal Street houses were earlier and the Essex Street houses “Victorian,” with the exception the Corwin House, of course. There were several public buildings on the tour (besides the Corwin House, the First Church, Grace Church, and the Salem Athenaeum) but I skipped them in the interests of time. I heard they were decorated beautifully though, my loss! The decorations get ever more creative with each passing year: you might notice a cocktail subtext below.

Well, the pictures above represent most, but not all, of the tour houses on Federal and its off streets. The other thing that has always struck me about the Christmas in Salem tour is the value encompassed. We’re not talking about a mere six or seven buildings, but rather 14, along with a “bonus second visit to favorite house.” The value of this tour is also based in the sheer quality and diversity of the architecture: it’s always a great representative of the sheer quality and diversity of Salem’s architecture. And so on to some really stately Revival homes on Essex: an Italianate house with its own hill (always impressive) and the Balch House, Salem’s most distinguished Second Empire structure, which served as the city’s American Legion headquarters for much of the twentieth century (see black & white photo below, from PEM’s Phillips Library). These are very exuberant houses which have recently been “refreshed” and it was great to see them both so shiny and festive.

 

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November 18, 2024

Mint McIntire

By daseger

It’s always a big moment when a Salem house crafted by Samuel McIntire comes on the market, and that moment is approaching! Likely the most important McIntire house still in private hands, the very-storied Cook-Oliver House at 142 Federal Street, is coming up for sale quite soon. This house will certainly need considerable work, but my title is an attempt to epitomize the great creative and material efforts of its successive owners to preserve McIntire’s design and craftsmanship. The house was built by Captain Samuel Cook (1769-1861) whose span of life represents Salem’s spectucular maritime rise and fall. He was one of a score of Salem captains and merchants who earned great profits by re-exporting commodities from the East Indies to Europe in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, and only a year or so after the dramatic shipwreck of his ship Volusia off Cape Cod in early 1802 he was able to finance the construction of a house which spared no expense by all accounts. The fortunes of these men always seem so fluid to me! The carved detail, evident inside and out, was so notable in its time that there emerged a narrative which connected Captain Cook’s house to an even more notable McIntire construction: the short-lived Derby Mansion in the center of town. Salem’s merchant prince or King, Elias Hasket Derby, financed the construction of what looks like a proper manor house in his declining years, and it was completed according to the plans of Charles Bulfinch and Samuel McIntire in 1799, the very year he died. Given its central and conspicuous location (right in the middle of what is now called Derby Square), the mansion’s life was short: it was torn down in 1815 to make way for what eventually became the Old Town Hall or Market House. Even though Cook’s house was built a decade earlier, there persisted a story that some of the woodwork was somehow salvaged by him. There is a particular focus on the gateposts of the Cook House having Derby Mansion origins, repeated again and again and again in periodicals and monographs on old American houses until Fiske Kimball dismissed the connection as “legend” in his 1940 study, Mr. Samuel McIntire, Carver: the Architect of Salem.

I was thrilled when my friend Michael Selbst, a very busy Salem realtor with the listing, texted me with an invitation to view the house just before the election, and we went in two days afterwards: a welcome distraction! As you can see, it was a sunny day and the house glowed, despite the traces of moving activity all around. I think that this is the only McIntire house in Salem in which I have not entered before: it was kind of chilling (in a good way) because I had seen so many photographs and now here I was in the real house. It’s hard to explain just how lovely this house is and the photos will not do it justice: there’s something about the combination of the smaller scale and the very detailed woodwork. It is not by any means a small house (especially with its additions) but it has a more intimate presence than the other McIntire houses I have been in: I was actually and immediately reminded of Leonardo’s embrace of the classical concept of in all things is the measure of man. It’s a humanist house!

These two doorways, to the right (parlor) and left (dining room) just as you enter the house, have been photographed so often over the last century or so that I was a little starstruck upon my entrance. 

