Tag Archives: Salem History

January 27, 2025

Headline History

By daseger

I went up to the Phillips Library in Rowley to look through some scrapbooks memorializing the Salem Tercentenary of 1926 late last week and found myself enchanted by the presentation and curation of one particular album put together by a certain Frank Reynolds. There were two big scrapbooks actually, and while I was expecting photographs (I guess that would be an album, rather than a scrapbook), there were only newspaper articles pasted in in a meticulous and chronological manner with attached white labels. At first I was disappointed, but then I went with it, and found the juxtaposition of the headlines really interesting. Then I came upon one particular article that really illustrated the concept of “headline history” and then I had my post.

Thus inspired, I divided my Tercentenary headlines into several categories:  1) The Big Row; 2) Getting Ready; 3) Advice to Tourists; 4) Dress Up; 5)) Crowds; 6) Presidential Address.

The Big Row was over the date of the founding of Salem, actually no, it was over what “founding” meant. Everyone knew that Roger Conant came down from Gloucester to Salem in 1626 with the “Old Planters” but William Crowninshield Endicott, Jr., the President of the Essex Institute, insisted that Conant and his colleagues were mere “fishermen and squatters” and Salem wasn’t really founded until his ancestor John Endecott arrived with the first royal charter in 1628. So Salem’s Tercentenary should be delayed for two years. The most eminent Salem historian of the time, Sidney Perley, made it clear that this was a ridiculous stance, and resigned in protest from his curatorial postition at the Essex Institute. Then Endicott resigned, and that was the situation in March of 1926, only a few months before the celebrations were to begin. I’m really not sure how it was resolved, but it took a lot of meetings and made a lot of headlines. Endicott went on to become President of the Massachusetts Historical Society, so maybe all the Boston Brahmins got together and offered him a bigger prize to back down.

Full speed ahead! We get some great headlines about getting ready. A lot of focus on cleaning Salem up. There was one big new project—a pineapple-topped bandstand on Salem Common—but much more of an emphasis on restoring and scrubbing (reports on parades later on often noted how clean Salem’s streets were). Hamilton Hall was stripped of its paint; the massive train depot was sandblasted.

There were some interesting marketing campaigns associated with the Tercententary. Every Salem store seems to have dressed up its windows with historical scenes; Parker Brothers reissued its first board game, The Mansion of Happiness. There seems to have been an outreach to Quebec, because of Salem’s large Franco-American population, but also to other areas of the country, and I think that might explain these odd witch headlines. The Salem Tourist Camp at Forest River Park seems extraordinary to me: this very same space hosted a refugee camp after the Great Salem Fire just twelve years earlier (and no, the Fire was not “kind to the city.”)

So many “antiques”! The word is used very broadly: houses, dresses, furnishings, all on display. There was a great opening of houses throughout Salem, and also a great opening of attics. While the parades presented a broad overview of Salem’s centuries, the open houses and performances were very focused on the Colonial: and its revival.

The entire July week was jam-packed: THREE parades, a big bonfire on the fourth in the Salem tradition, fireworks in the Willows along with a triple parachute jump from a hot air balloon and then an attempted quadruple jump two days later by Louise Gardner (who would fall to her death before an Atlanta crowd of 15,000 two years later), athletic competitions, lectures, a ball, all sorts of exhibitions. The Massachusetts papers covered everything in detail, as did some national papers, and there were a lot of headlines about crowds. For the Historical and Floral parade at the end of the week, the participants were estimated at 10,000 and the crowds at nearly 100,000.

By all accounts the Salem Tercentenary was a resounding success, but clearly there was a need for a presidential nod to cap it off. I had always thought that Calvin Coolidge was dissing Salem by not attending the big event as he always summered nearby, but apparently this year he was in another part of the country. So he sent Vice-President Charles Dawes, who interrupted his annual fishing trip to Maine. The Vice-President reviewed the first tercentenary parade, and gave a speech on how the radio could safeguard the constitution from rampant populism. But even that sounds better than President Coolidge’s note, below. So enthusiastic: “even if Salem ships no longer circle the world and the life of the community goes on in less picturesque and spectacular channels” Salem still has its history! You’d think Silent Cal would have congratulated the city on putting on such a big party, but no. The President does make the point that anniversary of the Declaration of Independence was being celebrated in the Salem year as Salem’s 300th and this year we have another concurrence with the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the American Revolution. From what I’ve seen so far, I think Revolution 250 is going to leave Salem 400+ in the dust, but we shall see.

Tercentenary font? Quincy is up this year: you can check out their schedule here.

