I always tell my students forget dates, you can always look them up, dates are a terrible way to learn history, but sometimes dates just stand out: 1348, 1517, 1776, 1789, 1914. The other day I was engaged in some endnote-editing and somehow, the date 1799 just started jumping out at me: it suddently seemed like the most important date in Salem’s history! Why? A lot of building mostly: of two of the most spectacular Derby houses and Salem’s first federal frigate, the Essex. But there were other notable things that happened in that year too: the foundation of the East India Marine Society for one, and the renaming of Salem’s long-ignored seventeenth-century fortification, Fort Pickering, for another. 1799 was a big year for Salem, then the eighth largest “city” in the United States with a population of over 9000. Its commercial vitality was already well-established, but it aquired a new civic reputation with the construction-by-subscription of the Frigate Essex for the federal government. The most wonderful book sheds light on the whole commission/subscription/construction process: Philip Chadwick Foster Smith’s The frigate Essex papers : building the Salem frigate, 1798-1799 (1974): I wouldn’t presume to add to it! I will, however, include a couple of its maps. Salem had terrible flooding last weekend and I think we need to remember that we live in an infilled-city, and that a river runs through it.
The US Frigate Essex, built in Salem by Salem residents.
Joseph Howard, watercolor of the Essex, after 1799, Peabody Essex Museum.
Maps from Philip Chadwick Foster Smith’s The Frigate Essex Papers.
Not one but TWO Derby houses built in 1799, with Bulfinch & McIntire designs.
The Ezekiel Hersey Derby House and the Elias Hasket Derby Mansion, one which existed long enough to be “denatured” into a commercial building and the other very short-lived, as its commissioner, the wealthy merchant Elias Hasket Derby, died in the same year that it was built: 1799. Think about the Salem in which these two structures were raised: talk about McMansions! These were conspicuous structures: Chestnut Street was at least five years into the future.
These were houses of a son and father of Salem’s first family. I’m not sure how long Ezekiel, the fifth child of Elias Hasket Derby, lived in his elegant house, one of just a few in Salem to be designed by Charles Bulfinch (with interior architectural details by Samuel McIntire). He was more focused on agricultural pursuits and the development of south Salem, where he had a sprawling farm. His town house stood long enough to be stripped, as happened to so many notable houses, and architectural historian Fiske Kimball established a Derby Room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art with its architectural features.
Plans and photos of the Ezekiel Hersey Derby House, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum; the Derby Room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Elias’s mansion did not stand long enough to be “denatured” (which certainly would have happened in its central location, maybe its short life was a blessing) or photographed, but there are sketches and plans in the PEM’s Phillips Library. It gave way to the present-day Derby Square.
Captain Devereux opens up trade with Japan!
It is decidedly NOT true that Commodore Perry opened up trade with Japan in 1853; rather, Captain John Devereux of Salem and the Boston ship Franklin did so in 1799. The Dutch had had a monopoly on western trade with Japan since the early 17th century, primarily because they did not proselytize like their European counterparts during the Reformation. Two centuries later, they licensed American ships to go to their trading post on Deshima Island just off the port of Nagasaki, including the Franklin in 1799 and the Salem ship Margaret in 1801. Devereux brought Japanese goods back to Salem, and so did the captain of the Margaret, Samuel Derby. The former’s account book in the Phillips Library lists “128 raincoats” purchased there, as well as several items of “lacked” (lacquered) furniture: the Peabody Essex Museum has a Hepplewhite-style knife box, several card and tip-top tables, and a large server/oval waiter in its collection from this cargo, the focus of an article in the July, 1954 Magazine Antiques below. Of course, the Reverend Bentley ran right over to see Captain Devereux’s hall at his house on the Common as soon as he returned, as recorded in his famous Diary.
The Foundation of the East India Marine Society!