It is also, and has always been, a family home, and Michael and its owners hope it will be a family home again, with its essential structure and details preserved intact. Captain Cook and his wife Sarah (Sally) lived in the house until their deaths in the 1860s and then it passed on to their daughter Sally and her husband Henry Kemble Oliver, real Renaissance Man: a soldier, officer, civil servant, politican and musician who served successively as mayor of both Lawrence and Salem. Sally Oliver died in 1866, but Henry continued to live at 142 Federal Street until his death in 1885. Several owners later, the long tenure of Dr. and Mrs. Carroli saw the only “losses” for the house as the Dufour wallpaper in the parlor was donated to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (now Historic New England) in 1904 and a cornice to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1920s. There are apartment and porch additions to the back that did not alter the original structure in any way. The woodwork throughout looks to my eye exactly as it does in the many photographs that date from the early twentieth century. After spending a good part of last year working on the Colonial Revival chapter for our forthcoming book Salem’s Centuries, not always a pleasant task as it involved documenting the “stripping” of several Salem houses, it was nice to see so much in situ!

I got a little flustered in the parlor looking at a unique fireplace insert, so I didn’t get proper photos of the mantle or even much of the room! So I have included some HABS photos, as well as two Frank Cousins views from Historic New England and the New York Public Library Digital Gallery with the Dufour paper, which was removed in 1904. The mantle remains the same! A lovely Palladian window on the second-floor landing, which has a very unique detail. More details, the dining room, kitchen, and my favorite third-floor bedroom. There are more bedrooms, and quite a few cute little rooms—I actually lost count: a sewing room? studies, a trunk room?

All summer long at the Phillips House, I kept describing the original McIntire construction (or relocation to Chestnut Street) as “shallow,” just one room deep. You rarely see Federal houses with this original shallowness—over the nineteenth century they were built on and on and on as needs dictated and so they become more square than rectangular. There’s something about being able to see the backyard from the front door: it adds a lightness to a house. On the dining-room side of the Cook-Oliver house, a first-floor kitchen was added and then the apartments wing, but in the hall and on the parlor side, you can see right through. And what you see is a very expansive yard. A quarter of an acre! Very lavish for Salem, as if this house wasn’t amazing enough.

 

Appendix: Period Homes, 2005.

 

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November 11, 2024

Past and Future at the Crane Estate

By daseger

It’s been a difficult week; I don’t understand the choice that my fellow Americans have made. But I do understand that I am well-insulated from said choice, by my age, occupation, residence and background. I’m a very privileged person; my first thought when I realized how the election was going was: well, I can go back to the sixteenth century and work on my saffron book. And I can, and I will. In the here and now, I realized I needed to immerse myself in something pleasureable: for me, that is always historic architecture. This past weekend, I was indeed very privileged to be able to visit a Samuel McIntire house here in Salem that will come up for sale in the coming weeks: pictures forthcoming. It was so charming, so crafted, so preserved, so comforting. And on Saturday my husband and I drove up to Ipswich for a tour of Castle Hill at the Crane Estate: it was so grandiose, so gilded, so well-situated, but still, somehow, so comforting. The estate is centered by the “Great House” or Castle Hill, a Jacobean Revival (??? not really sure about this label—the front facade is said to be based on the National Trust’s Belton House, a later Stuart structure. Stuart Revival? Carolean Revival? Restoration Revival?) built between 1924-1928 on an ocean-fronted drumlin which provides inspiring views of the surrounding sea and marshland. A complex of mansion, outbuildings, and surrounding landscaped gardens and grounds was commissed by Chicago industrialist Richard Teller Crane Jr. and his wife Florence, who purchased the property in 1910. They first built an Italianate mansion, but as Florence hated it and its stucco walls failed they commissioned Chicago architect David Adler to design a more enduring building in another European style. The house has 59 rooms encompassed in nearly 60,000 square feet, and was donated to the Trustees of Reservations after the death of Mrs. Crane in 1949. We toured about half the house, and then proceeded up to the roof to see its cupola and the surrounding terrain and ocean, along with Crane Beach, the best in New England.

