Tag Archives: Privateering

June 29, 2026

Salem 250: Revolutionary Residences

By daseger

So many towns around us have had house and walking tours featuring houses connected to prominent patriots for this big anniversary year, but not Salem. It’s not surprising. The Witch Trials are an eclipse that darkens so much of our city’s history, and Salem’s myriad roles in the Revolution have been relatively ignored for the last century or so, not only by locals but also by academic historians. For overviews, there are some great journal articles, and now a book, by Richard J. Morris, and we made our author, Hans Schwartz, compress the entire Revolution (as well as Salem’s role as pre-revolutionary provincial capital) into a 5,000-word chapter in Salem’s Centuries. There are references to Salem’s pre-revolutionary resistance in several general texts on the Revolution, and an entire volume on Leslie’s Retreat by Peter Hoffer. Scholars cannot ignore the fact that Salem was a major, if not the major privateering port, so there’s some good coverage there. But that’s about it, and very little of this scholarship has impacted Salem’s public history, with the notable exception of the annual reenactments of Leslie’s Retreat. My deep dive into Salem history over the past few years has convinced me that the Revolution is the era of opportunity for Salem historians and I hope they step up! There are many stories which have yet to be told. In the meantime, however, I put together my own Revolutionary house tour, designed to highlight both prominent and not-so-prominent Salem patriots—and architecture, of course. This is by no means exhaustive, just a start really.

Several successful privateers became even more successful merchants after the Revolution, and their houses have always been notable, so I’ll start with the Derby Street houses of Captains Simon Forrester and Edward Allen. Forrester is a storied privateer/merchant, and not only because he emigrated from Ireland on Daniel Hawthorne’s ship, married the captain’s daughter, and thus was connected to Nathaniel Hawthorne as “Old Simon Forrester.” The wealth that he attained both during and after the Revolution add to the story, as does his drinking, about which some of his memorialists get a bit defensive. But he commanded or had interests in 7 privateers during the Revolution, beginning with the very successful Rover. I’ve always thought that his house, at 188 Derby Street, is in the perfect location overlooking Salem Harbor. Further down the street and on the other side at #125 is the Capt. Edward Allen house, built by the commander of the South Carolina naval brigantine Comet: presumably he was rewarded with that command after bringing Charleston news of the Battles of Lexington and Concord in his Salem ship Industry. Both the Continental Congress and individual states commissioned naval ships during the Revolution, and Massachusetts was a center of recruitment for both. While I was in the Derby Street neighborhood, I searched for the house of the Lt. Colonel Samuel Carlton, my candidate for Salem’s most illustrious Revolutionary warrior. Carlton created his own company right after Bunker Hill, and was with Washington at Valley Forge. There, he wrote letters documenting the suffering of the troops; indeed he offers the most poignant characterizations of the suffering shoeless soldiers of Valley Forge. There, he suffered himself, so much so that he had to leave service and was paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, the Reverend William Bentley wrote that no man endured so much with greater patience upon his death. Carlton has a lovely gravestone in Howard Street Cemetery, but he deserves more: he definitely deserves his own post, an article, a book, a memorial. I couldn’t even find his house: Bentley refers to it as located on Union Street, and a genealogical account describes it as “three stories with narrow eaves,” so #s 8 1/2 and 22 are my best candidates, but it may be gone.

When “revolutionary remembrance” started in the 1820s and 1830s, the most famous Salem veterans were Timothy Pickering, Stephen Abbot and Jesse Smith. Pickering was successively a Colonel, Adjutant General and Quartermaster General during the Revolution, and Secretary of War and State afterwards, so his prominence made his family’s first-period house Salem’s key revolutionary touchstone and I think it remains so. Abbot served as a captain in several companies of the Massachusetts 15th Regiment from the beginning of the revolution through 1780, and founded Salem’s 2nd Corps of Cadets after the war, and was also appointed a major general in the Second Division of the Massachusetts Militia. President Washington visited both the Pickering and Abbot houses when he came to Salem in 1789, but Abbot’s house is long gone, from at least 1912, when its remains were incorporated into a Chestnut Street carriage house. Jesse Smith (1756-1844) was not a Salem native or soldier, but he moved to this town of opportunity in the later years of the Revolution, and really became famous for being a veteran decades later. He was at Lexington and Concord, and Bunker Hill, Brandywine, Germantown and Monmouth, after which he became a member of General Washington’s prestigious Life Guards. He became a shipmaster in Salem after the war, and because of both his service and longevity, lived to see and represent Salem in a series of Revolutionary commemorations. He was not a wealthy man, but a prominent one, and while he lived out his last days boarding at 14 Beckford Street (third image below), his fellow citizens saw fit to erect an elaborate monument to him upon his death, with inscriptions of his service and a pillar topped by George Washington’s bust (which has since disappeared) in Salem’s newest and most fashionable cemetery, Harmony Grove.

Funerary monument of Jesse Smith, Harmony Grove Cemetery, c. 1890s, Frank Cousins Collection of Glass Plate Negatives, Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum, via Digital Commonwealth.

Next up, we have more humble “soldiers of the Massachusetts line”: you can find a concentration of their houses along Federal and River streets–in perfect proximity for a walking tour!