The Peabody Essex Museum’s foundation date of 1799 and claim to be the oldest (maritime) museum in the United States is based on the establishment of the East India Marine Society in that year. I love the description of the society included in the American Neptune of 1944, in an article marking the completion of the restoration of the the Society’s East India Marine Hall: In the autumn of 1799 a group of thirty Salem shipmasters met to found a society so exclusive that only those who had sailed around Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope as masters or supercargos would be eligible for membership. As the first New England vessel had reached China only thirteen years before, this requirement made the society comparable, for its time, to a modern aviation club, for which only pilots who had successfully crossed the Atlantic or Pacific could qualify. Its members were equipped with notebooks so they might advance navigational and geographical knowledge, and like Captain Devereux, they brought home things to embellish their Society’s “cabinet”. There are quite a few old histories of the Society (like the 1920 text below) which reprint the foundation documents and highlight all sorts of little details, but there’s also George Schwartz’s recent history, Collecting the Globe, which presents a more comprehensive context for its foundation year, 1799.
So, much of this seems fine, certainly the themes are great (more on them below), and the criteria professional. I’m having some difficulty envisioning the logistics of the vetting process, but will leave that to the experts. What does concern me, however, is the disassociation of “site” and “building” as referenced in #3 on. As you see in my graphic above, the Salem Witch Museum, the most profitable of the for-profits, is referred to as the former East Church, which is presumably how it made the cut. Why the East Church is deemed “historic” is beyond me, aside from its imposing Gothic Revival style: certainly it is no more historic than the nearby houses of ultra-philanthropist George Peabody and Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, or the birthplace of the illustrious Benson brothers across the Common. When I asked why and how the Salem Witch Dungeon Museum, also located in a former church (built by the Christian Scientists and not the East Church parishioners), was included on the trail, I got this response from the Executive Director of Destination Salem: The Witch Dungeon Museum and Lynde Street are the site of early fortifications. English settlers knew that their presence in Salem immersed them in a web of global conflicts. Fearing reprisals from the indigenous people they were displacing and attacks from other colonial powers, the colony of Massachusetts erected a fort near this spot in 1629. Samuel Sharpe came from London with cannons to assume command of the militia. The first fort was probably made of tall wooden palisades, with extensions jutting out to prevent flanking. In the following decades, further fortifications were built along the Salem coast and a palisade was built along the western end of town. The early, feared attacks never happened. The East Church built a chapel on Lynde Street in 1897 and The Witch Dungeon Museum opened in the building in 1979. Visitors can watch a live-action reenactment of a witch trial and tour a recreation of the grim prison where the accused were kept. So basically: because a long-gone fort was once on the site of the Salem Witch Dungeon Museum, it qualifies for the trail? I don’t think I need to spend too long discussing the implications of this “standard.” In a city as old as Salem, every structure downtown was built on the site of something else: there are layers and layers and layers. The Witch Dungeon Museum’s storefront sister “museum” on venerable Essex Street, the Salem Witch History Museum, could claim that it sits on the site of Salem’s first printing house or any number of historic structures and thus qualify for the new Heritage Trail. Perhaps the cumulative criteria above could mitigate against this, but it does not appear to have done so with the Salem Witch Dungeon Museum: I think we need to be honest about where we are leading people—and why.
Mannequin City: mid-20th century interpretive “technology” reigns in Salem’s for-profit witch “museums” which have no incentive to innovate, as the City delivers visitors right to their doors; Witch Dungeon Museum hanging mannequins.
Salem tourism brochures from the 1950s through the 1980s: not until the last decade was the Heritage Trail restricted to downtown and the “story” increasingly restricted to witches. Love the sentiment of “traveling through history in Salem.”
Higginson Square, 1893, Nelson Dionne History Collection, Salem State Archives and Special Collections. A big flatiron to highlight Asheville’s Flatiron building. It begs the question: no Parker Brothers site for Salem’s new Heritage Trail?
Entrance to the George Peabody Estate, “Kernwood”, in North Salem, Frank Cousins Collection of Glass Plate Negatives at the Phillips Library via 
There is a facsimile edition, but how amazing to see the original 1693 maritime atlas of Pierre Mortier, the “most expensive sea-atlas ever published in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century” according to the eminent Dutch cartographical historian Cornelis Koeman. Stunning plates of beautiful European ships: here is a “Tartane de Pesche”.
Mr. Monroe at the 1/11/18 public forum at PEM.
Nostalgic call slips featuring the old Salem locations in Daland and Plummer Halls.
The always dignified Mr. Edward Cassell (who catered events at far more places than Hamilton Hall!) standing before the Peirce-Nichols House in Salem, 1907. Courtesy of 