Inside are grand halls and Anglo interiors: there are floors and panels extricated from doomed houses across the Atlantic. The library, with its Grinling Gibbons overmantle carving and woodwork from a Tudor manor house named Cassiobury Park, is definitely the star of the first floor although the perfect-green dining room was a close second for me. As we proceeded upstairs, the rooms seemed more “American” to me, although there was some beautiful French wallpaper (Zuber?) in one of the halls. As Mr. Crane made his fortune in plumbing, the bathrooms are impressive in both fixtures and decorations, but I didn’t get any good photographs! (All summer long, whenever I showed visitors the relatively plain bathrooms at the Phillips House, they would comment oh the bathrooms are much better at Castle Hill. There was a ship’s cabin feel to the charming third-floor Billiards Room, which presently has no billiards table. From here we ascended up to the cupola and roof.

Back down to the gorgeous green dining room, from which I spied the butler in the kitchen washing champagne glasses, his tuxedo so perfectly of the twenties time that I thought he might be a ghost! But no, he came closer and was actually Brendan, a student in two of my courses this semester. I knew he worked at Castle Hill but somehow I had forgotten, so when I saw him, it was kind of a shock; you know, the shock you feel when you see a familiar person in an unfamiliar place. Brendan was very much in his element and I was very happy to see him so: much of my week’s disappointment was for my students, who are going to have to deal with the consequences of this election early in their lives and for longer than I. Something about Brendan in his tuxedo made me think that he was game, along with his contemporaries. Almost immediately after that pleasurable encounter, I stepped out of the house onto the grounds  and ran into none other than Senator/Secretary John Kerry! He was mid-stride and did not look like he wanted to talk and I didn’t really know what to say anyway, but as he walked away I thought, wow, he’s probably doing the same thing as me, coming to this beautifully-preserved Massachusetts place on a gorgeous fall day trying to forget the election. He looked at Crane Beach for a while and then he was gone. That brief encounter made me think of Kerry’s perspective and realize that my frustrations pale in comparison: imagine serving your country in many ways over many decades and then that man is elected president, not only once but twice! Ah well, it was a beautiful day at the Crane Estate.

That green! Brendan, and a wing-less gryphon. I didn’t take Senator Kerry’s photograph because it would have been rude, and I was in the midst of snapping the gryphon. Happy Veterans Day to the Senator and all of his comrades.

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April 23, 2024

Salem’s Uber-Inglenook

By daseger

A month or so ago, I was very fortunate to be able to tour Salem’s former Superior Court, a grand Victorian castle, complete with turret, built in 1861 and expanded in the 1880s. It’s been mothballed for quite some time, and is now part of big development/redevelopment project, in which it and its adjoining Greek Revival courthouse will be restored and a new multi-story residential building built alongside Salem’s train station. My husband’s firm, Seger Architects, is working on this project, and so after a big of nagging, I got to tag along on one of their site visits. I recall being in this building before, but I was not really present in the way I was on my recent visit: there were only a few people milling about and I had time to focus on every little detail. And there were so many: iron staircases with intricate designs, all manner of rounded and squared and arched windows, crafted courtrooms, with carved benches and siding and vaulted ceilings, small spaces for conferences delineated by smooth panelled doors and frosted windows, wooden phone booths, tiled floors with mosaic embellishments. But above and beyond all, there is the Essex County Law Library, with its magnificient “walk-in” fireplace. It’s impossible to describe the baronial beauty and presence of this particular room and feature, so I might as well just show you some photographs, of present and past.

My photos of the former Essex County Law Library and the Superior Court exterior from last month; Frank Cousins’ photographs from c. 1891, Cousins Collection, Phillips Library via Digital Commonwealth.

