Tag Archives: Historic Interiors

December 8, 2025

Christmas in Salem 2025: Close to Home

By daseger

Christmas in Salem, a holiday house tour held hosted every year by Historic Salem, Inc. as its largest fundraiser, has always been one of my favorite events. It represents every thing I love about Salem: architecture, creativity, community, preservation, walkability, pride of place. It’s the light at the end of the long dark Halloween tunnel. I never miss it, and this year I couldn’t miss it, as our house was on the tour, so it came to me! Actually, on Saturday morning, I was so tired of cleaning and decorating and just thinking about it, I got in the car and drove away as soon as my house captain and guides arrived and took charge: I wanted out of sight and mind and out of Salem. But I came home to festive guides and family and knew I had missed out, so yesterday my husband and I set out on the tour ourselves and as usual, it did not disappoint. I don’t mean to convey that the experience of opening your house is in any way oppressive: Historic Salem and the Christmas in Salem team are thoroughly professional and supportive and of course it’s an honor and a privilege to be included among an always-stellar collection of Salem homes. I think I was just tired (it’s the end of the semester) and done on Saturday but I rallied on Sunday, and so I have lots of photos. I missed quite a few houses (there were long lines everywhere and we somehow had to have a drink in the midst of everything) but here are my highlights, grouped by impressions.

New perspectives:

This tour consisted of homes in my immediate neighborhood but I could see very familiar places, including my own house, in new ways. Window, courtyard, and porch views from houses that you don’t live in make things look a little different. Standing on my Cambridge Street neighbors’ porch waiting to enter their very charming house, I realized that their daily view of Hamilton Hall was very different from my own on the other side. While I was waiting to go into a house on Broad Street, I suddenly got a great view of a little Georgian house on Cambridge with its side to the street which I have always slighted. And I copied a great shot a friend of mine took through my front door wreath of the wonderful house across the street, which I get to gaze at everyday.

 

Boughs and Blooms:

That was the theme this year, so I thought I would show you some boughs and blooms, including some of my favorite Christmas trees on the tour. We had two, a stately one in the front parlor and a short and fat one in back, and I love them both but I don’t think either can compare to this first amazing tree at One Chestnut, located in the perfect dining room alcove. But all Christmas trees are special of course.

You can see that the Salem Garden Club, which decorated the cute Federal cottage with the mansard roof over on Cambridge Street pictured in the three photos above, took the boughs and bloom brief seriously! Really beautiful botanical displays throughout the house. The last time I was on this tour, 20 years ago (!!!), they decorated my house and I’m not sure it was a good idea for me to have taken on that task myself this year. But anyway, here are my two trees, front and back, tall and short.

 

So many Mantels:

And I have finally managed to spell mantel correctly, a word I’ve mispelled for years. After the tree, I’m always looking for well-dressed mantels at holiday time, and there were lots to see on this tour. If you’ve followed the blog over the years, you know that I have the decorating sensibility of a four-year-old and choose a different animal theme every year, and this year it was snow leopards (though I really couldn’t find enough leopards of the snow variety so I broadened my theme a bit). They were pretty prominently featured on both parlor mantels and on the dining room table. Most mantels on the tour were a bit more traditional, and as is always the case with the Christmas in Salem tour, there was diversity in terms of scale and materials.

 

Stairways:

Stairs are also a good focal point for holiday decorations and actually the main reason we agreed to go on the tour this year was our front stairway: we wanted to get rid of an old faded and motheaten runner and refinish the treads to match the mahogany banister. It’s good to have a project for these things, and nothing is more motivating than the challenge (threat) of 2000 people walking through your house. We got it done, or should I say the best floor guy in the world, Dan Labreque, got it done: he’s been doing the ballroom at Hamilton Hall for his entire life, following in the craft of his father. We painted our back staircase too, although that was much less of a project. I must also admit that I had a bow brigade to tie these bows as even after watching many tutorials, I just can’t do that. I loved the antique toile wallpaper in the front hall over at the corner of Broad and Cambridge, and the very grand hallway at #1 Chestnut as well.

