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.