I posted a few photos on facebook, and one of my friends referred to this fireplace as an “inglenook,” which surprised me, as I think of inglenooks as small cozy places in pubs, where one gathers around the fire. This spacious enclosure does not strike me as particularly “nook-like”.  But the definition (according to Curl’s Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture) is more general: “corner of a large fireplace where the opening of the chimney was far larger than needed, and there was space where persons could sit” and “area off a room containing the fireplace, often with a small window, fitted with seats behind the chimney-breast and the wall.” So maybe it is an inglenook–it certainly could be fitted with myriad seats, though it was more purposely filled with bookcases. In the Cousins photographs above, you can see the windows on each side of the fireplace, long blocked-off. This area is more of an inglenook room, though, and its size and scale certainly impressed contemporaries when it was unveiled to the public upon its completion in 1889: “on entering it one is confronted by a fireplace so massive that, like one in the Castle of Chillon, it seems to dominate the whole room” wrote Thomas Franklin Hunt in the 1895 edition of Visitor’s Guide to Salem. I looked at all the Chillon fireplaces, and could not find one to rival Salem’s (imho) and none seem to be encased in inglenooks, so I think we have a very special space here, and also a relatively early example of the great inglenook revival ushered in by the Arts and Crafts movement on both sides of the Atlantic. The original architect of the Superior Court was Enoch Fuller of Boston; the 1880s addition was the commission of Wheeler & Northend of Lynn, the partnership of Holman King Wheeler and and William Wheelwright Northend. I’m not sure which partner designed the Library and its majestic fireplace, but I’d like to think it was Northend as he was from Salem and the younger brother of one of my favorite Salem authors, Mary Harrod Northend. In any case, it was was influenced by a burgeoning Tudor-esque revival of inglenooks, manifested in Britain most notably by the Richard Norman Shaw at Cragside in Northumberland in the 1870s and 1880s  and locally by Arthur Little’s renovation of Caroline Emmerton’s house on Essex Street in the latter decade.

Cragside Inglenook, Royal Academy of Arts; Sir William George Armstrong, 1st Baron Armstrong of Cragside (1810–1900), in the Inglenook at Cragside, by Henry Hetherington Emmerson, National Trust Collection; Arthur Little’s rendering of the dining room inglenook at 328 Essex Street, Salem, American Architect & Building News, November, 1890.

These inglenook fireplaces were the forerunners of more generic variants featured a few decades later in the pages of The Craftsman and on the cover of the Inglenook magazine. Like William Morris in Britain, Gustav Stickley loved these crafted “rooms within rooms”: for every bungalow an inglenook! It seems like this feature came to symbol craftsmanship in the early twentieth century, so it seems appropriate that the ultimate inglenook is right here in Salem, a very well-crafted city until recent decades. It’s not clear what new function the former library will serve in the future, but I’m hopeful that more people will be able to take (walk!) in this treasure in the years to come.

Gustav Stickley, Craftsman houses : a book for home–makers (1913). Cover of the weekly Inglenook magazine, 1906.

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March 20, 2024

The Grass is Greener

By daseger

I’m home now from my spring break road trip, so this is part two: the way home. Looking through my photographs, all I could think of was green. You know I’m a die-hard New Englander, but the mid-atlantic and southern states simply have better springs, period. All is green rather than brown. We’ll get that green, but it won’t be for a while. Picking up where I left off with my last post, I drove south from Mount Vernon into Virginia, stopping at Fredericksburg, Richmond, Williamsburg and Yorktown before turning north towards home. I was still following my George Washington route, and Fredericksburg is really GW-central, with his childhood, mother’s and sister’s home located there, as well as his brother’s house, which is now a tavern. Everything was great, Fredericksburg is a really nice town, but the world kind of slowed down for me when I walked through the doors of Kenmore, the house of his sister and her family. It immediately became my favorite house, displacing Gardner-Pingree here in Salem and last year’s spring break highlight, the Read House in New Castle, Delaware. I’m never loyal, there’s always a new favorite house around the corner, but wow, this 177os house is something: it experienced the typical Colonial Revival restoration and then a later one and is primarily known for its elaborately-designed stucco ceilings, crafted by the same anonymous “Stucco Man” (presumably an enslaved or indentured servant) who worked on Mount Vernon.

It’s quite a house, representing a significant investment of money and labor. Betsy Washington Lewis (pictured in this last photo) and her husband Fielding were both patriots and slaveowners, representing and presenting the typical Virginia conundrum. The interpretation at Kenmore emphasizes both aspects of its owners’ lives, including the financial hardships incurred by their contributions to the cause and the life and work of the over 130 enslaved persons who inhabited the Lewis plantation. The Civil War experience of what was once a working plantation but now seems like a stately townhouse in the midst of Fredericksburg, presents another dichotomy: that beautiful dining room pictured above served as a surgery and there are both Union and Confederate cannonballs embedded in its brick exterior.