 

Tables!

I had my leopards, and everybody else had their best china and/or silver out! Dining rooms or tables are really an encapsulation of all the little details you have to put together, I think.

 

Very random details: I spent one afternoon making this bower (???) for one of my leopards in my pantry so of course I have to feature it; what a light fixture at 1 Chestnut, my Cambridge Street neighbors spent over a year reconfiguring an addition at the back of their house and the results are stunning–here are some of the artifacts they found during the process and a great bundt pan display, swag from Historic Salem, which gave every homeowner on the tour one of these lovely paintings by Simeen Brown, just a nice simple wreath to close the post.

5 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , | posted in 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.

5 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Architecture, Culture, Houses, New England

September 29, 2025

Schoolhouse to Outhouse

By daseger

I had some obligations here in Salem so could not leave the Witch City for the weekend, but I did spend yesterday driving around a little part of our county stopping in at open houses for the annual Essex Heritage Trails and Sails event series, which features an array of heritage, cultural and nature events over three weekends every September. I do not like my city during this time of year, but I love my county! I do believe that Essex County has the most colonial houses of any region in the US, and even though I’ve been driving around it for thirty-odd years, I’m always discovering new-to-me ones. I started out my Sunday trip with a visit to the old schoolhouse on Newbury’s Lower Green, restored for the Bicentennial and full of treasures, and ended it at the Samuel Holten House in Danvers right next door to Salem, which has the cutest outhouse ever.I have admired it for years, and always thought it was some sort of shed, but no, outhouse it is. In between, I saw several structures in Georgetown, including a great old tavern, the town’s oldest house, an old firehouse and another schoolhouse, and a former famous inn. The buildings were all great, but what I particularly like about these open houses are the passionate introductions of their stewards, who are so eager to showcase them. In these places, the stewards were representatives of the Newburyport Historic Commission, the Georgetown Historical Society, and the Daughters of the American Revolution.

An 1877 schoolhouse in Newbury.

 

Georgetown: the Brocklebank-Nelson-Beecher House and a few other structures.

 

Samuel Holten House in Danvers.

From these stewards, you’re going to learn a lot of lore and more. I learned that: literacy tests for voting were in place not only down South but also up here in the early 20th Century (the schoolhouse served as a polling place), Byfield, another village of Newbury, had lots of mills, and one still standing (I couldn’t find it), Georgetown had a little village in its midst called Marlborough as well as a trolley line, where the oldest house in Georgetown is (see above, dressed for Halloween), where the once-famous Bald Pate Inn is (see above), all about Patriot Samuel Holten, and that there was at least one enslaved person, named Cato, in his house (see under the eaves room above).

8 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in History, Houses

September 22, 2025

Escape to Old Newbury

By daseger

I had yet another “symbol trauma” (I have no other way to refer to it) on Friday when people starting sending me images of little anime cats with notes indicating that this was the new official mascot for Salem’s 400th commemoration, Salem 400+. Was this a joke? Apparently not. Here’s the press release text and the cat (in front of 1910 City Hall just to emphasize his/her official status).

Mayor Dominick Pangallo has announced an exciting new community engagment opportunity: a naming context for Salem 400+’s black cat mascot! Salem 400+ has unveiled a charming black cat character designed to strengthen the program’s connection with the community and celebrate Salem’s unique identity. Salem students in 3d through 8th grade have been invited to participate in naming this special mascot through a district-wide contest that opened a few weeks ago. “There was so much positive community spirit and creativity when it came to naming our new trash truck, Chicken Nugget, we wanted to open up this opportunity to our students as well, said Mayor Pangallo, “the Salem 400+ black cat will help represent Salem and this special moment, and we want our young students to be part of bringing it to life.” 