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October 21, 2024

History is Gray

By daseger

For the past month or so, I’ve been considering the case of the Salem City Seal and various reactions to it. In the past, before last month, I’ve probably thought about the seal for 5 minutes; over the last month, I’ve been thinking about it for many hours—too many, certainly. If you haven’t read my previous posts, here is what happened, succinctly: several members of the Salem community complained that the seal, with its depiction of a Sumatran man, pepper plants, and Salem ship, was stereoptypical and insulting to Asian-Americans. Their condern and complaint was brought to the city’s Race Equity Commission, which had deliberations over the summer and concluded that “damage had been done” and the seal should be redesigned. The Race Equity Commission reported this finding to a subcommittee of the Salem City Council which concurred (I think), but somewhere in the process someone stepped in and suggested a public task force to add some transparency and public comment to what had heretofore been quite a closed process—I think at best 40 people knew that our circa 1839 seal was deemed suspect in a city of over 40,000.  And this is what the City Council finally voted on: the creation of a task force which will sit for 18 months and hear public testimony and garner historical perspectives. So that’s where we are and I think that’s a good place, in theory. In practice, I have my concerns, because I’m just not sure those in positions of authority have the capacity to grasp historical perspectives, frankly. In the Salem of my experience, every single public history issue has been black and white, villains vs. heroes, the powerful and the powerless, with an overcast of green, for money. Nothing is nuanced, multi-causal, two-dimensional, or gray, and that’s a problem, because most of history is gray. Salem has been without a professional historical society for a long time, and it shows.

 

Salem Stereotypes: Seal and Patch

My first concern about how this whole process will play out relates to stereotypes. The original accusation against the seal was that it represents a generic “oriental” stereotype. I can understand that, at face value. But before I gave the seal much thought, I always thought it was really cool for its cosmopolitan character, depicting a ship over there rather than in Salem Harbor. So I sent a note to our city councillors asking them to consider the very global nature of this very early civic symbol. About half wrote back, all but one branding the seal’s figure a stereotype. This got my dander up as it indicated a general closed-mindedness before we had even delved into the matter, and of course I couldn’t help but think about the certain stereotype which is everywhere in the Witch City. Wasn’t this a hypocritical position on the part of our Councilors, given that there is a crone-like character with a pointy hat riding on a broomstick on all of our police cars? And you know, people died who were not witches. (Edit: a city councillor informed that the City Council does not approve “mascots,” only the seal, so the omnipresent witch is not under their jurisdiction—I have to say that it’s not particularly uplifting to know that the Salem schools would choose the witch as their “mascot”).  No matter—there’s really no questioning this particular stereotype, and no constituency for its removal. The historical record regarding the intended depiction of the city seal’s character is pretty clear: he was supposed to be from the specific part of Sumatra (Aceh) which grew the pepper which was so sought after by Salem ship captains and merchants. He did look vaguely Asian to me except for the hat—the hat was a little different and a little distinctive and I thought I had seen it before. And then I remembered: Theodor de Bry, a Dutch engraver and publisher who specialized in depicting and disseminating images of “new” people as Europe intensified its voyages of expansion and conquest in the early modern era. Below is a 1599 engraving by de Bry’s son, and an image from nearly three centuries later of a group of Aceh men during the brutal Aceh War with the Dutch. Same hat, right? But again, it doesn’t matter:even if Salem’s seal features a unique provincial figure and not a general stereotype, if people label it as the latter it becomes one. There’s only so much history can do.

J.T. de Bry, Inhabitants of Sumatra, 1599, Bartele Gallery; Aceh envoys seeking British support against the Dutch in the Aceh War, 1873, Bridgman Images.

 

The “enormous condescension of posterity”.

George Peabody, Salem alderman and son of Joseph Peabody, one of the city’s wealthiest merchants, chaired the committee that designed the seal following the adoption of a new city charter in 1836. As a Sumatra trader himself, Peabody had familiarity with Aceh and its people, but again, I’m not sure this really matters. As expressed by public opinion, it seems to me that those for a complete redesign of the seal and against are rather equally divided, but last week a long column was published in the Salem News which condemned support of the Sumatran image as “toxic nostalgia.” It’s a well-written piece, so it commanded my attention, as did its almost-complete ahistorical argument: it’s an excellent example of labor historian E.P. Thompson’s famous quote, “the enormous condescention of posterity.” According to the author, “regardless of what the seal was meant to celebrate, it must be acknowledged that George Peabody was a product of his times and that the seal he designed reflects a lot of the imagery that came to be associated with western notions of superiority over eastern peoples.” Coincidental with the adoption of the seal in 1839 was the beginning of the shameful Opium Wars instigated by Great Britain upon a weak China, and as “some American merchants (including no doubt some from Salem) did engage in the Opium Trade and benefitted from the British actions in China” we should reject the seal on the basis of this connection? Are we also to reject the East Asian collections of the Peabody Essex Museum, all the Federal Salem houses built with fortunes made by pepper and spices, and the navigational expertise of Nathaniel Bowditch, whose miraculous return from Sumatra in 1803 made The New Practical American Navigator authoritative? Are we to reject anybody who had anything to say in 1839 and just wallow around in the progressive present? If so, it’s going to be a bit difficult to learn from the past. George Peabody’s time seems far less toxic to me than later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and its extensions unleashed a cascade of anti-Asian vitriol in the United States, and we should all note that one of Salem’s most famous native sons, Joseph Hodge Choate, argued against the Act before the Supreme Court in 1893.