I spent so much time at Kenmore that I slighted the rest of charming Fredericksburg, which seemed to me like a perfect town for tourists and residents alike—-I didn’t get to the Civil War history or even to the James Monroe Museum, went quickly through Mary Washington’s house (much more humble than that of her daughter’s, the charming garden is above) and then I was off to see my sisters-in-law in Richmond. The following day was the best: Richmond really has it all for the heritage tourist. First off, it is a city that has made a thoughful and engaging (and likely expensive) commitment to public history: only Arthur Ashe remains on Monument Avenue and on the waterfront, adjacent to the new American Civil War Museum, is a poignant statue commemorating emancipation as well as a creative installation on the fall of Richmond in April of 1865 on a bridge/dam walk across the James River. There are well-marked heritage trails within the historic districts of the city, and mansions outside. And the Poe Museum, located in a cluster of buildings which include Richmond’s oldest house! You really can have it all. We went to an amazing performance (??? lecture??? I wouldn’t call it a tour) at St. John’s Episcopal Church, where Patrick Henry gave his give me liberty or give me death speech, and now I am a complete Henry fan.

Richmond! Brown’s Island, Liberty Trail, Agecroft Hall and the Virginia House, Poe Museum.

In my last few days, I drove down to Surry, Virginia to see Bacon’s Castle, a very rare and beautifully restored Jacobean plantation house with outbuildings (including an 1830 slave dwelling) and gardens: this was a nice tidewater comparison to the Sotterly plantation I had seen in Maryland just days before. Then if was across the river (by ferry!) to Williamsburg and Yorktown, to finish the George Washington tour. I had been to both places before, so no surprises, but I was trying to look at all of the places that I visited on this trip (my Jersey stops, Annapolis, Alexandria, as well as Fredericksburg and Richmond) as more of a tourist than an historian, so that I could try to look at Salem the same way and perhaps become a bit more comfortable with its evolution into a year-round tourist destination. Could smooth brick sidewalks, plentiful public bathrooms and parking, a diverse array of shops, and aesthetic and informative signage be in our future? Fixed-in-time Colonial Williamsburg is certainly an unrealistic and unfair comparison, but there were more robust tourist infrastructures nearly everwhere I went.

Bacon’s Castle, the Nelson House at Yorktown and Whythe House in Williamsburg on Palace Green, where General Washington was headquartered before Yorktown. Dream garden—ready to go.

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February 19, 2024

A Salem Walking Tour for Presidents Day

By daseger

Sorry I’m a little late with this Presidents Day post, but I woke up this morning with an earnest desire to take a walk around Salem, an urge I haven’t felt for quite some time. And since it was Presidents Day, I had a walking theme, which is always nice. We had a lovely weekend in New Hampshire with old friends and a equally lovely dinner with my brother and brother-in-law when we returned last night, and I woke up feeling happy and finally rested from finishing THE BOOK. So off I went in search of presidential places on this sunny but chilly day. This is a little breezy, I certainly didn’t do any research, so feel free to make corrections and/or additions. I’ve plotted my tour on a 1915 “New Map of Salem for the for Motorists and Tourists” from the Library of Congress, and most of the tour stops (marked with stars) are standing today: one had yet to be built (the Hawthorne Hotel) and another (the Ruck House, marked by a special star) was torn down to make way for the new Post Office in the 1920s, along with 50+ other old structures in the vicinity.

I always start my walking tours at Hamilton Hall on lower Chestnut Street because I live right next door. So many things happened at the Hall, however, that it is not only a convenient place but also a logical place to start a Salem history tour. Quite a few presidents have visited the Hall, John Quincy Adams, Martin van Buren, and Theodore Roosevelt for certain. The latter came up to Salem from Harvard for debutante assemblies in the later 1870s, and I think he might have even met his first wife, Alice Lee, there, as several letters in the Pusey Library refer to their courtship amidst the assemblies. Then Vice-President Van Buren reportedly referred to Chestnut Street as “the most beautiful street I have ever seen” at an 1817 reception though this oft-quoted opinion has been attributed to others.