So of course engaging students in a naming contest is great but I’m sorry: the choice of this AI anime cat is not. He (or she—we don’t know yet!) is everything that Salem is not: superficial, generic, silly, not serious. I understand the political reality here (the Chicken Nugget roll-out was intense—it was very clear that whoever got in between the trash truck and a Salem politician was in trouble if photographers were nearby), but I’m just so tired of the triviality. There are always these gestures in Salem that go 3/4 of the way but never all the way: a Remond Park with incorrect information about where Salem’s 19th century African American residents actually lived, a Forten Park which loses Charlotte between gaudy installations and pirate murals. But this is a whole new dimension of dissing Salem history. Even my long-suffering husband, who has to hear me rant nearly every day, said wow. There’s nothing anyone can do but disengage, so when I woke up Saturday morning, I knew I had to get out of town. Fortunately it was a grand weekend of Revolutionary remembrance in Essex County, so up to Newburyport I went. It happened that this was the 250th anniversary of Benedict Arnold’s Quebec Expedition, in which Newburport played a large role. So I headed north, because even Benedict Arnold looked good to me.

The Quebec Expedition (I think the first poster is rather old) was a spectacular failure. With the new Continental Army ensconced in Cambridge, Colonel Arnold approached General Washington with the idea of an eastern invasion force aimed at Quebec City in concert with General Richard Montgomery’s western expedition from New York. Washington gave Arnold 1110 men, who sailed from Newburyport on September 19, 1775. Their destination was the mouth of the Kennebec River, from which they would progress upriver to Fort Western (Augusta, ME) after which they would navigate water, marsh and land to the Chaudiere and St. Lawrence Rivers and Quebec. They encountered so many difficulties along the way that ultimately a quarter of the regiment turned back (taking essential provisions with them), and Arnold arrived in Quebec with 600+ exhausted and starving men. A New Year’s Eve battle was a disastrous defeat, resulting in the death of General Montgomery, the injury of Arnold, and the capture of Captain Daniel Morgan and hundreds of his riflemen. Nevertheless, Arnold was promoted to Brigadier General for his leadership of the expedition. The weekend’s activities were definitely focused on Newburyport’s “early and ardent embrace of the Revolutionary cause” rather than on Arnold himself.

Everywhere I went in Newburyport and adjoining Newbury I ran into people engaged in their history: the celebration of a new plaque recognizing the patriots of Newburyport at the Old South Church (above), a parade of participants making their way down High Street following a reenactment of the 1775 dedication for departing troops at the nearby First Parish Church, glanced from the doorway of Historic New England’s Swett–Ilsley House after the guide and I paused our tour. The Museum of Old Newbury set out its revolutionary artifacts in the rooms of its 1808 Cushing House, including a reconstructed Newburyport rum jug taken out of the ground in shards amidst the “Great Carrying Place,” a 13-mile portage trail between the Kennebec and Dead Rivers through which Arnold and his men passed 250 years ago. Actually, the jug was on a brief loan to the Museum from the Arnold Expedition Historical Society and Old Fort Western Museum and Executive Director Bethany Groff Dorau drove up to Maine to retrieve it for just this commemorative weekend., but the Museum is full of its own treasures and I’ve featured just a few of my favorites below. I’m looking forward to going back, and back again.

Rooms and Collections at the Swett-Ilsley and Cushing Houses in Newbury and Newburyport: that’s a portrait of Lafayette leading into the south parlor at Cushing—what a punch they made for him when he visited in 1824! And I am obsessed with the c. 1786 portrait of the Reverend John Murray by Christian Gullager. Great Liverpool jugs! The Museum is the historical sociey of Newbury, Newburyport, and West Newbury, so its collections are vast and varied.

And on the way home, I encountered a handtub muster on Newbury upper common! What could be better? Just a perfect day away.

