Tag Archives: Photography

December 3, 2012

First Snow

By daseger

On Saturday we had our first snow here in Salem; by Sunday it was gone.  I was very happy to see it and hope to see more:  last year, we had no snow in the winter, not a flake. There was the Halloween storm on my birthday (while a month or so ago my birthday fell on Superstorm Sandy, or vice-versa: what is the cosmos trying to tell me?)  So this year, I”d like a white winter:  not the huge, towering snowbanks of winters past, but just a little snow on the ground. Here are a few photographs of my garden and downtown, with barely a whisper on the ground.

First Snow 019

First Snow 011

First Snow 014

As you can see, where there was no grass, there was no snow. Not much of a display for New England, but I’m a little desperate as it has been a while. When I feel like waxing rhapsodic about snowflakes, I always conjure up the charming images from Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), but I think I’ve already done that once or twice on this blog.  So instead, I want to focus on another man, several centuries later, who was similarly obsessed with snowflakes:  Wilson Alwyn Bentley (1865-1931), a pioneer in photomicrography. Bentley was a self-taught farmer from Jericho, Vermont who developed a process by which snowflakes could be photographed before they melted; he captured over 5000 images, demonstrating (like Hooke before him) that no two snowflakes were alike. Bentley was so taken with the singular, fleeting beauty of snow crystals, that he strove to capture them forever, on film, and first did so in 1885. Just after his death, about half of his images were published in a book entitled Snow Crystals (1931) which was republished by Dover in 1962. You can also see many his images at sites maintained by the University of Wisconsin and the Jericho Historical Society, as well as a few other places. Apart from their scientific and photographic value, Bentley’s images are just simply beautiful. Washington photographer Theodor Horydczak was inspired by Bentley to create his own grouped snowflake images, but I think I prefer the singular sensations.

First Snow Bentley Camera

First Snow Bentley 1910

First Snow Wilson Alwyn Bentley 1910

First Snow LC

Wilson Alwyn Bentley with his special microscope/camera in Vermont; lantern slides of two of his captured crystals, c. 1910, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Theodor Horydczak photograph, 1920, Library of Congress.

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

November 27, 2012

Queen Anne and Napoleon III

By daseger

We spent Thanksgiving in Saratoga Springs, New York, a city that on first impressions is as “Victorian” as Salem is “Federal”. I wasn’t able to spend the entire long holiday weekend there (and I was sick most of the time I was there), so I didn’t go on a long architectural/photographic walking tour as is my typical inclination, but I did dash down North Broadway, which is lined with Gilded Era mansions, as well as a few downtown side streets. I’m going back for more soon. Even before the quick trip to Saratoga, I had been thinking about Victorian houses here in Salem, and how I’ve never really done justice to this broad category of architecture. There are so many subcategories and styles!  I’ve always been a bit confused about two in particular:  Queen Anne and Second Empire. Not the styles of these houses, which are easily recognizable with their towers, turrets, and mansard roofs, but the names:  how did these thoroughly American houses get named for the last Stuart monarch, who reigned in Britain a full 150 years before a “Queen Anne” house was built across the Atlantic, and the French Second Empire ruled by Napoleon III (which was at least contemporary with Second Empire houses here in America)?  These names seem to imply a cultural imperialism that is incompatible with the assertive American spirit of the later nineteenth century, but then again, I’m neither an American historian or an architectural one, so my impression could be incorrect.

Queen Anne (r. 1702-1714) in 1705 by Michael Dahl, and an carte-de-visite of Napoleon III (r. 1852-70), National Portrait Gallery, London.

I can understand the use of the term “Victorian” for nineteenth-century houses on both sides of the Atlantic, as Queen Victoria really dominated her long era, but Napoleon III was no Queen Victoria! I suppose the rebuilding of Paris–the cultural center of the world–in Second Empire style during his reign provides the general explanation for the use of that term over here. The use of “Queen Anne” remains a mystery to me, but here are a couple of Queen Anne houses:  the first one in Saratoga, the second in Salem. There are several great Queen Anne houses in Salem, mostly outside the city center, but this more compact example is just a few steps from the Common:  it seems to feature all the characteristic details of the style in a much smaller footprint than the grand Saratoga house. This is a house that even a Federal fan such as myself could love.

