Tag Archives: Newspapers

August 1, 2020

The Fabric of Friendship

By daseger

Back to my Salem singlewomen shopkeepers and businesswomen: they continue to be my favorite subjects among these #SalemSuffrageSaturday posts. Socialites, authors and artists: too easy! I came across one of the most stunning nineteenth-century photographs I have ever seen: of Miss Eliza P. Punchard, dressed formally in black bombazine, in front of Ann. R. Bray’s dry goods store at 76 Federal Street circa 1875. The picture was taken by the very accomplished Salem photographer Edwin Peabody, and it is in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum, although you will never find it on the PEM’s impenetrable and unhelpful website: I make most of my PEM discoveries through old publications of either of its founding institutions, the Peabody Museum and the Essex Institute. In this case, the photograph was published in Museum Collections of the Essex Institute, published in 1978. It may seem like an old-fashioned way to access a museum’s collections in 2020, but believe me, such publications are your best bet for now.

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This photograph is so compelling, so sharp, so curious! Miss Punchard is not posing formally, yet she looks very formal! Her cheekbones! A literal window into a shop full of fabrics! I want to see more of the sign! So what’s the story?

Miss Eliza P. Punchard and Miss Ann R. Bray worked together in the dry goods business but they were not business partners: the former was always listed as clerk in the census and directory records while the latter was clearly the shopowner. They were, however, friends and perhaps life partners: after leaving bequests to a score of nieces and nephews in her native Gloucester, Miss Bray left the bulk of her estate, and her shop, to Miss Punchard in her 1875 will: I can only assume that this photograph marks Miss Punchard’s succession to the well-established Bray business: and is she wearing mourning? Miss Bray’s will implies that they were very close but I can’t presume anything more than that—although again, they lived together and alone (except for a succession of servant girls, several from Maine and several from Ireland) for more than three decades: every time they needed a new servant Miss Bray advertised for help in “a household of two”. Following Miss Bray’s death in 1875, Miss Punchard ran the shop until her retirement in 1886; she died three years later. And that was the end of a seemingly-successful woman-owned business in Salem, one of many: I am sure I am just scratching the surface with these posts. The Bray business had a long run, from around 1821 at least, when Miss Bray began advertising her services as a tailoress in Salem: not a seamstress mind you, but a tailoress. The “trimmings”took over and she moved into dry goods dealing from a variety of Federal Street locales: ending up at #76.

Bray Salem Gazette 1821 (2) Best

Bray 1833

Bray Goods SR June 24 1848 (2)

Advertisements in the Salem Gazette and Register, 1821-1853: Cambric and Bombazine dresses from MoMu: Fashion Museum Antwerp and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Miss Bray was an enthusiastic advertiser in the Salem Gazette, Register and Observer and even the Wizard of South Danvers (now Peabody) and her stock got larger and more exotic as her business expanded: she offered gingham from the beginning to the end (and you can see it in the photograph of Miss Punchard) but added many other fabrics and frills from the 1840s on. I’m familiar with lots of things (merino, tartan, worsted, muslin and linen), but clueless about others: what in the world are “Russian Diapers” and “Circassian Bombazettes”? From some fashion historian crowdsourcing, I did learn that “Quaker Skirts” were a lightweight hoop, and Miss Bray offered other hoops as well, including the “Watch Spring” and “Bon Ton” varieties, and all manner of petticoats, including the popular Balmoral Skirt inspired by Queen Victoria. BUT there is definitely a patriotic shift during the Civil War: towards simpler fabrics, manufactured domestically. Mourning wear, unfortunately, was always in demand.After the war Miss Bray returned to her vast array of fabrics and accessories, and even included pianofortes in her stock! Just brief glimpses into two women’s lives in Salem: their public roles are somewhat revealed while their private world remains just so.

Bray Collage

Bray Goods July 24 1862 (3)

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Bray End Salem Register, January & July 1862; South Peabody Wizard, January 1869; Newburyport Daily Herald, November 1886.

13 Comments | tags: #SalemSuffrageSaturday, Clothing, ephemera, Fashion, Newspapers, Photography, Shopping, Textiles, Women's History | posted in History, Salem, Women's History

July 11, 2020

The Coal Queen of Salem

By daseger

There is no question that the women I’ve come to admire the most as I’ve been compiling my #SalemSuffrageSaturday stories are the entrepreneurs: the artists and writers and activists are both interesting and impressive of course, but women entrepreneurs leave less of a mark, and were much more daring in their day. It was fine for women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to “dabble” in painting and writing, but business was another thing altogether: no dabbling there. And no one is interested in them, so their stories remain untold. We have to hear about (very worthy, but still!) House of the Seven Gables founder and philanthropist Caroline Emmerton Caroline Emmerton Caroline Emmerton Caroline Emmerton Caroline Emmerton Caroline Emmerton Caroline Emmerton Caroline Emmerton Caroline Emmerton Caroline Emmerton Caroline Emmerton again and again and again and again and again, but I’m telling you now: her contemporary Charlotte Fairfield was far more interesting.

So who was Charlotte Fairfield (1864-1924)? Well, I have labeled her “Salem’s Coal Queen” and the Boston papers refer to her as both a “Model Business Woman” and “Salem’s Smartest Business Woman”, among other glowing terms. She was the daughter of James Fairfield of Salem, a dealer in coal and other commodities, but she did not simply inherit the family business: she pursued her own bookkeeping career in Boston, principally with the dry goods firm Babcock & Sargent, until the combined forces of her own illness and her brother’s death compelled her to come back to Salem and work with her father. In 1903, when she was denied a vote in the Salem Coal Club, she and her father decided to go “independent” and undercut their competition, lowering the price of coal in Salem and exposing what was essentially a cartel in the process to great acclaim and notoriety: the newspapers simply could not write enough about Miss Fairfield in the winter of 1903: she became the “Fighting Coal Dealer”.