8 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Culture

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.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Architecture, Culture, Houses, Salem

August 11, 2025

Cardboard & Chrome

By daseger

Last week was a little challenging here in Salem, with news of two local businesses closing: one decades old, the other an extremely popular retail shop which caters to residents rather than tourists. Such businesses seem fewer and fewer present along the streets of Salem, and it’s a bit disheartening. The slide towards all-year-long Halloween seems relentless, at least to me, and you can see little black witch hats everywhere you walk even on the hottest days of summer. So it was nice to have two more traditional events this past weekend: the Maritime Festival at the newly-designated Salem Maritime National Historic Park (as opposed to Site, its prior designation) and the Phillips House Car Meet. These events have been going on for decades—the Maritime Festival took a break but was revived several years ago with a new marquis event, a cardboard regatta which is really fun to watch and the Car Meet just gets bigger and better every year. I saw lots of old friends on both days and met quite a few new among the old cars as I was greeting guests at the Phillips House. And I saw only ONE stupid little witch hat on both days! I took lots of pictures, so here they are:

Maritime Festival & Cardboard Regatta at Salem Maritime National Historic PARK on Saturday: the boats were largely family or organization constructions with lots of young sailors aboard and some were very seaworthy while other sank pretty quickly. But everyone paddled as best they could! Lots of entries this year, and the awards were very creative.

They’re still working on her as you can see, but it’s been nice to have the Friendship back at Derby Wharf this summer too. And it was lovely to be able to go into both the Custom House and the adjoining Derby House—I hadn’t been in the latter for at least a decade; I can’t really remember when I was last in there, actually. It looks great.

Love the scale of these rooms!!!

The 23rd Annual Phillips House Car Meet on Sunday: as you can see from my photos, what I like is the juxtaposition of old houses and old cars. This event started out with maybe 15 cars, and now there are cars lining both sides of Chestnut Street so almost every house has its own car! The lower end of the street, where I live, is excluded, as it is narrower and traffic has to flow somewhere so my house does not get its own car. In years past when I was not working this event, I would find out all about the cars but I didn’t have time to do that this year as I just took some snaps during a break. 

And then they were gone….leaving no tracks.

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

July 14, 2025

Stone Enders

By daseger

I met several work deadlines last week so now it’s officially summer road trip season: about time! So yesterday I drove south to Rhode Island to see a very distinct form of its early architecture: stone enders. This is a very descriptive term: stone enders are late 17th century houses which feature one exterior and interior wall consisting entirely of an expansive side chimney. They are rare because they are so old, but also because in several documented cases the chimney walls were assimilated into an expanded house, rendering them central: stone enders were and could be hiding in plain sight! Often there are interesting house detective stories associated with stone enders, and for those that do survive, there is always a restoration story. Both cases were true with the two stone enders that I visited, the Clemence Irons house (1691) in Johnston and the Eleazer Arnold house (1693) in Lincoln, both owned by Historic New England.

Clemence-Irons (top) in Johnston and the Arnold house in Lincoln.

The Arnold House, one of Historic New England’s (then the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities) earliest acquisitions in 1918, survived through adaptation and expansion in the back with its chimney wall always exposed but still there were mysteries to solve about its original appearance. It went through several restorations, which are discussed in a great little article that Abbot Lowell Cummings wrote for the magazine Antiques in 1960:

  • The Eleazer Arnold is one which students have loved for its persistent puzzles, not all of which were entirely solved by laying bare nearly every scrap of structural evidence the house had to offer. As early as 1895 Norman M. Isham (in his Early Rhode Island Houses) was concerned about both the original plan and the window arrangement. From what he could then see of the structure he assumed that the house had originally been built, as the rear slope of the stone chimney indicates, as a two-story house with lean-to and with its present full length, providing for two rooms at the front on the ground floor and two rooms behind them in the lean-to. The roof had been finished with an impressive facade gable, the valley rafters of which remain in the attic (though not restored). Without having full knowledge of evidence concealed in the frame of the house, Mr. Isham suggested the possibility of single casement openings in the front or south wall. By the time his Early American Houses was published in 1928 he had had a chance to explore enough of the hidden frame to know that the pattern of original wall studs there confirmed his supposition about these windows.