First up is this wonderful house at 114 Federal Street built in the last year of the Revolution by Colonel John Page. Page was a Marblehead native who signed up for John Glover’s regiment right after Lexington and Concord. He served for a year, then came back to Massachusetts and moved to Salem, where he become Colonel of the Militia. In that role, he volunteered for service in Samuel Flagg’s Company at the Battle of Rhode Island, the first joint military operation between American and French forces, in August of 1778. The next house is the rare double back-to-back Federal built by the famous Sanderson brothers, among Salem’s most famous and productive cabinent makers. Neither Elijah or Jacob were soldiers, but they were Lexington natives who were very much there during the Battles of Lexington and Concord, both in terms of engagment and testimony, so their house needs to be on a Revolutionary residence tour. Across the way, I’d love to include another post-revolutionary house (Salem experienced a major building boom in the 1780s and 1790s, largely because of privateering—compare to Marblehead!) built by Joseph Felt, but I can’t quite confirm that the builder/dweller was the same Joseph Felt who served in Capts. Benjamin Ward Jr.’s and Miles Greenwood’s Companies in 1776-1777. Pinning down soldiers is difficult: we have digitized service, pension, and service records, but they contain ommissions and contradictions (and there are a lot of Felts.) The last house in the group below, at 175 Federal Street, was most definitely the dwelling of Joshua Cross, who served in Major-General Charles Lee’s Life Guard under the command of the heroic Benjamin Gould from Topsfield.

Circling back to adjacent River Street, there are the houses of Stephen Driver at #18 and John Chandler at #7. According to their pension applications, Driver was a corporal in two companies, Capt. Addison Richard’s and Capt. Joseph Swasey’s, from 1775-1777, and Chandler served as 2nd Lieutenant in John Crane’s and Capt. Drury’s companies in Henry Knox’s Regiment over a slightly shorter period. I thought Chandler might have been part of the Knox Artillery Train, but Crane (another super hero) stayed near Boston. All of these guys (including Knox) were in their twenties, and I am grateful for their service as well as these material reminders.

3 Comments | tags: America 250, American Revolution, Architecture, Commemorations, Fourth of July, Pickering House, Privateering, public history, Walking Tours | posted in Architecture, Historic Trails, History, Salem

April 3, 2021

The Privateer’s House

By daseger

On this very day in 1776, the Continental Congress authorized private vessels commissioned with “Letters of Marque and Reprisal” to “make captures of British Vessels and Cargoes” and Salem’s shipowners and shipmasters responded enthusiastically: 158 privateering vessels originated from Salem during the Revolution, capturing 458 prizes and the largest prize tonnage of any single American port. It seems appropriate to feature what once was the home of a particular (and particularly active) privateer today: a structure that long stood on Lynde Street downtown and is now in the process of being “transformed” into a much enlarged building in a Georgian-esque style, complete with a built-in garage. I don’t know how much is left of the James Barr House, actually, but a brief history of its most celebrated occupant and record of its evolution are below.

James Barr was born several years before his father, also named James, built the family homestead at 25 Lynde Street, but he spent most of his childhood and adulthood in the house and died in it in 1848, at age 93. His was a full and long life, on sea and on land. Fortunately we have a wonderful and accessible source: his grandson James Barr Curwen published Barr’s “Reminiscences,” including his Revolutionary War commissions, in the Historical Collections of the Essex Institute in 1890 (Volume 27). Barr spent the war in service: on the Black Snake as First Lieutenant in 1777 and as Captain of the Oliver Cromwell, the Rover, and the Montgomery thereafter. He took prizes and was taken prisoner: he spent several months onboard the infamous British prison ship Jersey in New York Harbor and was also transported by the British to Barbados: nevertheless he always seemed to be able to extricate himself and find another ship. Unfortunately his grandson includes more details about the terms of his commissions than his escapes. After the war, Barr became a merchant mariner in partnership with his brother John: their copper-bottomed ship Hope was apparently one of the speediest Salem ships to the East Indies. Mr. Curwen assesses his grandfather’s retirement as “quiet”: “in early days he was a staunch Federalist and later a Whig, but he never took a conspicuous part in politics. He lived a strictly honest and conscientious life and died respected by all who know him at the age of ninety-three years, four months, twenty-one days.” James Barr’s “Reminiscences” also include a portrait commissioned in Leghorn for East India Hall and a very rare photograph of the old captain in the year before his death. Photographs of Revolutionary-war veterans have been the subject of several studies over the past few years and I’m not sure this particular one is well-known: what a record!

In another town, a famous privateer’s house might be preserved and celebrated: but that’s not the Salem way. The Barr house, built on the storied site of Salem’s first fort in 1759, left the family’s possession in the early twentieth century and its downtown location rendered it vulnerable to commercial and multi-residential use. Much of Salem’s downtown is under the jurisdiction of the Salem Redevelopment Authority (SRA) rather than the Salem Historical Commission: those identifying adjectives are apt. Here is the visual evolution of the house over more than a century: from Curwen ownership in the 1890s (captured in Frank Cousins photographs from the Phillips Library and Digital Commonwealth) to a MACRIS photograph from 2016, to the day it lost its gambrel roof last week, to this morning, and a rendering of its completed form encompassing however many condominiums were approved by the SRA.

And here’s the description from the Massachusetts Historical Commission’s 2016 MACRIS inventory by Neil Larson and Walter R. Wheeler: The Barr house is one of a diminishing number of mid-18th century vernacular wood frame dwellings in Salem. Although it has experienced minor alterations and significant additions over time, the original outline of the dwelling remains clearly readable; it retains its original form, feeling and materials, and continues to embody the distinctive characteristics of a mid-18th century side passage gambrel-roofed dwelling.