 

 

History is not cherry-picking.

Proponents of the seal tend to talk about “history-erasing” and its critics focus overwhelmingly on the violence which characterized the trade with Sumatra, which led to two US interventions after American ships were attacked by Malay pirates. Indeed, it’s not a pretty picture, but history seldom is. It is certainly not true that it was a one-way trade imposed upon the Acehnese: American ships brought a lot of silver over there. I’ve been reading as much scholarship as possible since this seal business began, and last week Anthony Guidone, an assistant professor at Radford University in Virginia, forwarded me his dissertion, “The Empire’s City: a Global History of Salem, Massachusetts, 1783-1820” (George Mason, 2023). It’s a detailed interdisciplinary study: I hope it gets published soon so everyone can read it. Guidone gives us the complete picture of Salem’s first global age: the black and the white, and lots of gray. Trade with Asia brought great wealth to Salem but also intensified its connections with slavery and the plantation economy in the Caribbean. But at the same time, it also benefitted a much wider slice of Salem’s population than I had realized, including African Americans and women, and facilitated the creation of a diverse community of sailors (he makes great use of the Salem Crew Lists 1799-1879 at the Mystic Seaport Museum, a great resource). In summary, Salem’s trade with Asia impacted “nearly all aspects of life in the town, changing Salem’s economy, politics, race relations, material culture, civic identity, and historical memory.” Whew! Even though the dissertation ends in 1820, Guidone expands it a bit further to discuss Salem’s anniversary moments in the next decades and the adoption of the city seal. He sees the commemorative focus on commerce by newish institutions such as the East India Marine Society and the Essex Historical Society as evidence of the desire to “construct a narrative that posed an alternative to the town’s witch-hunting past” even as (or because of ???) encroaching commercial decline. I agree completely: members of these institutions tended to identify the witch trials as a “stain” rather than an opportunity and waved no witch flags. How backward they were!

I’ve got to admit, Paul Revere’s first Massachusetts seal from 1775 is my favorite, even though its central figure cuts a rather simplistic figure.

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September 23, 2024

Salem Can’t Lose Sumatra

By daseger

I’m still thinking and reading about Salem’s endangered city seal, so this is Part II of last week’s post. I promise there will be no part III (at least for a while) as I think I have resolved my feelings about this little scrap of paper, wood, or metal, which links past and present in very interesting ways. My present stance is: Salem can’t lose Sumatra. Let me first recap the issue and bring us up to date, as I was a bit sketchy in last week’s post about how we got here. Certain members of the Salem community find the figure on the 1839 seal, representing an early 19th century dignitary from the Aceh Province of Sumatra, offensive, and appealed to the city’s Race Equity Commission. This commission approved a recommendation to the City Council to redesign the seal unaminously in August. I don’t think there was any public awareness of this issue at the time (or much now, although there was an article in the Salem News last week). Thankfully, somewhere between the Race Equity Commission and the City Council emerged the idea of a task force, I think from the Mayor’s office, and that is what the City Council will be voting on this week. I am grateful that a public process is being considered, although I have yet to ascertain whether the task force will be a true gauge of public opinion or a rubber stamp.

I believe that this seal is unique in its provincial (vs. generic “oriental”) depiction and its global perspective for reasons I laid out in last week’s post. I subscribe to my former colleagues Dane Morrison’s and Nancy Schultz’s assertion that the aged Salem City Seal can still represent a relatively new cosmopolitanism in American Studies, as outlined in the preface to their authoritative volume on Salem history, Salem: Place, Myth and Memory. 

      “After Salem was incorporated in 1836, 210 years after its founding, the community imagined by city leaders was a much more globally connected entity than conventional histories have depicted. They called for a city motto, Divitis Indiae usque ad ultimum sinum—“To the farthest ports of the rich East”—that served as a reminder of Salem’s intimate connections with the trade of China, India, and Sumatra, the pepper-rich island in the South Pacific. The city council commissioned a design by pepper ship owner George Peabody to represent Salem’s global connections. It portrays an Atjehnese man, surrounded by palm trees and a pepper plant, holding a parasol to shade himself from the hot Sumatran sun, and wearing traditional attire—a flat red turban, red trousers and belt, a yellow kneelength robe, and a blue jacket—common to the Atjeh province of the island. In the background, a Salem vessel, with sails unfurled, navigates the harbor. Filling out the emblem are compass rose motifs and the image of a dove bearing an olive branch. The Salem City Seal may be read as text that illustrates this new direction in American Studies, offering a fresh way to envision cannections, not just between the local and the national, but also among the local, national, and global.”