Keep walking up Chestnut and cross over to Essex on Flint, then walk eastward towards Grace Church, our second stop. President William Howard Taft, who maintained  “Summer White Houses” over in Beverly for several seasons, attended services here occasionally from 1909-1912. Like several other presidents, Taft also visited the Peabody Museum and the Essex Institute and spoke at the Salem Armory, and an endorsement from Mrs. Taft indicates that he was a big fan of the chocolates at the Moustakis Brothers’ “Palace of the Sweets” at 220 Essex Street (although I’m pretty sure he didn’t shop for them there himself.) Continue walking eastward on Essex and cross over to Federal Street at Monroe, after passing the Cabot-Low-Endicott house on the right: I really think President Grover Cleveland visited his first Secretary of War, William Crowninshield Endicottt, there but I can’t find the documentation.

On Federal, we’re just going to head west for a bit until we come to the Peabody Essex Museum’s Assembly House, where President George Washington was wined and dined at a reception during his big trip to Salem in October of 1789–he stayed at the Joshua Ward House on the street that would be renamed in his honor after this visit, now The Merchant Hotel. Then it’s a long walk towards downtown along Federal Street to Washington and the Tabernacle Church, where Calvin Coolidge attended services while maintaining his Summer White House in Swampscott in the 1920s. Then we walk down to Town House Square where several presidents traversed and campaigned, including Ulysses S. Grant, Chester Arthur, and Theodore Roosevelt.

President and Mrs. Coolidge attending services at the Tabernacle Church, Salem, on July 4, 1925, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.

Walk down Essex Street to the East India Marine Hall of the Peabody Essex Museum, which was visited by a succession of presidents from John Quincy Adams to Taft and Coolidge. The Salem Armory (or what’s left of it) also hosted several presidential receptions. It’s difficult to orient yourself historically on Essex Street as so much is new, but Thomas Jefferson (1784), James Monroe (1817), and Andrew Jackson (1833) all visited famous dwellings in this vicinity. Jackson was not popular, and he did not attend a special  “handsome and good dinner including mock turtle soup” for 150 attendees on June 26 prepared by famed Hamilton Hall caterer John Remond, pleading illness. His great opponent, the former president John Quincy Adams, later expressed his doubts about Jackson’s debility, which he called “politic,” at best.

Make your way over to Salem Common by the Hawthorne Hotel, from which President George H.W. Bush WALKED down Hawthorne Boulevard and Lafayette Streets for his speech at Salem State College (now University) in May of 1994. I’m not sure whether or not his fellow presidential speakers in the famed series, Presidents Ford, Carter, and Clinton, stayed or were “received” at the Hotel, but they were certainly in Salem!

On the Common, head for the northeast corner and the Washington Arch, recently restored by the Salem Common Neighborhood Association. (unfortunately the attendant sign is incorrect: while Salem’s privateering record is impressive, the port did not account for half of the estimated 1800 captured British vessels during the Revolution. This kind of sloppiness is unfortunately all too common with Salem’s historical signage). From the arch you can look at two “presidential” houses at either side of this corner, the former Silsbee house (now beautiful condos!) and the Joseph Story house, both of which served as venues for the reception of President James Monroe in the summer of 1817. From this vantage point, I can also imagine President James K. Polk’s entourage speeding down Winter Street towards Beverly in 1847.

Walk south towards Salem Harbor and Derby Street, where you will find the stately Brookhouse Home for Aged Women right next to the Custom House. It was built for Benjamin Crowninshield, who was a US representative and Secretary of the Navy under both Presidents Madison and Monroe, and the latter stayed her during his 1817 visit to Salem. From there its a pretty straight shot along Derby, Charter and Front Streets to the Joshua Ward House/Merchant, where President Washington stayed  in October of 1789. A friend of ours restored the building (very meticulously!) and so as soon as it was open for business, we booked the very room in which Washington slept, which was quite a thrill! From the Merchant you can look out to where the Ruck house once stood, now occupied by the Salem Post Office. This was the home of Abigail Adams’ sister and brother-in-law so often visited by the Adamses in his pre-presidential years. The two wonderful pastel portraits of Abigail and John by Salem artist Benjamin Blyth were no doubt a product of their familiarity with this house and Salem.

Abigail and John Adams by Benjamin Blyth, c. 1766, Massachusetts Historical Society.