The Second Empire style was forged by the Haussman Plan, a comprehensive urban planning initiative in Paris commissioned by Napoleon III and administered by Georges-Eugène Haussmann between 1853 and 1870. Much of central “old” Paris was swept away and replaced by grand boulevards and squares lined with mansard-roofed and embellished multi-story buildings made of “sanitary” stone. The “haussmannization of Paris” was projected to the world via serial publications and French paintings, creating an international style.

Images of the new boulevards of Paris, 1850s-1870s, Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

When I walk down the streets of Salem, I see structures, small and large,  that seem to be inspired by the Second Empire style:  American translations in a “colonial” context. Lafayette Street gives off a “French” impression in more ways than one, and not far from the Queen Anne house, just off the Common, is a multi-family painted-brick house that comes close to the French standard, at least to my untrained eye. The Salem house that really reads Second Empire to me, however, is over on my side of town, on upper Essex Street.  Even though Bryant Tolles (in Architecture in Salem:  an Illustrated Guide,1983) refers to it as reflecting “French Academic and High Victorian Italianate” influences, the Putnam-Balch House, which was built at the height of the Second Empire style, always reads “Paris, 1870s” to me. This majestic mansion, somehow all the more extravagant because it is built of wood, really dominates the streetscape with its sheer presence:  it once served as an American Legion post and has recently been restored.

9 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in History, Houses, Salem

November 25, 2012

Cranberry Picking

By daseger

“…as why are Strawberries sweet and Cranberries sowre, there is no reason but the wonderfull worke of God that made them so…”.  John Eliot, the Puritan “Apostle to the Indians”, used the “American” name rather than the preferred English fenberry (variantly bear-berry and mosse-berry) in his 1647 treatise The Day-Breaking if not the Sun-Rising of the Gospell with the Indians in New-England, one of several seventeenth-century references to the sour little berry that was so common in Massachusetts. Along with corn, this was one native American crop that captured the attention of  the English early on–though most of their efforts seem to have been directed at transforming cranberries into something sweeter:  syrups, tarts, sauces.  They could not ignore a berry that ripened in the winter!

One last Thanksgiving weekend post on a fruit that remains one of Massachusetts’ few commercial crops, although we are no longer the country’s leading producer:  that title is now claimed by Wisconsin.  Still, there’s a major harvest every year starting in late September, and it’s a beautiful sight to see.  I just couldn’t make it down to the southeastern part of the state this busy semester, but here’s a great recent photograph of a bog at the A.D. Makepeace Company in Wareham, one of the state’s oldest producers.

Photo credit:  Charlie Mahoney for the Boston Globe; 1907 Makepeace Co. cranberry sign,Etsy.

The conditions of cranberry picking have changed a lot over the last century, for the better. Documentary photographers like Lewis Wickes Hine focused on the industrial exploitation of child and migrant labor in the early nineteenth century, and contemporary photographs of very small children, native Americans, and newly-arrived Europeans (in the case of southeastern Massachusetts, primarily Portuguese “bravas” from New Bedford, led by bog bosses called padrones) abound.

Portuguese cranberry pickers at the Eldridge Bog in Rochester, Massachusetts, and the “tenement” that housed them, September 1911, and a boy “scooper” at the Makepeace Bog. The caption of the last photograph reads: Gordon Peter, using scoop with metal teeth not covered. Said 10 years old. One of the smallest scoopers that we found. Usually scooping is done by adults. Been picking 3 years. Location: Makepeace near Wareham, Massachusetts. Lewis Wickes Hine, Library of Congress.

The pictures above contrast sharply with the recent photograph of the cranberry harvest at Makepeace, but also with artistic representations of cranberry picking in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Two paintings that fall on either side of Hine’s photographs are Eastman Johnson’s Cranberry Pickers, Island of Nantucket (1880) and Provincetown artist Ross Moffett’s circa 1930 Cranberry Pickers. Moffett’s modernistic representation of the workers in their spare Cape Cod context is a lot bleaker than Johnson’s more romantic image, but both artists seem to focus on the landscape at least as much as on the pickers.

Eastman Johnson, Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket, 1880, Timken Museum of Art, San Diego; Ross Moffett, Cranberry Pickers, c. 1927-30, Smithsonian American Art Museum.