Dane’s and Nancy’s preface, which is part of their instruction for students and teachers, instructed me to investigate the American meaning of the Salem-Sumatra connection, and boy did I find a lot! (and I’m sure there’s a lot more, but I actually have to work—when I found myself in the digital archives of the State Department at 2:00 in the morning I made myself stop). There are a lot of well-known facts: Sumatran-supplied pepper made Salem the 6th largest city in the US and its import duties 5% of the nation’s gross revenues, for example. There’s also well-known lore: so many Salem ships plied the Sumatran coast that the island’s residents thought SALEM was a country. But there’s much more. In 1905, the Merchant Marine Commission released a report to Congress with a striking summary statement that “only 10% of our vast seaborne commerce is now conducted in American ships” and a comparison from a century earlier, when that percentage was 91%. In the syndicated news stories that followed, published in newspapers across the country, Salem represented the earlier golden age of commerce when her pepper ships ruled the seas and transformed both the city and the nation. All of these stories featured the “romantic” narrative of Salem’s pepperdom, but they were also looking for lessons from the past—and equating Salem’s pepper ships with America’s merchant marine.

Then there are a succession of presidential references to Salem’s pepper trade and traders: daring free agents in a world of expanding European empires. This was the party line of presidents as diverse as James Monroe, Andrew Jackson (of course, he was very proud of his naval intervention in retaliation for a native attack on a Salem ship), Franklin Pierce, Zachary Taylor, William McKinley (a big jump!), Franklin Roosevelt, and most of all, John F. Kennedy. Kennedy clearly loved the Salem-Sumatra story: he referenced it when President Sukarno of Indonesia visited the US in 1961 and whenever he happened to be in a town or city called Salem.

Then-Senator Kennedy identified the image as an “Indian,” indicating that the Seal’s figure did not have an localized identification then as well as now. But the emphasis on “people of courage” still rings true, I think. His different Salem variations are interesting, but they all go back to Salem, Massachusetts, the connecting link between east and all the different wests. It would be so sad to lose this Salem, to a sanitized version of a witch’s hat (!!!!) or even the Custom House. We would be going back, I think, back to the provincial and away from the worldly. I am not of Asian descent, nor am I a politician or a human resources professional or a graphic designer so I have none of those perspectives: this is just one historian’s view: Salem can’t lose Sumatra.

P.S. I’ve had a lot of emails and read comments elsewhere…..yes, I too am struck by our city government’s lack of awareness about the contradiction between the perceived stereotype of the Sumatran city seal and the obvious stereoptype of the Witch, Salem’s other official city seal (or patch?), and plan to write about this in a future post. Every single Witch Trial descendant who I know or have heard from is offended by this image, but their outrage, our outrage, has no representation or redress.

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September 16, 2024

The Salem City Seal

By daseger

Last week, the Salem City Seal was an agenda item for a meeting of our City Council: apparently there are concerns about its representation and plans for its replacement. I don’t know much more than that, as I wasn’t able to attend the Council meeting or any of the previous subcommittee meetings that have brought us to this point. The Council sent the matter to another subcommittee, I believe, so hopefully a public process of deliberation will ensue. I do think it is appropriate and even useful for a community to reconsider past representations on seals, statues, and other expressions of collective heritage or identity, as long as those conversations are public, so I’m hoping to contextualize this discussion a bit. I’m also kind of curious about the history and reception of our city seal myself, as it always struck me as rather unusual. So I spent a few hours this past weekend digging into some primary and secondary sources—certainly not long enough! What follows is certainly an impressionistic history and a work in progress, but first, here IT is:

So as you can see, there are some variations of this image. The first seal is the official one, which I have taken from the city’s website, and it is accompanied by this description:

The City Seal was adopted as the insignia of the City in March 1839, three years after Salem was incorporated as a City and 213 years after its founding. The Seal depicts a ship under full sail approaching a coastal land in the East Indies. A native inhabitant in traditional garb stands in the middle, surrounded by plants of the region. A dove sits atop the scene, with an olive branch in its mouth. The City motto, “Divitis Indiae usque ad ultimum sinum” – “To the farthest port of the rich East” – is below. The Seal is ringed by the incorporation dates of both the Town of Salem, 1626, and the City of Salem, 1836.