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January 22, 2024

Salem 1799

By daseger

I always tell my students forget dates, you can always look them up, dates are a terrible way to learn history, but sometimes dates just stand out: 1348, 1517, 1776, 1789, 1914. The other day I was engaged in some endnote-editing and somehow, the date 1799 just started jumping out at me: it suddently seemed like the most important date in Salem’s history! Why? A lot of building mostly: of two of the most spectacular Derby houses and Salem’s first federal frigate, the Essex. But there were other notable things that happened in that year too: the foundation of the East India Marine Society for one, and the renaming of Salem’s long-ignored seventeenth-century fortification, Fort Pickering, for another. 1799 was a big year for Salem, then the eighth largest “city” in the United States with a population of over 9000. Its commercial vitality was already well-established, but it aquired a new civic reputation with the construction-by-subscription of the Frigate Essex for the federal government. The most wonderful book sheds light on the whole commission/subscription/construction process: Philip Chadwick Foster Smith’s The frigate Essex papers : building the Salem frigate, 1798-1799 (1974): I wouldn’t presume to add to it! I will, however, include a couple of its maps. Salem had terrible flooding last weekend and I think we need to remember that we live in an infilled-city, and that a river runs through it.

The US Frigate Essex, built in Salem by Salem residents.

Joseph Howard, watercolor of the Essex, after 1799, Peabody Essex Museum.

Maps from Philip Chadwick Foster Smith’s The Frigate Essex Papers.

 

Not one but TWO Derby houses built in 1799, with Bulfinch & McIntire designs.

The Ezekiel Hersey Derby House and the Elias Hasket Derby Mansion, one which existed long enough to be “denatured” into a commercial building and the other very short-lived, as its commissioner, the wealthy merchant Elias Hasket Derby, died in the same year that it was built: 1799. Think about the Salem in which these two structures were raised: talk about McMansions! These were conspicuous structures: Chestnut Street was at least five years into the future.

These were houses of a son and father of Salem’s first family. I’m not sure how long Ezekiel, the fifth child of Elias Hasket Derby, lived in his elegant house, one of just a few in Salem to be designed by Charles Bulfinch (with interior architectural details by Samuel McIntire). He was more focused on agricultural pursuits and the development of south Salem, where he had a sprawling farm. His town house stood long enough to be stripped, as happened to so many notable houses, and architectural historian Fiske Kimball established a Derby Room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art with its architectural features.

Plans and photos of the Ezekiel Hersey Derby House, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum; the Derby Room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Elias’s mansion did not stand long enough to be “denatured” (which certainly would have happened in its central location, maybe its short life was a blessing) or photographed, but there are sketches and plans in the PEM’s Phillips Library. It gave way to the present-day Derby Square.

 

Captain Devereux opens up trade with Japan!

It is decidedly NOT true that Commodore Perry opened up trade with Japan in 1853; rather, Captain John Devereux of Salem and the Boston ship Franklin did so in 1799. The Dutch had had a monopoly on western trade with Japan since the early 17th century, primarily because they did not proselytize like their European counterparts during the Reformation. Two centuries later, they licensed American ships to go to their trading post on Deshima Island just off the port of Nagasaki, including the Franklin in 1799 and the Salem ship Margaret in 1801. Devereux brought Japanese goods back to Salem, and so did the captain of the Margaret, Samuel Derby. The former’s account book in the Phillips Library lists “128 raincoats” purchased there, as well as several items of “lacked” (lacquered) furniture: the Peabody Essex Museum has a Hepplewhite-style knife box, several card and tip-top tables, and a large server/oval waiter in its collection from this cargo, the focus of an article in the July, 1954 Magazine Antiques below. Of course, the Reverend Bentley ran right over to see Captain Devereux’s hall at his house on the Common as soon as he returned, as recorded in his famous Diary.

 

The Foundation of the East India Marine Society!