6 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Culture, History

November 19, 2012

Fathers, Friends, Neighbors & Artists

By daseger

While the Peabody Essex Museum continues to mount blockbuster exhibitions, there are more intimate exhibits at smaller venues here in Salem. The Salem Athenaeum and the Kensington–Stobart Gallery are currently featuring shows that focus on relationships:  The Good Father (with some exceptions) is the Athenaeum’s Fall/Winter exhibition, and Artist Friends and Neighbors is on view at the Kensington-Stobart until December 2nd. Both exhibitions emphasize proximity, in different ways, and you can also get very close to the texts, images and artwork.

The Good Father was assembled by Elaine von Bruns, the “honorary” curator of a succession of Athenaeum exhibitions. A variety of fathers–from literary, artistic, and political realms, as well as the animal kingdom–are represented by both texts and images from the Athenaeum’s vast, venerable and diverse collection. There are early editions of Hawthorne and Melville on display as well as eulogies for the father or our country bound for the Athenaeum in 1800. Several classic illustrated editions are on view; though he was not a particularly good father, I particularly loved Fritz Eichenberg’s image of Heathcliff from the 1943 Random House edition of Wuthering Heights.

Good and bad fathers at the Salem Athenaeum:  Swedish artist Carl Larsson (1853-1919) and his daughter on the exhibit poster, pages from editions of Cheaper by the Dozen (1948), A.A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young (1924), Hamlet, and Wuthering Heights (1943).

For me, the Artists Friends and Neighbors exhibit  is a perfect blend of past and present inspirations and associations. Most of the exhibiting artists are friends of mine, and as the exhibition title implies, friends and neighbors to one another. An assemblage of work by Salem artists working today is also evocative of the circle of Salem artists who were friends and neighbors a century ago, many of which I’ve written about here:  Frank Benson, Philip Little, Ross Turner, Isaac Henry Caliga, Jesse Lewis Bridgman. It was quite the cultural milieu a century ago, and it is exciting to see echoes of this cumulative creativity now.  The curator of the exhibit, Jim McAllister, will be giving a gallery talk on this very topic on November 27. And quite apart from the historical inspiration, the exhibition is a lively display of very diverse talents and influences, with works in just about every medium from the participating artists:  Charlie Allen, Katy Bratun, David Decker, Julie Shaw Lutts, Barbara Burgess Maier, Trip Mason, and Racket Shreve. Whenever possible, click on the link so you can see these artists’ works for yourselves (or visit the gallery):  I couldn’t get images of everyone’s work and those images I did get do not do justice to the actual pieces.

Selections from Artist Friends & Neighbors:  Corpus Domini by Charlie Allen (oil on canvas); The Dictionary Series by Julie Shaw Lutts (encaustic collage); two very different fish by Katy Bratun; photographs by Trip Mason (please check out his portfolio here–photographs of photographs taken at night never come out very well!) and 81 Essex Street by Racket Shreve. I’ve included a photograph of the actual house for contrast.  Apologies to Mr. Decker and Ms. Maier–my pictures of their work were far too flashy.

Artist Friends and Neighbors, through December 2, Kensington-Stobart Gallery, 18 Washington Square West (in the Hawthorne Hotel), Salem, Massachusetts.

The Good Father, Salem Athenaeum, 337 Essex Street, Salem, Massachusetts.

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November 11, 2012

Aid and Comfort

By daseger

My family does not have a long list of veterans in its present or past, so Veterans Day has always been a bit abstract for me, or just the tail end of another long weekend.  I’m as patriotic as the next person, so I always try to think about war, service, and loss on the actual day, but my thoughts are not particularly personal, and consequently, not very heartfelt. I must admit that several Veterans Days have been “observed” by watching marathons of war films on Turner Classic Movies, or, even worse, going shopping!  This year, however, I am more thoughtful, because I am focused, finally, on my grandfather’s service during World War II.

My paternal grandfather, who died in 1996, was a physician who served as a lieutenant in the  U.S. Navy Medical Corps from 1943-45.  He was the medical officer on board the USS Taluga, which was hit by a kamikaze suicide plane attack in April of 1945, and also worked in a field hospital on the island of Okinawa. I don’t remember him talking about these experiences at great length; his identity was always more physician (and patriarch) than it was veteran.  And sadly, I don’t think I really every questioned him about it, in any detail.  We recently celebrated the 100th birthday of his wife, my grandmother, and while putting together a photographic presentation of her life, I came across several pictures of Pops in uniform, and finally started to focus on his service.  Too little, too late; Nana can answer some questions, and there are letters, but I really wish I had had conversations with my veteran while he was still alive.