The second seal is also from City Hall: I think it’s the watercolor image produced by Salem artist Ross Turner but the city’s art inventory is not very descriptive. An article in the Beverly Citizen from the spring of 1888 informs us that “Mr. Ross Turner, the artist, has made an interesting and handsome study of the city seal of Salem, designed half a century ago by Colonel George Peobody, who is still living. Mr. Turner adheres to the original design, which has suffered a great deal at the hands of engravers and others.” The third and fourth images are from a pediment carved for the President of State Street Bank which came up at auction a few years ago and the last is from a really fun book, Town and City Seals of Massachusetts by Allan Forbes and Ralph Eastman, which was published in 1950. If you browse through this last book, it’s immediately apparent how unusual the Salem seal is: it’s the only one recognizing a foreign identity and region as integral to the history of the city/town. Every other seal has a recognizable landmark or person or industry from that place—there are quite a few ships but Salem’s is the only one on the other side of the globe! I think it’s one of the oldest seals in the book, too: Massachusetts called for every town and city to come up with a seal only in 1899, when Salem’s was recognized as “ancient.”

The designer of the original seal in the 1830s was George Peabody, son of the wealthiest pepper trader in Salem, Joseph Peabody, and a city alderman. There were deliberations before its acceptance and commission, LOTS of deliberations due to “diversity of opinion”: you can read all about them in the March 1866 volume of the Historical Collections of the Essex Institute. There seems to have been universal agreement that the seal was to represent two things: Salem’s unrivalled prosperity and Salem as City of Peace. Given Peabody’s background, it’s understandable that he chose to depict the personage of a distinctly East Indian man from the Aceh province of Sumatra rather than a more generic “Eastern” figure: this region was the source of the pepper which had enabled Salem’s commercial ascendancy. Joseph Peabody alone is credited with 61 voyages (6.3% ot the total trade)  to Sumatra alone from 1802-1844, and 100 voyages (or 10%) with his son-in-law John Lowell Gardner): this was the family business. The pepper trade was also Salem’s major business between 1799 and 1846, with 179 ships engaged on multiple voyages. The 1866 account of the Salem seal’s approval concluded that “it was her shipping, fitly typified by this design, carrying the fame of her merchants as well as the flag of the country into unknown  areas, that made her name in the first half of this century, a synonym for commercial honor, enterprise and success, throughout the other hemisphere as well as this.”  The second theme of the seal, peace, symbolized by the dove bearing an olive branch, is a bit more of a tough sell in this specific historical context, given the fact that the 1830s was the decade which saw two U.S. military interventions in Sumatra in retaliation for native attacks on American shipping. The connection between peace and commercial prosperity was often emphasized in early nineteenth century newspaper accounts as it was very clear to everyone that Salem’s era of prosperity began after the American Revolution. The pepper trade had been a dangerous one from its beginnings at the turn of the century, but the 1831 attack on the Salem ship Friendship certainly brought things to a head with the first Sumatram intervention, often referred to as the “Battle of Qualah Battoo” (now Kuala Batee) in the following year. The broadside below (from the Phillips Library’s digitized collection) is representative of the “war fever” of the era, but it was printed in Portland, Maine rather than Salem. The Salem accounts are a little less “patriotic” and a lot more detailed: they note the precise number and names of those who were killed or wounded (five and six rather than “all”), everything that was taken, and call for restitution.

George Peabody’s seal was designed a mere four or five years after this engagement, and both his family and his city wanted to continue this valuable trade. When I look at this solitary Sumatran, I tend to identify him with Peabody family friend Po Adam, a local dignitary who warned the Americans about the coming attack on the Friendship and helped them recover their ship. This was a sacrifice on his part: he wrote to Joseph Peabody afterwards that his acts had earned him the “hatred and vengeance of my misguided countrymen” and that “the last of my property was set on fire and destroyed, and now, for having been the steadfast friend of the Americans, I am not only destitute, but an object of derision.” This identification is only conjecture on my part, but the original figure on the Salem seal was certainly more respectful recreation than stereotypical figure. The connection between Sumatra and Salem endured through the nineteenth century into the twentieth, even into the twenty-first. It was referenced in regard to the new (well not really) heritage trail or “yellow line” just a few years ago, and much more significantly after the terrible 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, when relief efforts on the North Shore were organized in deference to the “old ties” between Massachusetts and Sumatra. Almost 20 years later, it seems like these ties are broken, or about to be.

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May 6, 2024

Salem History: my Reading List

By daseger

We got word last week that our book Salem’s Centuries. New Perspectives on the History of an Old American City, 1626-2026 cleared its final rounds of review and approval and will be published by Temple University Press in the fall of 2025, just in time for Salem’s Quadricentennial in 2026. This project has been challenging in many ways but I think our book will expand Salem’s written history rather dramatically: there are four pieces on African-American history alone, chapters on Salem’s experience of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, and lots of twentieth-century history that has never been written, and much more. I felt vulnerable throughout the whole process: I had never edited a volume before, and I am not trained in American or modern history but here I was writing chapters not only on the seventeenth century, but also the nineteenth and twentieth. The whole project would not have been possible without my colleague and co-editor Brad Austin, who is both an experienced editor and a modern American historian. I also relied on Salem historians past and present, as I felt I had a detailed grasp on the topics I was writing about from a local perspective, but no general, much less comprehensive, context in which to place my Salem narratives. So the whole experience was like a deep dive into historiography for me, and I learned a lot. As a tribute of sorts, I thought I’d post my Salem bibliography, in chronological order of publication. These are the sources, primary and secondary, from which I learned the most. I’m going for breadth over depth here so I’m not going to annotate each and every title, but if you have questions ask away!