The Peabody Essex Museum’s foundation date of 1799 and claim to be the oldest (maritime) museum in the United States is based on the establishment of the East India Marine Society in that year. I love the description of the society included in the American Neptune of 1944, in an article marking the completion of the restoration of the the Society’s East India Marine Hall: In the autumn of 1799 a group of thirty Salem shipmasters met to found a society so exclusive that only those who had sailed around Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope as masters or supercargos would be eligible for membership. As the first New England vessel had reached China only thirteen years before, this requirement made the society comparable, for its time, to a modern aviation club, for which only pilots who had successfully crossed the Atlantic or Pacific could qualify. Its members were equipped with notebooks so they might advance navigational and geographical knowledge, and like Captain Devereux, they brought home things to embellish their Society’s “cabinet”. There are quite a few old histories of the Society (like the 1920 text below) which reprint the foundation documents and highlight all sorts of little details, but there’s also George Schwartz’s recent history, Collecting the Globe, which presents a more comprehensive context for its foundation year, 1799.

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December 7, 2023

Special Little Places: Closes, Corridors and Courts

By daseger

Still basking in my Edinburgh afterglow as we finish the last week of classes of the Fall 2023 semester: at home, as a deficient boiler has rendered Salem State’s North Campus an uninhabitable place. Shades of 2020-2021 for sure! I’m actually teaching two online classes by choice next semester, but I was not expecting to be back on Zoom so soon. I had a bit of time to think about some themes I wanted to emphasize about my Scotland trip, and one is “special little places”: I find that in most (not all) European cities that I have visited there are urban spaces which preserve a bit of the past, off the beaten path. Little courtyards and lanes and ways. Off the Royal Mile in Edinburgh there are so many “closes”! It’s quite extraordinary really–some access other ways, some are closed-off, all seem to transport you off a busy street into somwhere else. Here are just a few: Riddell’ss Close AND Court, Advocate’s Close, Tweeddale Court and Bakehouse Close: the latter two arre Outlander locations, and I encountered an Outlander tour just after I took these pictures!

There are some special places in Edinburgh’s 18th century “New Town” as well, but not as many: it was laid out for breadth, perspective, and movement, just like an American city (well, at least the latter). There are places and lanes that give you a bit of that enclosure within the larger city feeling, like Circus Lane below, and the spectacularly picturesque Dean Village. You can still get away, or get back, in the New Town.

There are a few places in America where you can get this out-of-time experience. Beacon Hill in Boston is like that for me. Neighborhoods in Charleston, Alexandria, Annapolis, Newport and Nantucket. Salem used to have lots of little ways and squares, but it has always evolved, and most have disappeared. Everybody’s favorite little street is actually a court, Bott’s Court between Chestnut and Essex, and I can spot a really special little way on a 1916 map of Salem: (the) North Pole! I’m not sure where that place went, but it’s definitely no longer here.

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November 30, 2023

A Scottish Photo Feast for St. Andrew’s Day

By daseger

I’m just returned from a long trip to Scotland, during which I took hundreds of photographs, and today marks the feast of the Scottish patron Saint Andrew, so that’s the post! I promise more substantive essays in the future, but I have re-entered at the busiest time of the semester and my Salem’s Centuries manuscript is due in just over a month, so these photos will have to suffice for now. We spent most of our time in Edinburgh, but also covered a wide swath of south central Scotland, including Glasgow, Oban and Fort William in the west, and St. Andrews in the east. I spent my junior year abroad at that city’s university, and while I’ve been back several times since, it’s always great to go back. I really explored Edinburgh on this trip, both Old Town and New and some adjoining neighborhoods, so it was hard to pick my favorite photos of the capital, but I think I’ll favor the light. All the cities and towns we visited were aglow with Christmas trim, and every other day the sun bathed the land-and street-scapes for several intermittent hours: with moody mornings and darkness descending at 4pm, the light is very precious.

In Edinburgh:

Interior shots are of two National Trust properties: Gladstone’s Land in the Old Town and the Georgian House in the new. Of course the modern embellished building is the relatively new Scottish Parliament, about which I learned a lot. Christmas markets and fairs in every available green space!

 

Glasgow:

Glasgow Cathedral and Council Chambers are quite something, as are the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery at Glasgow University. Charles Rennie McIntosh immersion is possible.

 

Western Coast from Oban to Fort William and through the Highlands:

 

 

Fife villages on the East Coast, and St. Andrews:

So, lots more to write about, including whiskey, GIN, Jacobites, McIntosh, Princes Street, old and new architecture, the power of Outlander, closes, courts and corridors, and hedgehogs, but this postcard post will have to do for now: Happy Feast of St. Andrew day!

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