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.