A couple of caveats: my chapters are on Hugh Peter, John Remond, the suffrage and Colonial Revival movements, and urban renewal in the twentieth century, so my reading list is going to reflect those eras and topics. This particular bibliography is not comprehensive in regard to the Witch Trials as our book is about new perspectives. I’ve got my colleague Tad Baker’s Storm of Witchcraft on here and a couple of classics, but that’s it.

  1. Francis Higginson, Nevv-Englands plantation. Or, A short and true description of the commodities and discommodities of that countrey. Written by Mr. Higgeson, a reuerend diuine now there resident. Whereunto is added a letter, sent by Mr. Graues an enginere, out of New-England (1630). First impressions and physical descriptions, plus Reverend Higginson was like a bridge for me, as he’s from my period.
  2. John Smith, Advertisements for the unexperienced Planters of New-England, or any where. Or, the Path-way to erect a Plantation…by John Smith, sometimes Governour of Virginia, and Admirall of New-England. (1631). 
  3. Lewis Roberts, The merchants map of commerce wherein the universal manner and matter relating to trade and merchandize are fully treated of, the standard and current coins of most princes and republicks observ’d, the real and imaginary coins of accounts and exchanges express’d, the natural products and artificial commodities and manufactures for transportation declar’d, the weights and measures of all eminent cities and towns of traffick in the universe, collected one into another, and all reduc’d to the meridian of commerce practis’d in the famous city of London (1700).
  4. Samuel Sewell, The Selling of Joseph. A memorial (1700).
  5. Joseph Barlow Felt, The Annals of Salem, from its first Settlement (1827). This is my favorite of the antiquarian histories–full of details!
  6. Charles Moses Endicot, Account of Leslie’s retreat at the North Bridge in Salem, on Sunday Feb’y 26, 1775 (1856).
  7. Harriet Sylvester Tapley, Salem imprints, 1768-1825 : a history of the first fifty years of printing in Salem, Massachusetts, with some account of the bookshops, booksellers, bookbinders and the private libraries (1870). More than printing here!
  8. Thomas J. Hutchinson, Patriots of Salem. Honor Roll of Officers and Enlisted Men in the late Civil War (1877).
  9. Samuel Sewall, Diary of Samuel Sewall. 1674–1729. Massachusetts Historical Society, 1878-1882.
  10. Marianne Cabot Devereux Silsbee, A Half Century in Salem (1887). There are quite a few memoirs by Salem women; this is my favorite.
  11. William Pynchon and F.E. Oliver, editor, The diary of William Pynchon of Salem. A picture of Salem life, social and political, a century ago (1890). There are several Salem Tory diaries; most left, Pynchon remained.
  12. Lyman P. Powell, ed., Historic Towns of New England (1898).
  13. Essex Institute (William Bentley), The diary of William Bentley, D. D.,Pastor of the East Church, Salem, Massachusetts (1905-1914). The ultimate detailed diary: new annotated edition coming soon, I believe!
  14. Arthur Barnett Jones, The Salem Fire (1914).
  15. Mary Harrod Northend, Memories of Old Salem (1917).
  16. Frank Cousins, The Colonial Architecture of Salem (1919).
  17. Clifford L. Lord, ed., Keepers of the Past (1965). Really good chapter on George Francis Dow.
  18. Richard P. Gildrie, Salem, Massachusetts, 1626-1683: A Covenant Community (1975). A really important book, key to understanding the religious structure and mindset of Salem’s religous foundation.
  19. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed. The Social Origins of Witchcraft (1976).
  20. Essex Institute, Dr. Bentley’s Salem: Portrait of a Town. A Special Exhibition (1977).
  21. Elizabeth Stillinger, The antiquers : the lives and careers, the deals, the finds, the collections of the men and women who were responsible for the changing taste in American antiques, 1850-1930 (1980). So many seekers of Salem stuff!
  22. Charles B. Hosmer, Preservation Comes of Age, 1926-49: from Williamsburg to the National Trust (1981). Salem is key in a national historic preservation movement.
  23. John Demos, Entertaining Satan. Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (1982).
  24. Bryant and Carolyn Tolles, Architecture in Salem: an Illustrated Guide (1983, 2003, 2023).
  25. Michael Middleton, Man Made the Town (1987). Urban renewal.
  26. Julie Roy Jeffrey, The great silent army of abolitionism : ordinary women in the antislavery movement (1998).
  27. Daniel Vickers, Young Men and the Sea. Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (2005). OMG what a tour de force!
  28. Dane Morrison and Nancy Schultz, eds., Salem: Place, Myth and Memory (2005). This is our exemplar, and we tried to make our book complementary.
  29. Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters. Three Women who ignited American Romanticism (2006).
  30. Avi Chomsky, Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the making of  a Global Working Class (2008). My colleague and a contributor to our volume: Salem needs more labor history!
  31. James R. Ruffin, A paradise of reason : William Bentley and Enlightenment Christianity in the Early Republic (2008).
  32. Gretchen A. Adams, The Specter of Salem. The Witch Trials in Nineteenth-Century America (2008). A big theme in our last century: the overwhelming impact of the trials.
  33. Georgia Barnhill and Martha McNamara, eds., New views of New England : studies in material and visual culture, 1680–1830 (2012).
  34. Susan Hardman Moore, Abandoning America. Life Stories from early New England (2013).
  35. Emerson W. Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft. The Salem Witch Trials and the American Experience (2014).
  36. Martha Hodes, Mourning Lincoln (2015). Descriptions of Salem in mourning from Sarah Browne’s diary.
  37. Jacob Remes, Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era (2015).
  38. Kabria Baumgartner, In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Optimism in Antebellum America (2019). Essential for school desegregation in Salem.
  39. Nancy Shoemaker, Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles: Americans in Nineteenth-Century Fiji (2019).
  40. James Lindgren, Preserving Maritime America. A Cultural History of the Nation’s Great Maritime Museums (2020).