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“Lottie” Fairfield transcended her gender with that particular headline in the Boston Sunday Globe, but the story beneath it, and most stories about her in 1903 and later, are overwhelmingly focused on it: Thoroughly independent, with a mind, a will, and a brain all her own and a masculine adaptability for business, Miss Fairchild is decidedly feminine, not at all what you would call a strong-minded ‘new’ woman, but an up-to-date, stylish, well-gowned, attractive, bright, lovable little body, who, with the proverbial inconsistency of her sex, with coal by the wagonloads on her wharves, has burned coke for a couple of years in her furnace reads the February 15 illustrated story in the Globe. Wow! That is quite a characterization. The Boston Post caricatured her “arrogant” competitors in the Salem Coal Club, most prominently Major George W. Pickering, while headlining her as a heroine.

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Coal Boston Post 13 Feb 1903 2PM Boston Post 13 February 1903

And so she was: because the result of Miss Fairfield’s war with the Salem Coal Club was the lowering of the price of coal from $12.00 to $9 a ton in Salem: imagine the impact that had in an era when coal was a major household expense! Charlotte Fairfield appears in the Boston papers again and again over the next twenty years, always portrayed as plucky, business-savvy, and well-dressed. After years of pleading with the city of Salem to dredge the Harbor so that coal-laden ships could reach her docks, she took matters into her own hands and then submitted the dredging bill to the City, which refused to reimburse her. One of her docks was damaged because of the inaccessibility of the Harbor. She filed suit against the City for both reimbursement and damages, and eventually won both, though the legal process stretched out for years, earning her more headlines in the local papers. She was a fierce advocate for Salem Harbor, and not just for commercial reasons: at this time the City was dumping raw sewage into it and she and others protested regularly to state and federal authorities. She was very involved in the relief efforts following the Great Salem Fire in 1914 (which did not burn down her waterfront storehouse, as it was built of “modern” materials) and she gave a job to every Salem soldier returning home from World War I.

Coal 1910 Beverly Directory (2)

Coal Harbor

I became so enamored of Charlotte Fairfield that I actually gasped when I found accounts of her death in the papers: a tragic end to a very full and active life, from injuries sustained when her clothing caught fire while she was standing too close to a gas heater in her home at 13 Pleasant Street (there is actually quite a list of Salem women who died when their clothes caught on fire!!!) She was able to call for help, and was in stable condition for the first few days in Salem Hospital, but she died on January 30, 1924, leaving only a niece, and a substantial estate, of course.

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10 Comments | tags: #SalemSuffrageSaturday, ephemera, House of the Seven Gables, Newspapers, Salem Harbor, Women's History | posted in History, Women's History

May 2, 2020

Mrs. Gibney did not have to rise to the Occasion

By daseger

In the first few months of 1918, the Boston-area newspapers all carried a story about a local Salem family, the Gibneys of Oak Street, who had received a letter from President Woodrow Wilson thanking them for the service of their four eldest sons. All the stories printed the President’s letter verbatim, and detailed the service of the young Gibney soldiers, but they also directed a spotlight on their mother, Mrs. John (Alice) Gibney, who clearly represented the perfect wartime mother: an expert war gardener, frugal cook, and Red Cross volunteer. There are lots of stories about women rising to the challenges (and opportunities) of the home front during World War One, but I think Alice Gibney’s service was quite simply her life (and vice-versa).

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Gibney-2-3 Boston Sunday Post, February 3, 1918 & Boston Sunday Globe, April 7, 1918.

So let’s look at the life of Alice Marion O’Brien Gibney (1869-1945) in the Spring of 1918. She was a Lynn girl who married a Salem boy in 1890: they had fourteen children, three of whom died in infancy. The family home on Oak Street looks like it might have acquired some additions over the years, but even in its expanded state it’s a bit difficult to envision it containing a family of thirteen although obviously there was more room with the four oldest boys in the service. At around the same time that Alice and John Gibney received their letter from President Wilson, he was laid off from his job at a Lynn shoe factory, so he fell back on what seems to have been a secondary line of work, ferret-breeding (and later, extermination). So Alice not only had a houseful of children but also ferrets out back. Nothing phased her: she told the Boston Post reporter that “surely we haven’t the right to grumble over a little personal discomfort” when boys such as hers “have taken their lives in their hands for the sake of their country.” In addition to her work as one of the founding members of the Bowditch (School) Parent-Teacher Association, she established the Company H Woman’s Auxiliary, which “carefully looked after 150 boys….even if they are far away in France (with her son Alfred): for Christmas of 1917 she personally packed 150 Christmas parcels for these soldiers. Along with the ferrets, there were several gardens out back: a vegetable garden which enabled Mrs. Gibney to can 150 quarts of tomatoes and 32 quarts of beans and “put down” bushels of carrots, parsnips, and celery in her cellar, and a flower garden “which brought forth 10,000 blossoms” in 1917, which were sold in the market. She made jars of pear preserves and grape “catchup”, all the while also supervising the war gardens of her younger children, who took top prize in the Salem Chamber of Commerce garden contest several years in a row.

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Grape Catchup Collage The standard war-time recipe for grape “catchup”, sometimes called catsup and later ketchup: it evolves into a relish over the twentieth century, but earlier in the century there were many different types of catchups: cranberry, mushroom, any fruit or vegetable really, and it was recommended that such sauces be served with roasts. I bet Mrs. Gibney had a more economical recipe for her grape catchup as 2 pounds of sugar would have been very dear in 1918.

Every day, in her free time, Alice Gibney went to the Red Cross headquarters in Salem to work on surgical dressings, baby layettes, or knitting projects, “wherever the need is greatest”. She also turned her practical experience at provisioning and feeding her large family to account in the service of Salem’s food conservation campaign. All four Gibney soldiers came home at the end of the Great War, several had families, and Mrs. Gibney lived to see her grandsons go off to war as well. She died at the close of World War II and is buried in Harmony Grove cemetery, not very far from her lifetime home.

Picture_20200430_182434877 We just discovered that Hamilton Hall served as a Surgical Dressings center for the Salem Red Cross in the summer of 1918, so Mrs. Gibney might have worked there—my attempt at a ghost sign for the Hall!

