Tag Archives: Mary Harrod Northend

September 26, 2019

Mary’s House

By daseger

I’ve posted previously (several times, actually) on one of my favorite Salem Colonial Revivalists, the author, photographer, and photographic purveyor Mary Harrod Northend (1850-1926), but I am focusing on her again today for two reasons: 1) I’ve uncovered quite a bit of new information about her; and 2) I think those of you who live outside of Salem might not be aware of what has happened to one of her primary residences, which sustained a terrible fire in late November of 2018. I say “primary” because my new information has uncovered a variety of addresses for Mary, but I still think of 12 Lynde Street as Mary’s House, and it’s been sad to see it in a distressed state for the past year. But never fear, it is rising from the ashes: its very responsible owners have hired (SHAMELESS PLUG FOLLOWING) my husband to shepherd its restoration. Whatever fabric (brick foundation, though all the bricks had to be reset and cleaned, some wood, including the front doors which will be dipped) could be saved will be saved, and it will get new window frames, wooden siding and windows, and a rebuilt interior. It was even lifted to straighten it out! It will be stunning, but it’s still unsettling to walk by, especially as I have such a soft spot for Mary.

It looks better and better with each passing day, I promise! And while I have you here, does anyone know the name of the entrance detail motif? I have not seen that before: thankfully it was unharmed. Mary’s professional life remains enthralling to me: it started late in life (when she was in her 50s) and was still going strong when she died from complications sustained in an automobile accident in 1926. Consequently it was compacted, and intense: besides her twelve published books there were literally hundreds, maybe even thousands, of magazine articles, on everything from andirons to bread crumbs. In 1914 alone, she sold over 150 articles, employed a stenographer, several file clerks, and a full-time photographer, enabling her to illustrate her own works as well as those of other authors. She had started out ten years earlier with her own camera, and a few sporadic submissions to random publications: now she was almost an industry unto herself, an industry based on highlighting the best of Salem rather than exploiting the worst, darkest days. I guess that’s why I admire her so much.

Here is a letter documenting the very beginning of her career, ten years earlier, from the Century magazine collection at the New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery. At this point in her life, Mary, her widowed mother and younger sister, were living in what sounds like genteel poverty, in the Rufus Choate House just next door to 10-12 Lynde Street. As you can read, Mary has yet to take up her camera or her pen to highlight Salem’s streets and houses, but she is still trading on her Salem connections and heritage: in this case seeking to publish some letters from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “most intimate friend”, Horace G. (Connolly) Ingersoll, written to her father. She is trying to get in on the big Hawthorne anniversary that year (and boy is she a bad writer! or typist. or both). The Century did not publish these letters, but they are the substance of a 1937 article published in The Colophon by Manning Hawthorne. Mary met with success with other submissions shortly thereafter, largely by abandoning her father’s connections in favor of her own perspectives on architecture and antiques, culled from living in the rapidly-disappearing world of “Olde Salem”. In a marvelous biographical article in the 1915 issue of Massachusetts Magazine, she credits her success to her “friends, the citizens of my hometown, Salem. Had they not thrown open their homes for my inspection and reproduction, I would have been nothing.” The article’s author, Charles Arthur Higgins, opines a bit after that admission, asserting that “now the owners of those beautiful Salem mansions are as proud of the fame and authority of their author as they are of her subject matter” and revealing that “Miss Northen has been repeatedly urged to maker her abode in New York; but she states that nothing can make her forsake the city that has so kindly aided her to fame.”

Fame AND Authority: Occasionally Mary Harrod Northend would present wistful Wallace Nutting-esque views, but mostly she was all about bringing antique material culture into the modern world; notices in Who’s Who in New England and the Architectural Record, citations in trade catalogs were common from 1915 on.

7 Comments | tags: Architecture, Archives, books, Colonial Revival Culture, ephemera, Historic Preservation, Local Events, Mary Harrod Northend, periodicals, Photography | posted in Architecture, Culture, History, Home, Houses, Salem

October 22, 2018

Two Sides of Salem

By daseger

I haven’t been posting on Salem very much: my blog is going to lose its name! Long-time readers will know that I always hide or leave during October as I do not care for Haunted Happenings, but I’ve been out of step with Salem for about a year now: it doesn’t really feel like home anymore. Lovely people, lovely houses, and the perfect small-city vibe remain, but I can’t get past the history thing. I grew up in a town (York, Maine) with a strong sense of historical identity, and moved to Salem because I felt that same strong sense here. I took it for granted, and went about my business, which is European history, and only became more locally-focused when I started this blog. Now I feel the effects of the removal of the Phillips Library, the repository of so much of Salem’s history, every single day. All the towns around Salem have these great historical museums—-the Marblehead Museum, the Beverly Historical Society, the Ipswich Museum, I could go on and on—and we have the Witch Museum. I’m jealous, and fearful of the future, because I know how much effort and energy past generations invested in the preservation and presentation of Salem’s multi-faceted history and I don’t see that same conviction here and now.