Since I don’t have the particulars, I’ll be more general; it occurred to me that medical advances are one of the very few positive outcomes of war, both in the past and the present. Not only did physicians, nurses, and medics provide essential aid and comfort in the midst of war, what they learned about the treatment of battlefield injuries contributed cumulatively to the advance of medicine after the war. War and medicine have been inextricably linked, through the centuries, and most intensively in last century of  total war weaponry and tactics. So my focus for this Veterans Day is on those who healed those who fought.

We don’t have any pictures of my grandfather doing his work during the war, and he wasn’t a surgeon, but I think the picture of a wartime surgery in the Pacific theater is particularly poignant, as is the following one of nurses on their way home, for quite different reasons.

Two pictures from the National Archives:  “In an underground surgery room, behind the front lines on Bougainville, an American Army doctor operates on a U.S. soldier wounded by a Japanese sniper.” December 13, 1943; and   “Nurses of a field hospital who arrived in France via England and Egypt after three years service.” Parker, August 12, 1944. The 9th Field Hospital at Okinawa, 1944, National Library of Medicine.

I can’t imagine how the medical corps of World War I dealt with military innovations of this “great war”, the gas, machine guns and trench warfare for which they had no reference.  And then the aftermath:  the legions of amputees, disfigured, and disabled veterans who would require treatment, rehabilitation, and aid long after the war was over.  The interwar era saw unprecedented advances in medicine due to the military medical professionals who rose to these challenges. Military medicine came to benefit not only those who served, but also society as a whole.

Scenes from World War I and after, from the National Library of Medicine:  an American ambulance corps at work in France, typhoid vaccinations, and “above knee amputation with peg legs reconstruction class”, 1917-1919.

I could show you picture after picture of injured and mutilated veterans of World War I; their sacrifices were documented by the medical corps for the greater good.  Clearly the nature of the injuries sustained in the Great War was unprecedented but the inclination to learn from such suffering was not:  Civil War injuries were documented as well, by battlefield physicians who were no doubt overwhelmed by the circumstances they found themselves in, and after, by their colleagues who were attempting to learn from the recent past–and probably prepare for the future.

U.S. Sanitary Commission Hospital at Gettysburg, 1863, New York Public Library Digital Gallery; page from The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, 1861–65, United States Surgeon General’s Office, 1870-88:  from the Smithsonian Institution Libraries’ Digital Exhibition “Picturing Words:  the Power of Book Illustration”.

The history of military medicine certainly doesn’t begin with the Civil War; I could trace battlefield physicians back to the Renaissance and certainly there were countless, anonymous nurses on the sidelines over the ages.  But the futility of their efforts in the face of war is important to note:  more soldiers died of disease and battlefield surgeries than combat injuries until World War I. So I’m going to end with a physician who offered even more than his professional skills and expertise in service to his country:  Boston’s own Dr. Joseph Warren, who died fighting in the Battle of Bunker (Breed’s) Hill, galvanizing the will of his fellow patriots.

An illustration from Heisters Surgery (1768), National Library of Medicine; John Trumbull, The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill, 1786, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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October 28, 2012

Salem Common

By daseger

First off, it is Salem Common, not Salem Commons; the Common is not a suburban tract housing development. Those who refer to it as “Commons” are either not from Salem, or from New England (where commons are common), or are peddling something, such as the owners of the sausage stands and fried dough trucks who are allowed to set up residence on the Common during October.  I love commons (I’m using the plural here) and I think Salem has one of the prettiest in New England–but not in October.

Salem Common this October, and the same corner in an 1870s photograph by Salem photographers Peabody & Tilton (New York Public Library) and a turn-of-the-century postcard.

One of my favorite views of the Common is not a photograph, but a painting:  George Ropes’ Salem Common on Training Day (1808), which shows the local militia drilling on the green with townspeople looking on:  a window into the civic life of the new republic.  The Common has never been a pristine park but rather the center of varied activities: baseball, weddings, festivals, field days, concerts, ice-skating. A succession of playgrounds have been located on the Common, and now there’s a particularly nice one on the southeastern corner.  I think that most of the activities in the Common’s history, however, have benefited the public rather than private individuals. It is a common, after all.

George Ropes, Salem Common on Training Day (1808), Peabody Essex Museum; baseball on the Common in 1910, and the same perspective this past week.