2 Comments | tags: #SalemSuffrageSaturday, Food and drink, Newspapers, Women's History, World War I | posted in History, Salem, Women's History

April 25, 2020

Sarah’s Spectacles

By daseger

In my mission to ferret out lesser-known Salem women for my #salemsuffragesaturday posts I seem to be focusing on quite a few unmarried women, but they are not your typical “maiden aunts” known only to their families: some public activity has to have been documented or they would leave no mark other than personal memories. Today I am featuring the older sister of a very famous Salem family, described by none other than the New York Times as “eminent for genius and enterprise”: Sarah West Lander (1819-72). Sarah’s siblings included Civil War General Frederick W. Lander and sculptress Louisa Lander; they were the great-grandchildren of Elias Hasket Derby and the grandchildren of Elizabeth Derby and Captain Nathaniel West, whose spectacular divorce rocked Salem in 1806. I wanted to write about Sarah mostly because I’m envious of the amazing houses in which she lived throughout her life, no doubt in the midst of all that famous Derby furniture: a charming and long-gone Barton Square house, the famous McIntire creation Oak Hill in nearby Peabody (also long gone, but with interiors preserved at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), and the brick townhouse that now houses the Salem Inn. But in her own time, I think she found considerable fame as the author of a series of juvenile travelogues titled Spectacles for Young Eyes: eight volumes were published in all during the 1860s, encompassing cities from Boston to New York to Berlin and St. Petersburg. It is through these spectacles that we come to see Sarah.

Lander Barton Square 1904 (2)

Lander Oak_Hill (2)

Oak Hill Parlor MFA

Lander Cousins (2) Five Barton Square, Sarah’s birthplace, in 1904 by Frank Cousins from his Colonial Architecture in Salem (1919); Oak Hill in the early twentieth century, Peabody Institute Library; Five Summer Street (left), Sarah’s home after 1850, in a 1890s photograph by Frank Cousins, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum via Digital Commonwealth.

Sarah didn’t begin writing her children’s books until the onset of the Civil War: the first one, originally titled Spectacles for Little Eyes and focused on nearby Boston, was published in 1862, the same year that her brother died from injuries sustained in battle and the onset of pneumonia. His Washington funeral was attended by President Lincoln and members of the Cabinet; crowds lined the streets of both the capital and Salem after his body was returned home for burial in the Broad Street Cemetery on March 8. It is impossible to know how Sarah processed all this: it is tempting to offer up escapism through travel writing but certainly that’s taking too many liberties!

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Lander Funeral March New York Times, March 9, 1862; C. Mathias, “General Lander’s Funeral March”, Library of Congress

Seven more books followed Spectacle for Little Eyes, all issued in multiple illustrated editions with the revised series title Spectacles for Young Eyes. Contemporary trade journals refer to Miss Lander’s success at selling 50,000 plus copies per title: while the rest of the country was occupied with war and reconstruction, she was clearly focused on her writing, publishing poetry and translations from French and German as well as the Spectacles books. Obviously Sarah knew Boston, but I can’t find any evidence that she visited any of the other cities she wrote about, using the experiences of the wandering Hamilton family as her “spectacles”. Her younger sister Louisa was well-traveled, but Sarah was an armchair traveler, settled in a Salem which she describes as very pleasant, quiet, staid, [and] neat-looking—as if it were Sunday all the time. The spirit of the Puritans seems hanging over it still [very Hawthornesque!]. Hers was a quiet Salem, not a busy (though declining) port, a burgeoning industrial center or a cauldron of reformist activism.

Lander Collage

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Lander Spectacles 3 (3) Spectacles: Boston, St. Petersburg, Zurich, “Pekin”.

Indeed, in her 1872 obituary, the Salem Gazette is pretty much in the same position to view Miss Lander as I am: it belongs to those who were favored with her intimate acquaintance, to speak of the attractions and virtues of her private character. But we may be permitted to refer to those productions through which she has become known to the public, i.e. the Spectacles, much praised for their great research, their moral tone, beauty of style, and great fidelity of description.

9 Comments | tags: #SalemSuffrageSaturday, Authors, books, Derby Family, Famous Salem Families, Frederick W. Lander, Houses, Newspapers, Samuel McIntire, Women's History | posted in History, Salem, Women's History

April 18, 2020

It was Her Shop

By daseger

Looking through classified advertisements in eighteenth-century Salem newspapers is one of my favorite pastimes: I can’t think of a better way to gain insights into the public lives of people at that time, though their private lives are, of course, another story. The other day I was wandering around in 1769 and a particularly enticing notice caught my attention: with its large letters and array of goods it could not fail to do so. Priscilla Manning, in big bold letters, listed her worldly goods, encompassing all manner and colors of cloth, caps, hose, shoes and tea, of course, all available at “her shop in Salem, a little above Capt. West’s Corner, at the lowest prices for Cash.” First I had to figure out what all of these eighteenth-century fabrics were: taffeta, satin, lawn, cambric, and linen were familiar to me, but somehow I have made it to this advanced age without knowing what “calamanco” was. I assumed it was an alternative spelling for calico, but no—a very different, thicker, embossed woolen cloth, which has its own (tortoiseshell) cat association in some parts of this world. Not only was I ignorant about calamanco: I had no idea that our neighboring city to the South, Lynn, was a major producer of calamanco shoes in the eighteenth century, well before it became known as an industrial Shoe City. But there’s the reference right in Priscilla’s inventory: best Lynn-made calamanco and silk shoes. My friend and former colleague Kimberly Alexander, author of Treasures Afoot: Shoe Stories of the Georgian Era, set me straight: calamanco shoes were the “everyday footwear of American life” and Lynn-made shoes had such a good reputation in the Boston area that merchants such as Priscilla “proudly trumpeted their origin”. Yes, that’s right: Priscilla Manning was a merchant; why is that occupational term reserved only for men?

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Calamanco Shoes Deerfield

My calico cat Trinity and some anonymous tortoiseshell I stole from the web, as apparently some parts of the word call torties “calamanco cats”; calamanco wedding shoes from c. 1765, collection of Historic Deerfield (object #HD 2004.26, photo by Penny Leveritt).