The Isham restoration is characterized as one of “exploration and stabilization” while the later restoration was far more ambitious, focused on returning the house to its seventeenth-century appearance, however, apparently “inauthentic fenestration” was introduced at this time. As Isham was also involved with the Clemence-Irons house, I went off on a midnight deep dive into some of his books, and I have to say that Early Rhode Island Houses is absolutely charming with its wonderful architectural drawings by Albert Frederic Brown. The later book, Early American Houses, is less charming as no Brown but it does have several photographs and some discussion of Salem houses.

I had a very detailed tour which focused on the Arnold family and the evolving roles of the house before taking us inside to examine its interiors from ground floor great room to the garret, where a succession of contractors signed their names on its beams. Obviously, one (or two or three) conspicuous interior detail of a stone ender are its expansive hearths. The Arnold house is pretty large for a stone ender, and became larger still over time, and its scale and convenient location along the Great Road in Lincoln made it a logical choice for a tavern and it still felt very taverny to me.

The Clemence-Irons house is about a twenty-minute drive south from Lincoln, but I realized that there was actually another stone-ender in town, the Valentine Whitman house (1696), which was not only currently for sale but had a scheduled open house in my window of opportunity between Historic New England tours! So I popped right over there, of course. This house was restored under the auspices of Preserve Rhode Island several years ago, and I was quite impressed by its combination of modern livability and traditional details. It’s even bigger than the Arnold house—at one point it was actually a four-family house. Beautiful lot too, further along the Great Road. I admitted that I wasn’t going to buy it to the listing agent, and she was really nice and said that I could take as many pictures of the interior as I liked but she wanted to request permission from the owners before I posted them. I promptly lost her business card, so I couldn’t ask permission, but the listing is here if you want to peek inside.

So then I was off to Clemence Irons in Johnston, where I had a very informative tour (along with two ladies from the Arnold tour—it’s a great idea to do these together, and not just because of their proximity) from a guide who was a historic preservationist. Clemence Irons is interpreted a bit differently than the Arnold house, more as a 1930s restoration of a seventeenth-century house than a seventeenth-century house. After the last owner/occupant of the house, Nellie Irons, died in 1938, it was sold to a trio of wealth Rhode Island siblings who wished to restore it to its original appearance and operate it as a museum. They hired Norman Isham to supervise the restoration, and he oversaw a great stripping of the structure down to its studs, following by a rebuilding with original materials as well as newly-sourced ones. The result is a bit of reverential and romanticized Colonialism, in keeping with the Colonial Revival era: Isham also fashioned seventeenth-century furniture for the museum, a practice that began by George Francis Dow right here in Salem when he created the first “Period Rooms” for the Essex Institute. I love the photograph of the house circa 1910 below: I think it’s the first “adulterated” house which I find aesthetically pleasing but it became even cuter after its restoration/recreation. The house was gifted to Historic New England in 1947, and it represents an important acquisition not only because it is a stone-ender, but also a well-documented example of mid-twentieth century restoration theory and practice.

There are more stone enders to see in Rhode Island: Preserve Rhode Island estimates fourteen in all though more may be hiding in plain sight. But I was focusing so hard on all of the architectural details of these two houses that I was exhausted by the middle of the afternoon so I headed north towards home. But I’m going back!

5 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Culture, Houses, New England