I’ve seen other vehicles besides food trucks drive and park on the Common at this time of year, as if it were a parking lot. The sense of enclosed, protected, tranquil space in the midst of the city has been challenged for some time now, and not only in October, by the deteriorating condition of the circa 1850 cast iron fence.  The city is restoring the fence, in phases, but it’s an expensive undertaking. The Washington Arch is looking a little worse for wear too:  I’d like to think that the revenues from the food trucks are going towards these repairs in particular, and into a fund for the general maintenance of the Common in general.

Late nineteenth-century stereoviews show the Common with a more spare and formal look, no doubt, in part to the presence of Elm trees, always so striking in images from the past. Below are three images by the prolific Salem photographers Frank Cousins and G.K. Proctor (I’ve got an interesting post about the latter coming in the next few weeks) and an anonymous contemporary colleague.  The north side of the Common remains the most serene today; I imagine that this last photograph is also the last of our Fall color with this enormous storm bearing down on us.

Salem Common stereoviews by Frank Cousins, GK Proctor, and an anonymous photographer, New York Public Library Dennis Collection.

13 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in History, Salem

October 25, 2012

In Living Color

By daseger

The first picture below sums up Salem at this time of year:  a ghoulish figure in a shop window (with yellow crime scene tape) and the reflection of the beautiful Federal house across the street. October is a very vivid month, in more ways than one. With my general disdain for witchcraft tourism, I tend to focus on the more natural and architectural attributes of our city, but even I can be amused by clever Halloween displays–I like this one, even though it was hard to photograph. Not quite so subtle, but an easier vignette to capture on film (at least in its entirety) is the annual display in a residential alley off Derby Street:  tourists are there all day long in October.

When I was looking for pink houses the other day, I found lots of other colors as well, so this post is much less monochromatic.  The doors really popped; Salem does not seem to have any of the trendy yellow and chartreuse doors that have been much-featured in shelter magazines in the last few years, but nearly every other color is out there.  Here are just a few colorful doors, beginning with one of the most photographed entrances in the city, right across from the House of the Seven Gables.

Of course, the turning leaves are also a source of vibrant displays of color at this time of the year. You can’t really tell in a more urban environment, but it seems like the colors are particularly intense this year to me, and the trees are peaking at different times. A case in point is this pair of trees on Essex Street, one completely bare, the other just past peak. Many tree are still mostly green, quite late in the season. I love the leaves on the back of this weathered house by the water.

Now in what other city could you see a whirligig framed against onion domes?  This is the St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church, built in 1908 for immigrants from Poland and Russia who came to work in the leather factories of Salem and Peabody. It’s on Forrester Street, off Salem Common, but I took this shot while examining a garden one street over–hence the whirligig.

12 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Salem

October 19, 2012

Places, Past, Present

By daseger

I’ve been thinking about a short little article by BBC “History of the World” presenter Andrew Marr about the five most historical places in world history quite a bit since I came across it a few days ago. I love lists, I love history, understanding and developing a strong sense of place has always been important to me (it’s one of the major themes of this blog), and I teach world history:  Marr has my rapt attention!

His choices are based on a world history perspective, but I think one of his historical places betrays his British bias, or maybe not:  I’ll discuss below. Here are his picks:

1. The Great Rift Valley in eastern Africa: where human civilization first emerged. A pretty predictable choice, and certainly one that is difficult to contest!

2. The Yellow River:  China’s “mother river”, where its first civilization emerged.  I’m not sure why Marr is privileging China above other world civilizations:  he does not have Mesopotamia, the western “cradle of civilization” on his list.

3. Athens, Greece:  symbol of the Classical Age. I suppose this is Marr’s concession to ancient western civilization, and I think he feels sorry for present-day Greece.  But it’s another obvious choice:  rational philosophy, democracy, theater, architecture, the Olympics–I could go on.

Ok, now we take a huge chronological jump:  from the 5th century BC to the eighteenth century. There is no amazingly significant place which has medieval (or as the world historians say, post-classical) relevance?  This seems like a very Renaissance view.