Priscilla continued to carry on her business until 1772 when she married a widower from Andover named George Abbot: he brought his two young girls to Salem, and if advertisements are any indication, took over her shop. Suddenly it is George Abbot who is offering all of theses splendid goods, from the same shop, with only a few slight changes, including cash given for empty snuff bottles. Priscilla disappears! Certainly the commercial contacts necessary to conduct such a cosmopolitan provisioning business were hers, and I bet she continued to work them, but she is no longer the public face of her business. Actually the newspapers give us few insights into the Abbots during the Revolution: George appears in a 1774 letter addressed to General Gage protesting the closing of the port of Boston, and then we don’t see another advertisement until 1783, when the shop has moved to “Main Street”. In the following year, he died at age 37, leaving Priscilla as the guardian of her two stepdaughters and their daughter, also named Priscilla.

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So what does Priscilla do? She re-opened her shop, “just above the town pump”, and built a big new house—both in her name. I do wonder if she had more freedom of operation as a widow than a miss, but that conspicuous advertisement from 1769 indicates she was under no commercial constraints before her marriage. The papers carry notices of the marriages of her stepdaughters and, sadly, the death of her own daughter at the tender age of 16, but they can offer no other insights into the life of Priscilla Manning Abbot, until her own death in 1804. What she left behind, to be disposed of by her executrix Elizabeth Cogswell: her mansion house and barn, one-half of wall pew #6 in the “Rev. Dr. Barnard’s meeting-house” and of course, her stock in trade.

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I think this plaque should read Priscilla Manning Abbot, Merchant.

Appendix: Priscilla Manning’s ad caught the attention of an expert in the field as well as wandering me: check out Carl Robert Keyes’ analysis at the Adverts 250 Project.

10 Comments | tags: #SalemSuffrageSaturday, American Revolution, Cats, ephemera, Houses, Newspapers, Salem Businesses, Textiles, Women's History | posted in History, Salem, Women's History

February 1, 2020

Sisters in Arms

By daseger

I’ve been searching high and low for Salem suffragists, and I have found some, but it’s been a difficult search as there are no extant papers of the “Woman Suffrage Club” of Salem that I can find: newspaper articles, a few flyers, references in diaries and other texts, that’s about it. There are records of many other women’s organizations—charitable groups, religious groups, fellowship groups—which met over different decades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and among them are the minutes and correspondence of the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society (SFASS), one of the country’s earliest female abolition societies. Looking at all these records, I see familiar names turning up again and again, and as I suspect there were concentric circles of female activism in nineteenth-century Salem, most especially among those women advocating for abolition and suffrage, I am especially grateful that the SFASS archives have been digitized through a partnership of the Congregational and Phillips Libraries. I had a student who worked with these records a year ago for her capstone research and she deemed them “boring”, but I find them fascinating in terms of both content and tone: expressions of a sisterhood of mutual aid and activism pervade even the most administrative of notations.

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Records of the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society, 1834-66, Phillips Library MSS 34: available at the Congregational Library. Meeting minutes & Correspondence from William Lloyd Garrison.

Before I get into the activities of the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society, I need to write about Clarissa Lawrence, again. An African-American schoolteacher who lived on High Street in a house that still stands, Lawrence was committed to what was obviously for her an intertwined mission of aid and abolition: she established the first female Anti-Slavery Society in 1832, the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, which consisted solely of free women of color. This organization was folded into the integrated Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1834, but in the interim year, Lawrence also revived and reformed the dormant Colored Female Religious and Moral Society of Salem. This woman was tireless, and relentless, and on fire. She served in the leadership of the SFASS, and was a delegate to the third Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in Philadelphia in May of 1839. On the last day of the convention, Lawrence rose to make a memorable speech, recorded in its proceedings and frequently referenced and reprinted. Yet despite her renown among her peers and historians, she is largely forgotten in the Witch City.

Speech-1839

I hope that Mrs. Lawrence felt supported in all of her efforts by her sisters in the newly-formed Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society, all 130 of them, including officers, managers and members. I assume that her election as Vice-President means that she was. The women were very serious about their organization, their meetings, and their minutes. Their first task was to draw up and ratify a constitution, after which they held regular meetings at Mechanic Hall, Creamer Hall, the Masonic Hall, and the Howard Street Church: sub-committee meetings were held at members’ homes. There is one reference to the expenditure of ten dollars for the “privilege of holding our meetings for the enduring year (1837) in the Anti-Slavery Room–occupied by the anti-slavery gentlemen of this city as a reading and debating room”: I have no idea where this might have been, but it conjures up an image of gentlemen reading and debating while the women are doing. Every meeting started with prayers, and decorum was always observed: one young lady who shall remain nameless was asked to resign for her use of “profane” language and she complied. Most of the work of the Society consisted of fundraising in order to support several missions: the purchase of memberships in the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society for those that could not afford them, sending representatives such as Clarissa Lawrence to conventions, supporting “refugees from slavery”, and underwriting William Lloyd Garrison and The Liberator. There were occasional requests for support of vulnerable members of Salem’s free black population—which were answered—but you can tell that the ladies’ primary focus was on those who had escaped from the South. Fundraising primarily took the form of holding fairs, in which the other female anti-slavery societies in the area—in Boston, Marblehead, and Danvers—would contribute, with reciprocation from Salem: the bonds of sisterhood definitely crossed municipal boundaries as well as state lines.