June 16, 2025

Patriot Properties

By daseger

An eventful weekend—one of several coming up this summer! I’m going to focus on one event out of several I participated in—a house tour of Patriots’ homes in Marblehead—simply because it yielded the best pictures. Having done this a couple of times myself, I am always grateful to homeowners who open up their houses to the public. As I am focusing on Marblehead, right next door to Salem, today, I have to admit that I’m feeling a bit envious of our neighbor for three essential reasons these days. First of all, it seems to have a very engaged electorate which has much more power than we do in Salem. I had an appointment there last week which happened to fall on local election day, and saw tons of people and signs out and about. Marblehead residents elect their board and commission members and city clerk, while in Salem we only elect a Mayor and city councillors, and the former appoints all the commissioners with the rubber stamp of the latter. There are often uncontested elections in Salem and the voter turnout is very low: 28% in the last mayoral election I believe. Marblehead is a town so they have town meetings! I feel quite disenfranchised by comparison. The second reason I envy Marblehead is its Revolutionary fort, Fort Sewall, which is perfectly preserved and well-maintained in contrast to Fort Pickering, Salem’s major historic fort, which has been left to rot and ruin by the City of Salem. This is, I believe, another example of civic engagement or the lack thereof. The third reason I envy Marblehead, pretty much every single day, is that it has a professional historical society, unlike Salem. The Marblehead Museum was established as the Marblehead Historical Society in 1898, and it continues its mission “to preserve, protect, and promote Marblehead’s past as a means of enriching the present” today. Salem has no such institution; it failed to develop one as the Essex Institute served that role for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, before its assimilation into the Peabody Essex Museum. The Marblehead Museum combines its stewardship roles (of both Marblehead’s historic record and its three properties) in conjuction with a very active calendar of interpretive events, including this weekend’s house tour, which couldn’t have been more timely.

The tour of five houses was self-guided, and so the first house for myself and my friend Liz was the Robert Hooper House on Washington Street, a 1769 reconstruction of an earlier home which I always thought was a Federal house. It has recently been restored so we were both eager to get in, and once inside you could immediately tell it was pre-Revolutionary even with its vibrant decoration. The carriage house was open too, and the views down to its terraced garden were spectacular, even on a rainy day. At first, I was a bit confused as to why this house was on a tour of homes associated with Patriots as I had my Marblehead Robert Hoopers mixed up: the owner of this house was NOT the famouse Loyalist Robert “King” Hooper, whose house is located just across the way, but rather another Robert Hooper. It was also confusing to read that George Washington visited this house during his 1789 visit to Marblehead: I don’t think this is the case as he is recorded as having been greeted at the Lee Mansion just down the street. But Robert “NO KING” Hooper’s son, also named Robert Hooper, was married to a daughter of Marblehead’s most illustrious Revolutionary general, John Glover, and as they inherited the house after his father’s death in 1814 that’s quite enough of a patriot connection for me.

Then we walked over to Franklin Street and the Devereux House, a very classical Georgian house built in 1764 by Marblehead merchant Joseph Homan. Persons enslaved by him likely lived here before Homan sold the property to Eldridge Gerry of “Gerrymandering” fame. Gerry gifted the house to his sister Elizabeth, the wife of Selectman Burrill Devereux who welcomed President Washington to town in 1789. A lovely house, well-maintained over the years and now the home of another Patriot, with whom we discussed the Army’s (rather than the President’s) big birthday.

The most famous Marblehead Patriot (who was born in Salem) is undoubtedly General John Glover, who ferried General Washington and his troops across the Delaware on Christmas night 1776 in advance of their big victory at Trenton. There is a Glover Square named after him, and in the midst of this square is the house most closely associated with him. Like the Devereux House, it’s on the National Register, and features yet another impressive Georgian entrance hall.

On our way back to our final stop, the Jeremiah Lee Mansion, we realized we had missed a house, which is of course a capital crime on any house tour. So we made a little detour to see the Martin-Hulen-Lemaster House on Washington Street. Its generous owner allowed us to see the entire 1755 house, and you could really appreciate the space created by its gambrel roof on the third floor. Marblehead ship captain Elias Hulen, Jr., whose father served on the Seacoast Guards and as a privateer during the Revolution, owned and occupied this house after its orginal owners departed for Maine in the 1770s.

We finished up the tour at the 1768 Jeremiah Lee Mansion, a museum property which I’ve toured before and posted about here. It’s an amazing edifice, with interiors impressive in both detail and scale. Only the first floor was open for the tour so I took some photos of decorative details that I didn’t think I captured in my earlier post, and looked out the tall windows at the archeaological and structural evidence of the Marblehead Museum’s ambitious ongoing project, a $1.4 million renovation of Lee’s Brick Kitchen & Slave Quarters next door. When completed, this project will expand the Museum’s archival, office, and exhibition space in addition to revealing and interpreting spaces of enslavement and labor, a logical extension of the Museum’s continuous efforts to identify and document the lives of African American and Indigenous peoples in Marblehead’s history.