4. Berkeley, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom:  the birthplace of Dr. Edward Jenner (1749-1823), who discovered the vaccination for smallpox.  This is the only British place on the list (not London!) and Marr is a presenter for the BBC, so I thought it was a rather biased choice, but now I’m not so sure.  Smallpox was a terrible disease, which killed millions of people in the New World and remained an endemic plague in the Old, and Jenner’s vaccination was an amazing empirical breakthrough.  I think smallpox is the only disease in world history which has been completely eradicated, and that makes Jenner a towering figure both in the history of medicine and the history of civilization. Nevertheless, I think one of the five most important places in world history has to be more than the birthplace of just one person, however great he or she was.

5. Los Alamos, New Mexico, United States of America:  birthplace of the atomic bomb and the Atomic Age.  A great choice:  it’s sad that this is the American contribution to the list, but there you are. If you only have five places to choose of relevance in world history, you’ve got to go with the most consequential.

This is a great list but I think there are a few places I would change.  It’s so difficult to choose, because the list is short and the history is long–and complex.  Obviously there are countless historical places; in fact, every place is historical.  Choosing just five places is an exercise in frustration, but also one in prioritization, which is always useful. On my list, the Yellow River would be replaced by a city along the Silk Road that connected China and the Middle East and disseminated so many Chinese innovations, for better or for worse:  textiles, gunpowder, printing, the compass.  Maybe Samarkand or Bukhara, both currently in Uzbekistan, but symbolizing the West’s desire to obtain the knowledge and goods of the East.

Samarkand, Uzbekistan:  Silk Road “Port”.

I considered Istanbul, Venice, and Rome, ports along the western African “slave coast”, and New York, but dismissed them all on relative criteria–basically my western bias.  But I cannot dismiss Jerusalem, one of the oldest cities in the world and a holy place for three world religions.  In my mind, there is no doubt that Jerusalem is one of the most important places in world history, so at least one of Marr’s places has got to go. What do you think?

Jerusalem

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

October 14, 2012

Which Witch House?

By daseger

One reason that I’ve been an ardent preservationist for most of my life is my belief that buildings hold extraordinary power–even more power, I think, than unbuilt spaces, no matter how beautiful. I can’t imagine a better example than Salem’s “Witch House” (more formally and accurately known as the Jonathan Corwin House), a structure that represents both the most tangible connection to the Witch Trials of 1692 as well as a symbol (and vessel) of Salem’s modern transformation into the “Witch City”. The Witch House seems to reflect the evolving aspirations and perceptions of the city that surrounds it:  for much of the nineteenth century, it was referred to as the “Roger Williams House”, a designation that tied it to the seventeenth-century minister who left intolerant Salem for free Rhode Island rather than the witch-trial Judge Corwin from a generation later. Freedom of conscience versus irrational jurisprudence.

The Witch House today and in an 1886 card by Edwin Whitefield, author/illustrator of Homes of our Forefathers.  Whitefield’s images seems to be based on that of Samuel Bartoll’s 1819 painting, in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum.

The early architectural history of the Witch House is a bit mysterious (a study has been commissioned by the city, but I haven’t seen the results yet), but most experts believe that it dates from much later in the seventeenth century than Roger Williams’ time in Salem. All of the above images, those from the nineteenth century and just yesterday, might be idealized images of this fabled house. We do know that Jonathan Corwin acquired a structure in this location in 1675, and that he served on the Court of Oyer and Terminer which tried the accused “witches” of 1692. That fact alone seems sufficient for the house’s transformation into the “Witch House” much later, after it left the possession of the Corwin family in the mid-nineteenth century. More than anyone, the person responsible for this identification was George Farrington, an entrepreneurial Salem apothecary who definitely emphasized the witchcraft (rather than Williams) associations of his new place of business:  Farrington grafted a box-like shop onto the house and sold medicines in bottles with a flying witch insignia, anticipating the marketing strategies of Daniel Low decades later and many Salem businesses today. He also published images of  the “old witch house”, effectively establishing that identity.

The Witch House in the mid-nineteenth century:  very influential photographs by Frank Cousins of the front and rear of the house just prior to Farrington’s purchase in 1856 (the house had acquired a gambrel roof in the mid-eighteenth century), a Deloss Barnum photograph from the 1860s, after Farrington’s pharmacy had been attached to the house, an “Old Witch House” stereoview published by Farrington, and a Farrington medicine bottle from the 1880s as pictured in a recent ebay auction.  All photographs from the Robert Dennis Collection, New York Public Library.

