Tag Archives: Candy

February 2, 2026

The Problem with Sugar

By daseger

I have either written, edited, or read all of the essays that make up Salem’s Centuries many times over these past three years as they have taken shape but now that they’re all together in a published book I read them again last week, as I wanted to see how the book held up, cover to cover, beginning to end. You don’t have to read the book that way, as it is a collection of topical essays in chronological order, but I wanted to see if there were some hidden themes that perhaps we should have made more apparent (I think I was also looking for typos). Overall I was really pleased—-I think the book holds together well, and I only found one rather insignificant typo, in one of my own essays! I was also pleased to come away from this material with questions, because for me that’s the mark of a good history book, or any book for that matter. So I thought I would re-engage with some Salem history from time to time here, prompted by these new questions about old topics. Today I want to write about the supply of sugar in Salem, prompted by a piece by my co-editor, Brad Austin, about Salem’s entrepreneurial candymaker, Mary Spencer, widely known as the “Gibralter Woman.” This is a well-worn narrative: an Englishwoman is shipwrecked in Salem in 1806 and gifted a pound of sugar by Salem residents which she transforms into “Gibralters,” hard candies which she first sells from the steps of the First Church and which are eventually carried all over the world on Salem ships.

Peabody Historical Society.

Brad’s piece, “Mary Spencer: Shipwrecks, Sugar and Salem” is a wonderful example of what he calls “pulling” on a (familiar) narrative thread to reveal more context—and more questions. He picks up the story with Mary’s son Thomas Spencer, who arrived in Salem in the 1820s and carried on the family business while at the same time asserting a very public Abolitionist stance as one of of the founders of the Salem Anti-Slavery Society. And here’s the problem and the question: as sugar was the commodity most associated with slave labor, how can an Abolitionist candy maker run his business in good faith? Brad tells us that “in 1805, the year that Mary Spencer arrived in Salem, the Salem Gazette had more than 2500 mentions of sugar and molasses in advertisements along, on top of the hundreds of news stories and price guides it published discussing these commodities.” Mary Spencer’s first bag of gifted sugar almost certainly came from the West Indies, where it was cultivated, harvested, and processed by enslaved labor. Was this still the case twenty years later when her son joined the business? I think so, but there were a few other possibilities that appeared as I went through a sampling of advertisements myself. (Just a sampling; this is a blog post. A more comprehensive review would take hours and hours and hours, so what follows is an impression.)

What I saw was a lot of West Indian sugar coming into Salem, often called Havanna and or Martinique sugar, and then increasing amounts of domestic New Orleans sugar, also a product of enslaved labor. It’s hard to see how a Salem candy manufacturer or indeed any Salem person could do without sugar produced by enslaved labor unless they did without sugar altogether. Then a little glimmer of hope: the arrival of East Indian sugar, called Calcutta and Java sugar, after 1815. As you can see above, Michael Shepard is sourcing sugar from both east and west, but was the former the way forward? This certainly makes sense with Salem’s eastern-oriented trade, and could have been an American variant of the “East India Sugar not made by Slaves” campaign in Britain.

Sugar bowl, blue glass, inscribed in gilt with the words ‘East India Sugar / not made by / Slaves’, about 1820-30, probably made in Bristol, England. Museum no. C.14-2023. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Sugar from the East Indies did come into Salem in increasing volume but West Indian and New Orleans sugar imports were greater over the next few decades from my sampling. Kind of depressing, certainly not a consumption revolution. But then I came across a striking statement which let me down another road: sugar beet cultivation!

Was this another first for Salem? Likely not—the first sugar beet operation is usually identified as David Lee Child’s “factory” in Northampton at around this same time but there were earlier experiments. Beet sugar seems to have had the potential to be the most promising slavery-free alternative to cane sugar for abolitionists in New England and elsewhere but a real industry didn’t take off until much later. Pickering Dodge Jr. does not appear to have continued his experiments in North Salem (but I’ll keep digging). It seems that both Childs’ and Dodge’s efforts were hampered by processing: the prevalent methods produced a sugar that people just didn’t like. And that was a problem.

4 Comments | tags: abolitionism, Agriculture, Black History Month, Candy, Salem History, Salem Trade, Salem's Centuries, Slavery, Sugar | posted in History, Salem

February 14, 2022

Candy Land

By daseger

In my sweetest dreams Salem is Candy Land rather than Witch City, and it certainly has the heritage to claim that title (although Candy Land was a Milton Bradley game rather than a Parker Brothers production.) There are of course the famous Gibralters and Black Jacks, still sold at the Ye Olde Pepper Candy Company on Derby Street, America’s oldest candy company. Mrs. Spencer sold her hard candy from a horse-driven carriage, and her primary competition seems to have been the stationary confectioner John Simon, whose shop was stocked with a variety of syrups and sweets, everything from anise drops to peppermint. He was always announcing his “removal” to Boston but somehow never made the move. Before the later nineteenth century, however, most confectionary item were not sold by single confectioners, but rather by grocers and apothecaries, and their lists of available sweets became longer and longer with every decade. Nourse’s Fruit Store on Washington Street sold “calves foot jelly candy, strawberry jelly candy, sherbet candy, gum jelly drops, and “East India Red Rock Candy” and all sorts of candies made with the New England’s favorite ingredient, molasses. Confections got a bit softer in the later nineteenth century, when cream candies became popular, and then comes Chocolate!

The Theodore Metcalf Company, one of Boston’s most successful apothecaries, published a beautiful pamphlet on gibralters and black jacks but these were SALEM candies; Nourse’s advertisement, Salem Observer 4 November 1865; Trade cards illustrate the softer trend in confectionary consumption.

The decline of hard candy and the rise of chocolate seems to be a major trend, but candy customers still loved variety. The most successful, and very long-running, confectionary business in twentieth-century Salem was the “Palace of Sweets” on Essex Street, from which the Moustakis Brothers sold their “mastermade” (a patented term) confections. This business was in operation from 1905 until 1968, and after the Taft Summer White House in Beverly placed a series of larger orders it received—and marketed—the presidential seal of approval.

Moustakis Brothers’ Menu from the digital archives of the Culinary Institute of Technology.

Salem is still candy central, in fact two confectionary shops opened up just this past year: Curly Girl Candy Shop on Washington Street and the Chocolate Pantry on Derby, not far from Ye Olde Pepper Candy Company further down the street. And then there is the venerable and amazing Harbor Sweets, the manufacturers of my very favorite candy, Sweet Sloops. I don’t even really have a sweet tooth, and if I am going to indulge I prefer jelly beans to chocolates, but bring a box of Sweet Sloops into the house and I will not rest until they are gone!

The House of the Seven Gables and Ye Olde Pepper Candy Company sponsored the ice sculpture of Mrs. Spencer’s horse and carriage for the Salem’s So Sweet festival this past weekend: its position made it difficult to photograph but it’s much bigger than it appears in this photo! My beloved Sweet Sloops, available at Harbor Sweets on Leavitt Street in Salem as well as lots of other retailers.