A few photos of the Jeremiah Lee Mansion interiors and the Brick Kitchen/Slave Quarters project behind and adjacent to the Mansion. The only king I was interested in this past weekend was the King of Prussia, as I was just fascinated by this plate! 

One more object of Marblehead envy popped up while I was looking at the Marblehead Museum’s website: the town retains reference to the original Pawtucket Tribe of our region in its land acknowledgement statement, while Salem’s excludes any reference to these native peoples in favor of the Massachusetts Tribe. I wish we could acknowledge the Pawtucket.

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March 26, 2025

Virginia Green

By daseger

Sorry for the delay in posting part II of my spring break road trip: I came back with a nasty flu so re-entry and re-engagement have been stalled. I’m feeling a bit better today and I thought it would make me feel better yet by looking at my photos. From the Eastern Shore, we traveled over the scary Chesapeake Bay bridge/tunnel up to Williamsburg for a few days, then we visited my sisters-in-law in Richmond. It was a real treat to stay in the Williamsburg Inn, and I do like Williamsburg in general even if it has its “history disneyland” qualities, but its highlights on this particular trip were definitely the George Wythe House and the museums. On the way up to Richmond, we stopped at the Berkeley Plantation on the James River, a beautiful and very history-rich site. I always love the capital, and we also visited Monticello up in Charlottesville, which I haven’t been to since I was in college. On the long drive back myself this past Saturday, I stopped on Virginia’s northern neck to visit Menokin, a plantation ruin in the midst of an interpretive restoration. As I drove north from there, I started feeling a bit gray but was thinking mostly of green: as we drove down we saw increasing green and on my ride home I was seeing less. That’s one of the things I like most about my March break trips down south: we won’t see that green in Salem for a while.

Four plantations: Eyre Hall on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, Berkeley and one of its “dependencies,”, Monticello & Menokin.

Eyre Hall, overlooking the Chesapeake on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, is a well-preserved, privately-owned 18th-century plantation whose owners open up its gardens to visitors, so we drove right in and I snuck a photograph of the house. The gardens are supposedly beautiful, but it was a a bit early for blooms. Berkeley has direct connections to the Harrison presidential family and to the Civil War, and is also a site rich in the history and documentation of slavery. There is also a claim to America’s “First Thanksgiving” in 1619, which I’m not going to explore because I’m from Massachusetts. Monticello was of course Thomas Jefferson’s beloved home, and he also has a tie to Berkeley and to the George Wythe house in Williamsburg. The Hemings family is also showcased at Monticello, which was the busiest site we visited by far: it was kind of difficult to take in the house on our packed tour. Menokin, as you can see, is currently a ruin, but its restorers have big plans. I took a lot of notes on interpretation over the week, but I haven’t really sorted them out and I’m not quite up to it, so I’m going to reserve my thoughts on inclusion/exclusion (and Thomas Jefferson!) for later.

Colonial Williamsburg: including the George Whythe (rhymes wth Smith) house, the Capitol and Governor’s Palace, and the museums.

And a view of the University of Virginia’s Lawn from the Rotunda (which I never knew you could spot from Monticello before last week).