Apparently over 1.5 million people visit Salem each year, with nearly 54% of that number in the month of October: for many of those 800,000 or so (I am severely math-challenged), this ⇑⇑ is historical interpretation.

Carnival Confusion: a City ordinance against mechanical rides on the Common prohibited the annual carnival there, so it was relocated to the middle of Federal Street, but somehow there are electrical rides on the Common as well. This is all very confusing to me, but a colleague of mine commented that the Federal Street location was ok, as those columns on the Greek Revival courthouse are Egyptian Revival, so the Pharaoh fits right in.

BUT, I must stress that there are still considerable efforts and energies in evidence in Salem. We do not have a single institution charged with collecting and interpreting the city’s history, but we do have myriad heritage and cultural organizations, all pursuing their own missions and planning their own programming. There’s the ever-expanding Peabody Essex Museum, the evolving Punto Urban Art Museum of murals in the Point, and a really active arts association. There’s a big university, a big hospital, and a big courthouse (which doesn’t have a carnival in front of it). Salem is accessible by both train and seasonal ferry, and for better or worse, is in the midst of a major building boom. It’s a lively place, to be sure, and right in the midst of all this it happens that four of my very favorite Salem houses are for sale at the same time, so if you can put the history thing aside, take a look: actually I think this first one is already under agreement.

22 Andrew Street: a beautiful Federal (built 1808) located on a lovely street right off the Common (which will not be the site of a carnival for much longer): looks like its sale is indeed pending.

One Forrester Street is right on the Common—it looks Federal but was actually built in 1770. When I first moved to Salem this was the home of a lovely woman whose family had owned it since the 19th Century. It’s been cherished throughout its history, and is still for sale.

The Stephen Daniels House is a first-period house which just came on the market. It was expanded and transformed into its present shape in the eighteenth century. It’s on a side street that runs from Essex down to Derby, on a really nice lot that could be a great garden.

Five Carpenter Street, in the McIntire District, is a gorgeous Federal which was once the home of the architect Ernest Machado. This was one of Mary Harrod Northend’s favorite doorways in Salem: she must have taken 30 pictures of it for her 1926 book Historic Doorways of Old Salem (1926). These stills are from Winterthur Digital Collections.

So you can sense that I’m torn. I seem to be dissing and selling Salem at the same time! Maybe I’ll snap out of it in November–I generally do, but this year feels different. In the meantime, I’m hoping that more of the thousands of tourists who descend upon Salem this month for its “history” make it into the neighborhoods to see Salem’s beautiful houses, not far from the maddening crowd, as I would rather they take away an impression of preservation than opportunism. I do see more tour guides and their increasingly-large groups out my window—and that’s good news.

8 Comments | tags: Autumn, great houses, Halloween, Haunted Happenings, Home, Mary Harrod Northend, Real Estate, Tourism | posted in Houses, Salem

March 26, 2018

Tea & Sympathy

By daseger

This weekend, I gave a talk on Salem author Mary Harrod Northend, the Martha Stewart of her day (1904-26), at the House of the Seven Gables and my favorite part (not sure about my audience’s) was her commentary on tea rooms, accompanied by her always-illuminating photographs. In a 1915 article in American Cookery, Miss Northend hails “The Coming of the Tea-House” as a sign of both women on the move and an indication of increasing interest in her beloved Colonial style: even though she admits that tea houses are of Japanese origin those “that are dotted along the automobile routes of New England never fail to give to the tourist the savor of the time when the old coaches drove along the turnpikes, the travelers stopping at ‘ye ordinary’ or inn for crisp waffles, maple syrup and fragrant, steaming coffee” (I really did not know that waffles were colonial fare). She highlights those that possess such ambiance, and also the social roles of tea houses and rooms, particularly for women: who opened them for respectable “livelihoods” and frequented them at all stages of life: as college students, young mothers, and empty nesters (although she of course does not use that term). Miss Northend seldom indulges in social history so this is interesting in general, and particularly so is her story of the Puritan Tea-House in Beverly, whose owner, “losing her home in the Salem fire, took refuge in a small, homely little house, just a minute’s walk from the station and cornering two roads. It is at the center of a group of all-year-round houses founded by people who had tired of the bustle and confusion of the city. It was an ideal spot for a tea-house and an easy matter to remodel the little old farmhouse to present-day use”. And so this Salem refugee thrived in Puritan-style.