Female-Fair Salem Register, 1841

Recording Secretary Eliza J. Kenny (sometimes spelled Kenney) was a fascinating woman in several ways, and she will get her own Salem Suffrage Saturday post in the near future: her influence, as well as long-serving President Lucy G. Ives, seems to be behind the lecture series sponsored by the SFASS from 1844-1860, which brought many famous abolitionist advocates to Salem: William Lloyd Garrison seems always ready to speak in Salem, but Wendell Phillips, O.B. Frothingham, William H. Channing and others also came to speak at the Lyceum. The lecture that received the most attention in the press by far was that of “fugitive slave” William Wells Brown, who came to Salem on his first tour as an agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, at the beginning of a brilliant career. When asked if he could “represent the real condition of the Slave” Brown replied that he could not: your fastidiousness would not allow me to do it; and if it would, I, for one, should not be willing to do it;—–at least to an audience. Were I to tell you the evils of Slavery, to represent to you the Slave in his lowest degradation, I should wish to take you, one at a time, and whisper it to you. Slavery has never been represented; Slavery never can be represented. What is a Slave? A Slave is one that is in the power of the owner. He is chattel; he is a thing; he is a piece of property. A master can dispose of him, can dispose of his labor, can dispose of his wife, can dispose of his offspring, can dispose of everything that belongs to the Slave, and the Slave shall have no right to speak; he shall have nothing to say. The Slave cannot speak for himself, he cannot speak for his wife, or his children. He is a thing. Brown’s words were by all accounts riveting, so much so that his Salem talk was issued in print, with the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society right there in the title, on the cover, a great example of the Society’s increasing focus on communication in its second and third decades.

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Female Anti-Slavery Society 1847 Salem Observer, 1847-48; Henry M. Parkhurst’s “phonographic report” of Mr. Brown’s Lyceum Speech.

Eliza Kenny led me to the intersection of abolitionism and suffrage: she was the first Salem woman to sponsor a petition, “that the right of suffrage may be extended to women” to the Massachusetts legislature in 1850, right after she attended the first National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester. I saw lots of familiar names among the 25 women who signed the petition: her anti-slavery sisters. Eliza went down a spiritualist route that made her a less effective (and committed) advocate for either abolition or suffrage later, but her decades of activism are commendable, as are those of the Salem Female Anti-Slavery, which disbanded in 1866, their objective realized at long last. But there were still battles to be waged.

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Kenny petition for the Harvard Anti-Slavery Petitions of Massachusetts Dataverse; The Female version of Am I Not A………., first used in George Bourne’s Slavery Illustrated in Its Effects upon Women (1837).

8 Comments | tags: #SalemSuffrageSaturday, Abolition, Archives, Clarissa Lawrence, Newspapers, Phillips Library, Slavery, Women's History, Women's Societies | posted in History, Salem, Women's History

February 28, 2019

Black History is Salem History

By daseger

I’m wrapping up February, a month in which educators have focused on African-American history since at least 1970, with a summary of some of the research in which I’ve been engaged and some links to some other initiatives and events in the Salem area. I really learned a lot this month, about Salem’s African-American history, and about Salem’s history: essentially I learned that they are one and the same. I got drawn into the experiences of African-Americans in Salem in the eighteenth century by my efforts to learn digital mapping through a project on enslavement, while the Remonds of Hamilton Hall have always been my point-of-entry for the world of nineteenth-century free blacks in Salem. I’ve been supervising an internship for Hamilton Hall in which the intern has been digging deep into the activities of the extended Remond family, and I have benefitted from directing (and following!) her path. My map is in the very preliminary stages primarily because I haven’t really mastered the process yet, but also because I have yet to establish the full scale of enslavement in colonial Salem. Every discovery leads me down a path in which I struggle to establish context: the Honorable justices William Browne, Benjamin Lynde Sr., and Benjamin Lynde Jr., the Loyalist Captain Poynton of the “Pineapple House”: all slave owners.

Black Past Brown

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Poyton Collage

Lynde collage

Black Past Otis Map Advertisements from the Boston Evening–Post; 1731 portrait of Benjamin Lynde Sr. by John Smibert; Diary entry and will excerpt from The Diaries of Benjamin Lynde and of Benjamin Lynde, Jr. (1880). I’m using the “Otis Map” or the “Map of Salem about 1780,” based on the Researches of Sidney Perley and the (contemporary) accounts of Col. Benjamin Pickman & Benjamin J.F. Browne with Additional Information Assembled by James Duncan Phillips and Henry Noyes Otis and drawn by Henry Noyes as my old-school working map and adding Xs as I uncover information from newspaper ads, censuses, and diaries–but there are still a lot of family papers to go through.

It’s so odd to think of Benjamin Lynde Sr. (1666-1749) and Benjamin Lynde Jr. (1700-1781), Salem natives, residents, and chief justices of the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature, conducting their legal responsibilities while simultaneously managing their private estates, which included the purchase of new slaves, and the recovery of those who had run away. The elder Lynde mentions purchasing sheep and a young boy named Scipio in the same breath. Benjamin Lynde Jr. presided over the trial of the British soldiers indicted for the Boston Massacre of 1770, and freed one of his slaves in his will six years later. And then everything changes: just one of many remarkable things I’ve learned about Charles Lenox Remond (1810-1873), also a Salem native and son of a free black emigre, is his intense advocacy for the erection of a memorial to Crispus Attucks, the African-American martyr of the Boston Massacre. He would not see that statue erected in his lifetime, but he would be the first African-American to testify before the Massachusetts legislature in 1842: on the timely topic of the the desegregation of the relatively-new railways. Just this past week, an excerpt of the new book Separate: the Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey From Slavery to Segregation by Steve Luxenberg was published in the Washington Post Magazine as ” The Jim Crow Car”: who knew that that phrase had northern origins? Mr. Luxenberg tweeted me a quote from his book referencing Remond’s testimony on February 10, 1842 when the chamber was filled with curious spectators as “Word had gotten out: a man of color would be testifying.”

Remond Train Collage

Before this month, I had a healthy respect for Charles and his equally famous sister Sarah Parker Remond, both very public abolitionist advocates and speakers, but I was a bit more interested in their parents, John and Nancy, a very entrepreneurial couple who kept the home fires burning while supporting their efforts back in Salem. I remain impressed with the entire Remond family, but I got to know Charles a bit more and I really think he was a man ahead of his time. He was not just advocating for abolition, he was going for complete equality: of race and gender. I read in his letters to his fellow abolitionist Ellen Sands in the Phillips Library in Rowley very carefully, and his earnest identification of his enemies as “his majesty Mr. Slavery and her majesty Mistress Prejudice” rings true in all his advocacy work: for desegregation of travel and education, for women’s suffrage, for the end of the Massachusetts anti-miscegenation laws, for the end of slavery and equal opportunities for African-Americans. All of the Remonds petitioned their local and state authorities on a range of social justice issues in the 1840s and 1850s, calling for the the abolition of capital punishment, the desegregation of the Boston schools (having been successful in Salem), and the refutation of the Fugitive Slave Act.