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December 30, 2024

Mills Mansion Shines

By daseger

We arrived at my brother’s house in Rhinebeck on Christmas Eve, ate, drank and were merry for two days, and then I woke up on the 26th eager to explore yet another Hudon Valley mansion, what I always want to do when I’m in the area. There are loads of Hudson Valley posts if you want to see past tours: I apologize for the unwieldlyness of my now 14-year-old blog, but you can find most things by keyword searches in the search box. Eventually I will get around to providing an index. The house I chose to visit was ironically located very close to my brother’s house, yet I had never cared to stop in. It’s a big classical revival Beaux-Arts building called the Mills Mansion, located in the midst of the Staatsburgh State Historic Site on the river. I had hiked the trails that used to constitute its vast estate estate, but never ventured through its doors. I pictured enormous square drab rooms, but my vision was wrong. The tour was labeled a “Gilded Age Christmas” and it was indeed very glittery! My brother and brother-in-law came along with me (along with my husband), and they confirmed that the last time they had been in the mansion it was a bit tired, but what we all encountered was a very engaging space, encompassing the efforts of both state staff obviously, but also a very active Friends group. All the docents in the building were so enthusiastic, so obviously happy to be there and share the stories of the mansion and the Mills family. It reminded me of my colleagues at the Phillips House this past summer.

The Mansion was just one home of Ogden and Ruth Livingston Mills, very wealthy members of the fabled NYC 400. Mr. Mills inherited a California gold rush fortune, and Mrs. Mills was New York aristocracy: her Livingston lineage went back to the seventeenth century in the Hudson River Valley. I really can’t think of a better recipe for a Gilded Age couple! She had inherited a much smaller Greek Revival structure generally called Livingston Manor, and in 1895 she and her husband commissioned the prestigious New York City architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White to remodel and enlarge it, a mission which was accomplished in only one year. It was expanded from 25 rooms to 79, and 14 bathrooms were added–if you want to see and study Gilded Age bathrooms, this is really the place! The new Mills Mansion, called Staatsburgh at this time, had its own coal-powered electric plant and central heating but also 23 fireplaces, some of which are quite baronial as you will see below. All the usual classical details were added to the exterior of both the two new wings and the original house in the center, and a huge portico tied everything together. The entire complex was not only a family home and guest palace, but also a working estate of 1600 acres, with gardens and greenhouses, a dairy barn, and additional outbuildings. The entirety, including all of the furnishings, was donated to the State of New York by the Mills’ daughter Gladys Mills Phipps in 1938, following the dearth of her parents in the 1920s. And so a large chuck of riverfront land was preserved for all of us to enjoy. The obligation to steward was also granted to New York State of course, and given the size of the Mansion, that is probably a constant process: several docents, with obvious pride and excitement, informed me that they had just won a grant to restore the period kitchen so that it could be added to the tour. It was obvious to me that both material preservation and interpretation were ongoing initiatives: an exhibition space adjoining the visitor entrance presents the site in a broad social and geographical context, and then you proceed upstairs and get wowed.

The grand reception rooms: library, drawing room, central hall, dining room, service pantry off dining room, a “golden” drawing room.

Staatsburgh/ Mills Mansion was the Mills’ “autumn” house, and when they were in residence, they had lots of guests, attended to by a staff of 25. The bedrooms upstairs were separated and designated to single men and single women guests and married couples: bathrooms were interspersed liberally. There’s a rather widespread belief that Edith Wharton, who was very familiar with this region and its social scene, had used the Mansion for her depiction of Bellomont in the House of Mirth so I was looking for Lily Bart’s bedroom of course. That would make Lily’s hosts, the Trenors, Ruth and Ogden Mills, and Ruth does have a certain “ambitious hostess” reputation. Apparently she was very pleased that she could secure the services of celebrity architect Stanford White for her project before he designed the neighboring Vanderbilt Mansion. Ever the gracious hostess, Mrs. Mills even provided her guests with a safe in which they could deposit their valuables upon arrival.

Guest bedrooms and bathrooms and the safe.

The Mills Mansion docents did not stress Mrs. Mills’ competitive hospitality but rather her family life, and her fraility. She had a heart condition, so her bedroom, an extravagant raspberry damask confection, was located on the first floor adjacent to the reception rooms rather than upstairs. Her husband’s bedroom was just across the way, with a connecting bathroom in between. A smaller staircase connected these rooms to the Mills children’s bedroom upstairs, and doors could be closed to create a more private family “townhouse,” which I thought was pretty clever. All in all, our visit to the very festive Mills Mansion was the beginning of a perfect day after Christmas.

The Mills Family’s “townhouse” within the Mansion.

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