While I usually make plans to be as far away from Salem as possible on Columbus/Indigenous Day weekend to avoid the crowds and traffic, we had obligations this year so I was stuck in town. I can hide in my house or run over to the Salem Woods to escape the tourists, but not my feelings of anxiety at this time of year. It’s really hard for me to embrace the party as I can’t forget it is based on collective and individual tragedy so I’m just kind of seething in Salem. I wish I could lighten up, but I can’t so the best thing to do is get out of town: if not for a weekend at least for a day, or even a few hours. So as soon as I heard the laughter outside of my house I ran outside, jumped in the car, and drove north. The Newburys (Newbury, Newburyport, West Newbury) always calm me down with their seemingly endless inventory of perfectly restored old houses and litterless streets. Plus, this weekend the “Battle for Newbury” was on at Historic New England’s Spencer-Peirce-Little House: certainly a Revolutionary-war reenactment would distract me. And it did.

Two preserved early Colonial houses in very different places: Salem’s Witch or Corwin House and Historic New England’s Dole-Little House in Newbury. Heading north on Route 1A you come to another HNE property, the Spencer-Peirce-Little Farm, scene of the annual “Battle for Newbury.” Abbreviated tours of the house, which is dated 1690 with many later additions, were offered so I popped in with a bunch of soldiers (dining-room mantle, Federal parlor and back staircase above) but it was such a beautiful day to be outside!

So of course the real battles for Newbury occcurred across the pond during the English Civil Wars but it’s always fun to be with people who crave history, even in an idealized sense. That is certainly not the environment in Salem. And it was peaceful in Newbury, even with the mid-afternoon skirmish: clearly the reenactors, both soldiers and civilians, like to spend time together indulging in camp life. There were colonials from Rhode Island and Acton and Marblehead, Massachusetts, and the redcoats in His Majesty’s 10th Regiment of Foot are from Wrentham, I think (though they drill in Lexington). After a few hours at the Farm, I made a little tour of other seventeenth-century structures in Newbury and Newburyport and ended up at another Historic New England house, the Coffin House (1678), home to generations of the prolific Coffin family. I had a great tour and learned all about the evolution of the house, from its later seventeenth-century origins (oriented south), to its 1712 addition (what you see in “front” from Route 1A), and its 19th century division (so many interior windows!) and acquisition by Historic New England (then the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities) in that fateful year of 1929. So much history, so much texture! So calm.

The Coffin House in Newbury: exterior and original (back) house and newer (1712) addition in front: main room, bedroom, buttery, Georgian kitchen and parlors.