Tag Archives: Old Salem Houses

November 15, 2023

Before, During and After the Revolution

By daseger

I have been thinking about Salem during the American Revolution quite a bit over the past few months. It’s yet another era in Salem’s history which is tragically under-represented, and we’re going to try to correct that with our forthcoming book. We have one whole chapter on the Revolution, and a shorter piece on privateers, but Salem really deserves an entire book on its revolutionary role. And why our city has a “real pirates” of Cape Cod museum and no exhibition on privateers when Salem supplied more sailors and ships than any other American port remains inexplicable to me. In any case, our chapter on the Revolution, written by Hans Schwartz, is really interesting: his thesis is that the Revolution was revolutionary for Salem, which sounds simplistic but is not. He examines the social changes in Salem during and after the Revolution, using houses and neighborhoods as one way to illustrate transitions. I didn’t agree with all of his analysis (which is presumptuous of me since he knows far more about this era than I do, but I guess editors need to be presumptuous), but it certainly got me thinking about houses built in Salem in the Revolutionary era. I decided to take a little tour of before, during and after. Federal Street seemed the best place to start.

The first three houses illustrate a pre-revolutionary style: two-story boxes, square or rectangular. They get additions and embellishments later on, but they are stalwart, well-built houses from the pre-Revolutionary era. They make me wonder: what were their builders thinking? Oh, this will all blow over? Obviously building a house is an expression of hope and confidence, or maybe I’m just projecting too much of a modern mindset. And when the war is not quite over, we start to see the Salem Federals built: larger three-story buildings that just exude confidence—we’re winning (lots of houses built in 1782, including the Peirce-Nichols House below) or we’ve won.

Does style follow politics? I’m just not certain: I think fashion might, but architecture? Most of the characteristic Federals for which Salem is famous were built at the beginning of the nineteenth century, not the tail end of the eighteenth. And if you widen your search for Revolutionary-era houses to all of downtown Salem, an architectural conservatism is immediately apparent: the first house below, on Turner Street, was built in 1771, but it’s similiar to the two yellow houses off the Common and Derby Street built ten and twenty years later. And before the Revolution, before the laying out of Chestnut Street in 1805 really, there is no housing segregation, so we are left with an interesting mix of architectural styles: so very evident along Essex and Derby Streets.

Building in 1779-1780: now that’s confidence. Elias Hasket and Derby began construction on Salem’s Maritime’s Hawkes House in the latter year, as their family had outgrown the Derby House next door.

I’m off to Scotland on Friday so no posts for a few weeks: “see” you after Thanksgiving! In the meantime, if you’re interested in Salem architecture, tickets for Historic Salem’s Christmas in Salem tour on December 2-3, featuring houses in the Salem Common neighborhood, are available here.

2 Comments | tags: American Revolution, Architecture, Christmas in Salem, Federal Street, Historic Salem Inc., Old Salem Houses, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem Maritime National Historic Site | posted in Architecture, Salem

July 26, 2022

An Enigmatic Etcher

By daseger

I wanted to share some examples of the work of the Salem artist George F. White, Jr., better known as George Merwanjee White (1849-1915), but I wish I could also share more details about his life. He’s a bit mysterious, particularly his chosen middle name, Merwanjee, a notable Parsi name. He was the proverbial “son of a Salem ship captain” whose most well-known works are quite local in focus, yet there is evidence that he also traveled widely, in both Europe and India. White’s father, George F. White Sr., made many voyages to the Indian Ocean for shipowners from Salem, Boston, and even New York, so perhaps his son might have accompanied him and was thus exposed to Indian influences, but this is complete conjecture on my part. In any case, by the time White Jr. married at the age of 27 he had shed the “F.” and acquired the “Merwanjee” and that is how he was known throughout his life. George M. White is recognized as part of an “Etching Revival” in Boston and Salem,, a movement which began in the last two decades of the nineteenth century in the latter city, exemplified by the little-known artists Harriet Frances Osborne and White and the more well-known Frank Benson. In addition to his etchings, White produced oil and watercolor paintings and was also recognized as a gifted producer of bookplates, but architectural etchings and drawings seem to be his preferred genre. There is a beautiful portfolio of his images of old Salem houses published by subsciption in 1886 entitled Etchings of Old Houses and Places of Interest in and about Salem which has been digitized for the “Peabody Essex Museum Publications” at the Internet Archive, and below are some of my favorite views. First, the process of production, followed by what was then generally known as the “Roger Williams House” and now the “Witch House,” the Philip English Mansion, the “Old Bakery” on St. Peter Street, later to be moved and renamed the John Ward House at the Essex Institute, the seventeenth-century survivor Narbonne and Pickering Houses, the lost Lewis Hunt and Richard Prince Houses, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s birthplace in its original location on Union Street.

White’s images are of both old Salem houses—emerging landmarks—which had survived the dynamic nineteenth century (or most of it) as well as fabled houses which had not, thus expressing the beginnings of a preservation conciousness which is also evident in the similar sketches of Edwin Whitefield’s Homes of our Forefathers series, which was published just about the same time. Whitefield is a bit more romantic; White a bit more realistic. White wants to show and tell us what was special about the English, Hunt, and Prince Houses, and he’s wistful about the “picturesque” past: this is a word he applies to both the lost Prince House and the “living” Pickering House, the exterior of which was “fashioned” in the picturesque style of a bygone age in the 1840s. You can’t help but feel that modernity is encroaching.

Heliotype prints from George Merwanjee White’s Etchings of Old Houses and Places of Interest in and about Salem, Limited Edition, 1886.