Black History Remond Petition 1

Black History Remond Petitition 1A

Black History Remond Petition 1B Just one petition with Remond signatures from Harvard University’s Anti-Slavery Petitions of Massachusetts Dataverse.

Because of the presence of the Remonds (and perhaps other African-American families whom I haven’t learned about yet), Salem served as a refuge of sorts for free blacks from eastern cities in search of educational opportunity, particularly young women: two very prominent educators, Charlotte Forten (1837-1914) and Maritcha Remond Lyons (1848-1929), left Philadelphia and New York for Salem in the 1850s and 1860s, and Forten graduated from Salem Normal School (now Salem State University) and became the first African-American teacher in the Salem public schools in 1856. Salem was definitely formative in Forten’s intellectual and personal development, and Salem State is justly proud of its graduate: a permanent exhibition space was opened up on campus last year, and a special tribute to her pioneering roles will be held next week.

Teachers Collage

Forten Talk 2 Charlotte Forten and Maritcha Remond Lyons, who was named after her mother’s best friend, Maritcha Remond. You can register for Race, Gender and Education: a Dialogue Linking Past and Present, a complimentary event, here.

The city of Salem is fortunate that institutions such as Salem State, the Salem Maritime National Historic Site, and Hamilton Hall are engaging in the interpretation of African-American history, but I think this topic—along with many others—deserves the coordination and amplification that a historical society/museum/center could bring to its presentation. A few tweets from the city’s tourism organization about the existence of an audio guide to African-American sites in Salem does not suffice. Despite the residency and advocacy of the Remonds, of Charlotte Forten, of Robert Morris and Jacob Stroyer, and the fact that the Salem Ship Desire delivered the first documented cargo of enslaved Africans to Massachusetts in 1638, Salem has only two sites on the map of the comprehensive African-American Trail project at Tufts University: Stroyer’s grave and Remond Park. While it’s lovely that Salem has paid tribute to the Remond family with a seaside park, this gesture should not suffice either–especially when the information conveyed in its signage is wrong: a large population of nineteenth-century African-Americans did not live on Bridge Street Neck, remote from the center of the city. And their presence and stories—like those of their predecessors and successors—should not be confined to the margins of Salem’s history.

Tufts-Black-History-3

Remond Park Collage Part of the African–American Trail Project at Tufts including an evening last fall in which projections of the University’s first African-American students were photographed: here is Claude Randolph Taylor from 1924. Photograph by Erik Jacobs, Digital Collections and Archives, Tufts University. I’m sure that the Remond Park sign will be corrected soon, but why was this sweeping and incorrect assertion included in the first place?

15 Comments | tags: African American History, Black History Month, Charlotte Forten, Commemoration, Newspapers, Remond Family of Salem, Salem State University, Slavery, Teaching | posted in History, Salem

February 22, 2019

Reports of Leslie’s Retreat

By daseger

This weekend brings the third annual commemorative reenactment of “Leslie’s Retreat” to Salem, an enthusiastic event that I think everyone enjoys because of its non-commercial, non-1692 focus: at least I do! The reenactment marks an event which might have sparked the American Revolution weeks before Lexington and Concord, if shots had been fired; it was nonetheless a notable occurrence of an armed (and potentially very dangerous) resistance. In late February of 1775 General Thomas Gage, the military governor of Massachusetts, got wind of a store of cannon in Salem and dispatched Lieut. Col. Alexander Leslie and 240 soldiers of the 64th Regiment by ship from Boston to Marblehead on the 26th (a Sunday!), with instructions to march to Salem and seize them. There’s a lot of whispering and distrust in this story as the “Tory” and “Patriot” sides do not seem firm, but several Marblehead patriots rode ahead in Revere-like fashion and warned the people of Salem, and thus “the Sabbath was disturbed”. By the time the soldiers arrived in Salem a crowd had assembled in the vicinity of the (old) North Bridge, as across the North River was the blacksmith’s shop where the cannons were being affixed to field carriages. A prolonged standoff ensued with the drawbridge raised, during which the cannons were moved west, several ending up in Concord, I believe. The bridge was lowered so that Colonel Leslie could fulfill his orders, but it was too late, and so he and his troops turned around and marched back to Marblehead, their ship, and Boston. I’ve written about this event several times (here and here), there’s a nice narrative of events here, and the most insightful accounts are on J.L. Bell’s brilliant blog Boston 1775 (I especially like this post but check this one out too, and this one), so there is no need to go into any more detail, but there are three issues I’d like to raise, two “open” and one relatively new (I think, maybe not, not my period!), all from newspaper accounts written in the weeks after Colonel Leslie’s retreat from Salem.

Leslies Retreat Collage

Leslies Retreat Newport Mercury

Leslies Retreat March 15 Masthead

There is some back-and-forth, especially in the first few weeks after the Retreat, but for the most part the papers are essentially publishing the standard story first published by the Essex Gazette. There are so many details to this story, however, that it’s notable what is put in and what is left out. So here are my “outstanding” issues, in the form of a question and two comments.

How many damn cannon(s) were there in Salem? I can’t lock down the number (and I know “cannon” is plural but I think I have to use cannons here). Apparently General Gage had received reports that old ships’ cannons were being converted in Salem and eight additional cannons had been imported from abroad, while the Essex Register’s report on the Retreat included the assertion that twenty-seven pieces of cannon were removed out of this town, in order to be out of the way of the robbers. I’ve read (and quoted) seventeen cannons, nineteen cannons, and twenty cannons. I think we’ve go to go with the eyewitness account cited by J.L. Bell, in which Samuel Gray, who was nine years old at the time, went into the smithy on the day after and asked how many cannons had been there the day before and was told twelve; understood they were French pieces, and came from Nova Scotia after the late French war; were guns taken from the French; does not know to whom they belonged previous to being fitted up on this occasion. TWELVE. Gray’s remembrances were in response to interviews that Charles Moses Endicott conducted to produce his Leslie’s Retreat; or the Resistance to British Arms, at the North Bridge in Salem, on Sunday, the 26th of February of 1775, which was first published as a separate Proceeding of the Essex Institute in 1856.