For nearly a century, the Witch House was configured as a strange (maybe not for Salem) combination of business and tourist attraction and thousands (maybe more) of postcards were issued, fixing and broadcasting its identity. In the decades before and after World War I, when Daniel Low was marketing its witch spoon and other witch wares nationally, there seems to have been a marked increase in the number and variety of Witch House cards. There are also some interesting private photographs of the house from this era, confirming its conspicuous place in Salem’s urban streetscape.

Two photographs of the Witch House in the 1890s from the Schlesinger Library at Harvard, and postcards from 1900, 1901, 1906, 1908, 1911 & 1922.  Just a random sampling of many on the market!

The 1940s was a decade of transformation for the Witch House, when it came to represent preservation–but also profits: change and continuity. With the planned widening of North Street, a main thoroughfare in and out of Salem, the house was threatened, and its survival (along with that of the adjacent Bowditch House) became the rallying cry for the formation of  Historic Salem, Incorporated and its subsequent restoration under the direction of Boston architect Gordon Robb (who had worked on Colonial Williamsburg as well as another famous Salem seventeenth-century structure, the Pickering House). Moved to a more secure northwestern position on its lot, its shop detached and gables rebuilt, the Witch House was opened to the public in 1948 by the City of Salem, and it has been doing steady business ever since.

The Witch House in 1940 (HABS photograph by Frank Branzetti, Library of Congress), 1945 & 1948.

For more on the evolving perception, and structural history of the Witch House, see Salem’s Witch House:  a Touchstone to Antiquity (The History Press, 2012) by Salem architectural historian John Goff.

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in History, Houses, Salem

October 4, 2012

Great Debates

By daseger

I became a little restless during last night’s debate and started thinking about other debates, past debates, great debates.  While last night was occasionally (and surprisingly) informative, in general I think we’ve turned our political debates into forums over the past few decades and wish we could return to the days of back-and-forth dialogues in which both sides elucidate rather than just score points. When we think of great debates, we think of Nixon and Kennedy, Lincoln and Douglas, and Williams Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow in the Scopes Monkey Trial (or Frederic March and Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind), but I think I can dig deeper and go back further.

First, two interesting images of Richard Nixon, literally clashing with John Kennedy in the 1960 televised debate, and pointing at Nikita Krushchev in the “Kitchen Debate” of 1959.

Photography credits:  Thomas Dworzak/Magnum Photos; Elliott Erwitt/ARTstor Slide Gallery.

Both were apparently riveting debates, for different reasons.  The Kitchen Debate fascinates me:  a really big debate—communism versus capitalism–spontaneous, unmoderated, captured on film and and broadcast to the world!  And just a generation earlier, the very existence of capitalism, democracy and nearly every aspect of western culture was debated, as these WPA posters from the later 1930s illustrate. Perhaps the 1938 reenactment of the Lincoln-Douglas debates served as a reminder that this was not the only generation that was dealing with adversity.

WPA Posters from 1936-40, Library of Congress.

Think about all the amazing debates that happened in the decade or so before the Civil War:  over slavery and its extension, states’ rights, and the very survival of the United States.  Some erupted into violence; all were ultimately unsuccessful in bringing about a peaceful solution, despite all those Compromises.

An engraving of the Senate by Robert Whitechurch at the time of the Compromise of 1850:  Senator Henry Clay is addressing the senators, with Daniel Webster seated to the left of Clay and John C. Calhoun seated to the left of the Speaker’s Chair.  Library of Congress.  The Compromise did not hold: “Southern Chivalry” shows South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks caning Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner in the Senate Chamber.

There were so many great debates held in the British Parliament over its long history it is difficult to choose just a few highlights:  debates over such seemingly insignificant issues as the adultery accusations leveled at Queen Caroline by George IV in 1820 and such major ones as the slave trade, suffrage, and many conflicts with the Crown. Of course there is a long history of debate outside the walls of Parliament as well, and while the arguments of the Radicals in the later eighteenth century are impressive, they were anticipated by those of the Levellers during the English Revolution. King Charles had been defeated by Parliament’s New Model Army, and there was an unprecedented opportunity for real political change, or at least the discussion of real political change. At the famous Putney Debates of 1647, Colonel Thomas Rainsborough of the New Model Army expressed a democratic argument that was way before its time: for really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, Sir, I think it‘s clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under…”  Now this was the beginning of a truly great debate!

The House of Commons, 1793-94 by Karl Anton Hickel, National Portrait Gallery, London; woodcut illustration of the Putney Debates, 1647.

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