Mary Harrod Northend’s Tea-Houses, c. 1915-1925, courtesy of Historic New England: The Tea House at the Gables, the Fernery and Martha Ann Tea Shop on Essex Street in Salem, and the sign for the Tea Kettle and Tabby Cat in Wenham.

8 Comments | tags: Colonial Revival, ephemera, Great Salem Fire of 1914, Mary Harrod Northend, Photography, Tea Houses | posted in History, Salem

June 27, 2017

The Lost Bungalows of Great Misery Island

By daseger

Out on Salem Sound the other day, sailing in a beautiful boat, I looked over at one of the several islands that mark the entrance to Salem Harbor and tried to imagine what once was. Off Great Misery Island there is a calm maritime meeting place referred to as “Cocktail Cove”: while one imbibes off-island now a century ago drinks were served on the island, first at the Misery Island Club, which became the Casino Hotel in 1904, and also in private cottages: 26 in all. Most of the structures on Great Misery were swept away by a fire in May of 1926 (just before the season), and both it and its adjacent island, Little Misery, reverted to nature under the stewardship of the Trustees of Reservations. But for a quarter of a century or so, Great Misery was quite a happening place, and its cottages attracted the attention of contemporary shelter magazines. House & Garden and The House Beautiful featured several Misery Island summer houses on their pages in their “aughts” heyday, all bungalows, and all the work of Salem architect Ernest M.A. Machado, an extremely enterprising young architect who died far too soon.

Sailing to the Misery Islands, passing the Fame along the way–off Great Misery.

Ernest Machado’s buildings on Great Misery: the Clubhouse/Casino (MIT Archives); the bungalow of Mrs. Charles Steadman Hanks (Mary Harrod Northend, “Some Seacoast Bungalows”, House and Garden, June 1905), “Ye Court of Hearts” (The House Beautiful, June 1905), the bungalow of Mr. George Lee, “The Anchorage” of Mr. George Towle (The House Beautiful, June 1909) , and “The Bunker” of Mr. Jacob C. Rogers (The House Beautiful, June 1906).

All of these Misery Island bungalow-owners lived on the mainland, either down in Boston or somewhere on the North Shore (Rogers was the last private owner of Samuel McIntire’s majestic Oak Hill, where the Northshore Mall now stands, or should I say sprawls), but they also owned summer houses along the Gold Coast: these cottages were for the weekend! The magazine articles accompanying these images emphasize the simplicity of the island bungalows, but it was a very deliberate, and very occasional, ethic. For about a quarter century, Misery was a Gilded Age playground, complete with shooting range and golf course, perfect for Harvard senior “Robinson Crusoe” picnics and reunions. Its moment might have been even shorter: social register references seem to appear with much less frequency in the teens and twenties, and then this very social chapter in the island’s history closes much more abruptly with the 1926 fire.

Newspaper reports of the 1902 Harvard reunions (Boston Post, June 22-25, 1902 ) and 1926 fire (Boston Daily Globe, May 8-10, 1926); Great Misery today, and home in Salem Harbor on a glorious early evening!

12 Comments | tags: Architects, Architecture, Boats, ephemera, Ernest Machado, Magazines, Mary Harrod Northend, Misery Islands, North Shore Massachusetts, periodicals, Sailing, Salem Harbor, Trustees of Reservations | posted in History, Salem