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January 22, 2024

Salem 1799

By daseger

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.

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August 7, 2023

Olmsted Central

By daseger

I have felt vulnerable all summer long, while working on my contributions for our Salem book: my chapters relate to academic fields for which I have no professional preparation, including African-American history (John Remond), art history (the Colonial Revival) and urban planning (Salem’s 20th-century development). I read widely and had support from my colleagues, and all the chapters will be peer-reviewed, so I don’t think I’ll embarass myself in the end, but I’m still a bit anxious. I’m co-writing the last referenced chapter, on Salem’s development from the Great Salem Fire of 1914 to the present, with my co-editor for the entire book, and after I plowed through rebuilding and urban renewal I simply dumped it on him, just done with it! It wasn’t fun to write and I needed some distance to reflect. So that’s what I have been doing for the last two weeks or so, trying to read histories of urban planning for pleasure. This is a field that intersects with the history of landscape design and garden history—and as the latter is more familiar to me I found a comfort zone. So I got some grounding and feel ready to go back into this chapter with some different perspectives and questions. I also realized I needed to cap off my weeks of reading with a visit to what must be the Mecca of landscape history: the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site in Brookline, Massachusetts.

So Chestnut Hill, a beautiful section of Brookline which extends over into Newton, was my weekend destination. This is where Boston Brahmins established their country seats in the later nineteenth century, and because of these considerable investments in land the area still retains its pastoral feel despite its proximity to Boston. At the height of his pathfinding career in 1883, Frederick Law Olmsted purchased an early 19th century farmhouse and several acres of land from two elderly spinster sisters who were reluctant to move: he built them a house next door. Another neighbor was Isabella Stewart Gardner, whose “Green Hill” summer house was built by Salem ship captain Nathaniel Ingersoll earlier in the century. Olmsted did not intend for his new house, named Fairsted, to be a seasonal showplace: it became the center of his business and his practice, as well as a center for the emerging new discipline of landscape architecture. This is the focus of the site’s interpretation: on the practice rather than the personal. The farmhouse was expanded in all directions, most conpicuously in the office addition which served as the headquarters of the Olmstead Brothers after the Frederick Law’s retirement in 1895. The firm endured (as the Olmsted Associates) until 1980, the same year that the National Park Service acquired Fairsted. As you can see from the photographs above, the orginal farmhouse its garden addition are not in the best shape: a planned and funded restoration has stalled due to the quality of the workmanship, and is delayed until the next funding process (but private donations can be made here). The interior of the farmhouse is pristine, and (again) dedicated to telling the story of the Olmsted practice. The office addition is like a time capsule of a 1920s-1930s architecture firm: with a drafting room, a photography room, a blueprint-printing room, a shipping room, and a vault, where all the Olmsted plans are archived.

In the main house: very few personal items, it’s all about the firm. I was primarily interested in the urban planning inititatives of the Olmstead firm as my chapter on Salem’s 20th century development begins with Harlan Kelsey’s 1912 City Plans Commission report. Because the Olmsted projects are so extensive, both in sheer number and geographically, the firm’s archives are always in demand and consequently the NPS has completed a major digitization project and also furnished researchers with an invaluable research guide to the collections. I found five Salem projects, the most important of which is the subdivision of the famous Pickman/Loring farm c. 1900: this was Salem’s first planned neighborhood, and I didn’t include it in my draft chapter (but I’m certainly going to do so now)!