(The remembrance and reconstruction of what became known as “Leslie’s Retreat” enable us to see how Salem’s history was collected, preserved and interpreted by the Essex Institute, one of the founding institutions of today’s Peabody Essex Museum. Contrary to the claims of the PEM leadership: yes, the Essex Institute DID function as a historical society, and that’s why its historical collections, including its publications and historical manuscripts and texts assembled in the Phillips Library, constitute an important archive of Salem’s history, and no, no institution is fulfilling that role for Salem now, so the decisions to end the Institute’s interpretation and collection missions and remove its archival collections from Salem will have far-reaching consequences. These decisions were made by Mr. Dan Monroe, and since he has announced his retirement it is time to consider his legacy—and this is a truly momentous one.) Sorry–the spirit of RESISTANCE overwhelmed me!

Back to the question of the cannon(s): for some reason Endicott goes with 17 in his account, which has become classic, but he includes Gray’s number in his footnotes, clearly giving some credence to his claim. I don’t know why we can’t believe the boy: certainly his would have been a crystalline memory.

Major Pedrick was a Tory! None of the contemporary reports of the events of February 26, 1775 mention Major John Pedrick as the “alarming” figure who rode ahead of Leslie’s troops to warn the citizens of Salem of their imminent arrival, nor does Endicott. That’s because his role was made up after Endicott’s account. Pedrick was in fact a wealthy Tory who would not have been motivated to play such a conspicuous role at this time; he came around a bit later but anonymous Marbleheaders warned Salem on that Sabbath day. Again, I am relying on J.L. Bell’s succinct analysis of the “myth” of Major Pedrick, which has been perpetuated in the most recent scholarship as well as our reenactment. I was also inspired by Bell’s post to look around and see what else was made up about our event, particularly in the “creative” Marblehead accounts of the later nineteenth century. Samuel Roads Jr.’s History and Traditions of Marblehead (1880) turns Leslie’s Retreat into an all-Marblehead affair: Pedrick is prominent, of course, along with an entire Marblehead Regiment that came to Salem to take up with Leslie’s troops. Not a single Salem name is mentioned in Roads’ account, but we do hear of one Robert Wormsted, one of the young men from Marblehead,—who afterwards distinguished himself by his daring and bravery,—[and ] engaged in an encounter with some of the soldiers. He was a skillful fencer, and, with his cane for a weapon, succeeded in disarming six of the regulars. Wow. No mention in Endicott of this cane-wielding Wormsted—or Pedrick—but Marblehead folk artist J.O.J Frost seems to have cemented the latter’s place in history in his early twentieth-century painting “Major Pedrick. To the Town of Salem, to Give the Alarm.“

Leslies Retreat Frost Courtesy Skinner Auctions; note the anachronistic photo inserted on the right.

“Anniversary History” was alive and well in 1775: Even in the standard reports of Leslie’s Retreat published in the week after, I couldn’t help but notice the juxtaposition of what had just happened in Salem and the imminent fifth anniversary of the Boston Massacre. Side by side we can read of Leslie’s “ridiculous” expedition and “an Oration, in commemoration of the Massacre, perpetuated in King-Street, on the 5th of March, 1770, by Joseph Warren, Esq.” and several reports made the connection between the two, which occurred on successive sabbaths. Dr. Warren actually spoke on March 6, 1775, and I wish he had referenced Salem, but he did not. Nevertheless, you can really feel the drumbeat of rebellion when you read the New England papers published in March of 1775: there are lessons to be learned and anecdotes to be memorialized. The editors of the Newport Mercury were also thinking historically when they opined that as our brave ancestors used to carry their implements of war with them to their places of worship during the Indian wars, perhaps our brethren of the Massachusetts Bay have good reason to make use of the same precaution at this day. I also can’t resist adding another eyewitness testimony here, from a “True Son of Old Ireland” who was on the spot, as well as my very favorite photograph of the First Reenactment of Leslie’s Retreat, two years ago: these guys played their roles really well.

Leslies Retreat Lessons Learned Newport Mercury March 6

Essex Gazette March 7 1775 Leslies Retreat

Leslies Retreat best photo The Newport Mercury of March 6, 1775 and the Essex Gazette of March 7, 1775; Lt. Colonel Leslie (Charlie Newhall!!!) exasperated and outflanked two years ago.

Commemorating Leslie’s Retreat on February 24: Reenactment at 11:15-11:30 for Redcoats (meet at Hamilton Hall) and Patriots (meet at the First Church). Reception afterwards at First Church.

A Staged Reading of Endicott’s Leslie’s Retreat at the Pickering House by Keith Trickett, 3pm: https://pickeringhouse.org/events/special-leslies-retreat-performance/.

Toast the Retreat and Salem’s Resistance at O’Neill’s Pub on Washington Street from 4-7pm.

And coming in April: the Resistance Ball at Hamilton Hall: https://www.hamiltonhall.org/full-event-calendar/2019/2/1/resistance-ball

19 Comments | tags: Anniversary History, Commemoration, Leslie's Retreat, Local Events, Local History, Newspapers, Peabody Essex Museum, Reenactments, Revolutionary War | posted in History, Salem

February 7, 2019

Enquiries and Enslavement

By daseger

I’m in the process of teaching myself how to create digital maps with layers of history so I can visualize different times, places, events and environments. Such maps are a great teaching tool, and I also think it would be a great way to put all of the discoveries I’ve made while blogging into a more compact form. “Spatial history” is a very big trend in historical interpretation and the digital humanities, but it’s going to take me quite some time to reach this level of presentation. I thought I’d start small with a series of maps of Salem with one layer each: how many first period houses survived in say, 1890, houses of notable women of Salem from different periods, and houses (or locations) where enslaved people lived and worked before the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts in 1783. I decided to start with the latter topic because I thought it would be manageable, but it is not: there were far more enslaved people in colonial Salem than I thought—but this makes it all the more important that we place them.