March 28, 2015

Mary Harrod Northend

By daseger

I’m not bound to such designations, but as we’re almost running out of Women’s History Month and our mayor has declared March 29 Salem Women’s History Day I’ve decided to feature a notable Salem woman on this last weekend in March. After much deliberation–as there are many notable women in Salem’s history–I’ve settled on the author and entrepreneur Mary Harrod Northend (1850-1926). She has interested me for some time, and she’s popped up in several posts in the past, but she deserves her own. Northend was from old, old Massachusetts families on both sides, and this heritage is key to her life and work. Both parents were actually from northern Essex County, but moved south after their marriage: her father, William Dummer Northend, became a prominent attorney and a state senator for Salem. Mary was born at 17 Beckford Street, a side-to-street late Federal house, but the family moved over to Lynde Street, in the shadow of the Federal Street courthouses, in the later 1850s. Their grand Italianate double house, photographed for Mary’s books later, is now sadly chopped into 12 apartments by my count. The few biographical details I could gather refer to a childhood sickness; in fact by all accounts (or by no accounts) Mary led a quiet life in her childhood and adulthood, until she burst out in her 50s and started writing all about colonial Salem and colonial New England, necessitating regional travel, which she clearly embraced. Eleven books were published between 1904 and 1926, when she died in Salem from complications sustained from a car accident, and many, many articles for magazines such as Good Housekeeping, The Century and The House Beautiful: I haven’t had time to compile a proper bibliography. But she was an incredibly prolific woman: an acknowledged expert on New England architecture and antiquities, with a touch of Martha Stewart-esque domestic stature as well, forged by her publications on decorating and party-planning. Let us, she writes in a very Martha tone in The Art of Home Decoration: link the old and the new, working out entrancing combinations that are ideal, making our home joyous and bright through the right utilizing of great grandmother’s hoard.

Mary Harrod Northend’s birthplace at 17 Beckford Street, Salem; her father William Dummer Northend, newly-elected State Senator from Salem, 1862, State Library of Massachusetts.

Her books and articles reveal Mary to be a fierce advocate for “Old-time” New England; she is at the forefront of that (second?) generation of strident Colonial Revivalists, fearful that the (changing) world around them hasn’t developed proper appreciation for colonial architecture and material culture. She is evangelical in her love of clapboards, mantles, arches, doorways, garden ornaments, pewter and seamless glass. The phrase “detail-oriented” doesn’t even come close to capturing Mary’s appreciation of the things that were built and made in the colonial past: these things are her life and her world. And like any good educator–which she was–Mary wanted her (growing) audience to see her world and so she spared no expense when it came to photography, first taking her own photographs and then “directing” commercial photographers in the manner of a cinematographer, according to Mary N. Woods’ Beyond the Architect’s Eye: Photographs and the American Built Environment (2011). The end result was a vast collection of still images (there are 6000 glass plate negatives in the collection of Historic New England alone, though the entry in the biographical dictionary Who’s Who in New England for 1915 indicates that Mary has “20,000 negatives and prints of American homes”) which she used to illustrate her own books, sold to other architectural writers, and colorized in the style of Wallace Nutting to sell directly to the public.

Two of Northend’s most popular titles, Historic Homes of New England (1914) and Historic Doorways of Old Salem (1926); the Cook-Oliver House on Federal Street in Salem, featured in Historic Homes and sold as an individual colorized print, “The Half Open Door”.

It’s relatively easy to research the work of Mary Harrod Northend: her books are still readily available in both print and digital form and prints from her photographic collection are at Historic New England and the Winterthur Library. But I wish I knew more about her business, the business of publishing books and photographs, writing, lecturing, collecting. I’m also curious about money: there’s definitely a bit of voyeurism in Northend’s books and I can’t discern why she remained in the family home on busy Lynde Street rather than move to the McIntire District just a few blocks away. In one of her most personal, yet still fictionalized, books, Memories of Old Salem: Drawn from the Letters of a Great-Grandmother (1917), the great-grandmother in the title lives on Chestnut Street, but Mary never did. This might have been a family matter: her widowed mother and sister lived right next door in the Italianate double house, which was also an appropriate “stage” for some of her photographs. I also think it was quite likely that Miss Northend was seldom at her own home, as she was so busy documenting those of others!

A very random sampling of Mary Harrod Northend photographs, mostly from Historic Homes and Colonial Homes and their Furnishing (1912), all from the Winterthur Digital Collections:

Three very different Salem houses: doorway at the House of the Seven Gables, entrance of 10 Chestnut, side view of the Robinson House on Summer Street.

Salem mantles: a pewter display, McIntire mantle at the Waters House (LOVE this louvred fire screen), Whipple and Pickman mantles.

Details & decor I love: hallway of 29 Washington Square, Salem, Ropes Mansion windowseat, entry hall at Saltonstall House, Haverhill, Attic and twin canopy beds on the Cape (from Remodeled Farmhouses, 1915–but all of Miss Northend’s books feature canopied beds! I would place them headboard to headboard.)

Flagrant displays of Colonial Revivalism: Spinning wheel and fire buckets at the Kate Sanborn House, and Miss Northend’s own house on Lynde Street, all dressed up for Spring.