I’m still working on my “data set”, having searched through newspapers (for both “for sale” and “runaway” advertisement, vital statistics, and the amazing 1754 census at the Phillips Library in ROWLEY (yes, I’ve been there; I will report later). The latter breaks down Salem’s residents into five categories: “rateable”, males under 16, females, widows, and negroes, and according to its survey, there were 3462 people in Salem in 1754, of which 123 were African-Americans. The word “slave” is never used; only servant. There are discrepancies between this survey, the advertisements, and the vital statistics, so I’m not sure how I’m going to be able to come up with an absolutely accurate number: this might have to evolve into a collective or crowd-sourced project. I’ve identified some of the larger slave-owning families though: an analysis of their papers (most are also in the Phillips) would undoubtedly reveal more information

All Essex Gazette

Enquire of the Printer. Runaway slave advertisements are very detailed; for sale notices less so. It’s almost as if people don’t want to give their names out, with some notable exceptions, like Captain David Britton, who was definitely more than personally invested in this trade. The map will require me to place the enslavers and the enslaved, but I don’t have much information on Britton: all I’ve found so far is a reference in Phyllis Whitman Hunter’s Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World. Massachusetts Merchants, 1670-1780 to his membership in a Salem club called “The Civil Society” which met at a local inn on Tuesdays and Fridays ” for friendship and conversation”. There were club rules against cursing and unrefined behavior, but apparently not against slave-trading.

Boston Evening Post and Essex Gazette

Once you start researching this topic, it shapes how you look at your environment. I’m sure people in the South are used to this, but not people in New England. There were enslaved people in the House of the Seven Gables, and the very wealthy merchant Aaron Waite, whose long partnership with Jerathmiel Pierce has inspired the naming of Salem Maritime’s gift shop, enslaved at least one person, named Pompey. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s great-grandfather Jonathan Phelps, let out both his blacksmith shop and his “excellent workman” in 1773. Several enslaved men were compelled to work for their master Samuel Barnard in the Ropes Mansion, and he also loaned them out to his nephew way out in Deerfield. Richard Derby owned at least one slave, as did William Browne, Jonathan Clarke, Daniel King, Edward Kitchen, Josiah Orne, William Pynchon, and Bezaleel Toppan, and many more residents of mid-eighteenth-century Salem, both wealthy merchants and less conspicuous craftsmen. The fabulously wealthy Samuel Gardner (1712-1769), whose house was located on the corner of Essex and Crombie Streets and whose many possessions are easy to find in auction archives and museum collections, listed several enslaved men among his possessions in his will: he left his “Negro boy Titus, as a servant for life” to his “beloved wife Elizabeth”, but freed a man named Isaac, adding the provision that if Isaac was “unable to support himself, that he be supported by my sons George, Weld, and Henry, in equal shares…..so as to free the Town of Salem from any charge”.

Samuel Gardner’s sugar box, collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

24 Comments | tags: Architecture, Colonial Salem, Decorative Arts, Digital History, ephemera, House of the Seven Gables, maps, Newspapers, Peabody Essex Museum, Ropes Mansion, Salem Maritime National Historic Site, Slavery | posted in History, Salem

January 22, 2019

I Miss the Assembly House

By daseger

I miss the Assembly House, a Georgian structure on Federal Street built as an assembly house in 1782 and transformed by Samuel McIntire into a more elaborate residence in the next decade: its proper name is the Cotting-Smith Assembly House (although it was charmingly called the “old Assembly House” after Hamilton Hall was built in 1805) and it was donated to the Essex Institute in 1965, the last building to be added to the Institute’s collection of historic houses, I believe. Of course the house still exists–I can see it at any time–but it has changed from when I first knew it: it has lost all of its trees–and its life. It is still, dark, and stark. It’s a shadow of its former self, or a ghost.

assembly house

assembly house 1926

assembly house howell-painting-1920-assembly-house mfa

assembly house cornell 8c73ca74-4027-453e-be51-e31e2437d593_size4

assembly house drawing hne best The Cotting-Smith Assembly House yesterday afternoon and in 1926, 1920 (in a painting by Felicie Ward Howell, collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), c. 1910 (Cornell) and an undated drawing (Historic New England).

I know, houses are not sentient beings as friends and family often tell me. But the Assembly House looks sad and it makes me sad to look at it, as I remember many happy times there in the 1990s, both before and after the Essex Institute and its houses were absorbed into the Peabody Essex Museum. I remember: teas, two baby showers, several anniversary dinners, a graduation party, a cooking class (???), coffees for candidates for local office—it seemed as if we were in there quite a lot! I remember feeling that the house was rather homey, despite its elegant interior details. I remember sitting on the back stairs talking to two friends who are no longer alive. I remember being wowed by the front staircase—with its second-floor landing and pedimented door—every time I saw it. But all these memories are from a long time ago, at least 20 years. I miss all of the Essex Institute/PEM houses, with the exception of the Ropes Mansion which was restored and reopened a few years ago. (Actually what I really miss is the Essex Institute, but that statement will always produce eye-rolls among those who believe that the Peabody Essex Museum rescued both the Institute and the Peabody Museum. This may be true–but it’s hard not to notice those dark stretches of Essex—and Federal—Streets).

assembly house hne

assembly house stairwell

assembly house hne 3

assembly house la sunday times aug 8 1926 assembly house bg 1963

assembly house bg 1985 Photographs of the Cotting-Smith Assembly House interior, Historic New England; Los Angeles Time, 1926; Boston Globe, 1963 and 1985.

The house where Lafayette danced in 1784 and Washington dined in 1789 and Susan Coolidge (above) came out and many other people celebrated weddings, anniversaries, and simply lived their lives was “restored, refurbished, and remembered” according to the 1985 story in the Boston Globe above but seems largely forgotten these days. It was celebrated across the country in 1926 as Salem marked its 300th anniversary, but seems likely to be overlooked as the city marks its 400th.