The Olmsted site offers two tours, both of which were given by enthusiastic and articulate interns: one on the cultural landscape, the other on the office and practice. In the first, we learned all about Olmsted’s design philosophy (naturalistic and anti-Victorian, not particulaly interested in PLANTS, “borrowed view”) and the second focused primarily on how the firm was run during the era of the Olmsted sons/brothers. I just loved the office tour: forget AI and digital “reality”: this was immersion!

The Olmsted office wing: photography library with project #s (all materials are preserved in the vault now), drafting room, planting specifications, blueprint-printing room (and a very strange blueprint drying machine), shipping room, little cubbyhole office outside the vault.

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July 20, 2022

The Golden Goose

By daseger

Last week Salem’s new Heritage Trail, or at least the foundation thereof, was revealed with a report to the Salem Redevelopment Authority (SRA) and the launch of a new website. The outgoing “Red Line” has long been the object of derision, as it was a play-to-play route which made no meaningful distinction between the Salem Maritime National Historical Site and the Salem Witch Dungeon Museum. Concerns about the sign pollution which plagues downtown Salem and the now-common understanding that “redlining” refers to housing segregation apparently inspired the city’s tourism agency, Destination Salem, to put together a working group comprised of “stakeholders” representing Salem’s organizations, institutions, businesses and local government (but not, notably, neighborhood groups) to reconfigure the existing trail as something “new.” The end result will be a gold line running through downtown Salem, and very nice signs which will mark the stops along the way, including……………….the Salem Maritime National Historic Site and the Salem Witch Dungeon Museum.

Believe me, I’m pretty tired of screaming into the void about how Salem values (or doesn’t) its long and notable history. I also realize that the people who have transformed a small subsection of this history into a valuable commodity have clearly won the day, as many of Salem’s heritage organizations, including Historic Salem, Inc., the Salem Historical Society, the Essex Heritage National Commission, and even the Salem Maritime National Historic Site had representative members in this working group, so are clearly supportive of this new trail. But this is a really important time for Salem, with its 400th anniversary only a few years away and so many of its historic houses shuttered, including the entire Essex Street Block campus of the Peabody Essex Museum. So I have a few things to say, of course! I’ll try to be as succinct and straightforward as possible: after some consternation I have limited and organized my thoughts (which might take the form of pleas) into three main points:

      1. For–profit sites cannot be “heritage“. Salem’s heritage is a public good, not a private commodity. Packaging an historical event into a dramatic presentation creates an “attraction,” not a museum. Packaging a tragic historical event into an attraction is troubling if not enacted with great care, and the dated figures employed by the The Salem Witch Dungeon Museum and the Salem Witch Museum evoke more mockery than empathy. These attractions have no place on an officially-sanctioned “Heritage Trail”; I don’t think any for-profit site does. Call the trail something else: my friend Joe suggested the “Tourism Trail.” I would have no problem with that: it’s the equivalency of an actual historic site like the House of the Seven Gables or the Charter Street Cemetery or the East India Marine Hall (all sites on the trail) with a manufactured attraction that troubles me, especially as the latter are so obviously exploitative. The creators and consultants of the new Heritage Trail realize that there is an issue here, so they have come up with criteria that Salem sites which hope to be listed on the trail as it expands must meet. Here they are, included as Appendix B in the “Salem Heritage Trail Recommendation and Project Recap” report prepared by the consultant company MuseumTastic for Destination Salem and presented to the SRA: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.

      2. The Trail is too restricted geographically. Salem has been a tourist destination for over a century, and there are previous incarnations of the Red Line, which was stamped on the City in the 1980s. (People seem to think that the big turning point in Salem’s tourism history is the filming of the television show Bewitched in 1970s, or at least that’s the story the rationalizes the placement of the Samantha statue in Salem’s most historic town square. But that’s clearly not true: it was the Haunted Happenings festival, initiated by the Salem Witch Museum in the early 1980s, that created our modern Witch City). All the pre-1980 trails were much longer, and included more Salem neighborhods and sites, including the entire McIntire District showcasing architecture, South Salem showcasing Pioneer Village and many more sites in the Downtown and Derby Street districts. If it really is going to tell Salem’s story in a comprehensive and authentic way (and accomodate all those themes!) the Trail has to branch out considerably. One of the reasons I find it so objectionable to direct people to a witch business on the basis of a seventeenth-century fort that is no longer there is the fact that Salem has a seventeenth-century fort that has been left to rot on Winter Island.
      3.  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.”
      1. 3. A Plea for Authenticity & Creativity: I don’t really have enough to go on to speak to technology or  interpretive issues, but from what I can read I am struck by the relative conservatism in terms of the conceptualization of the entire trail: I expect more from a process of “strategic revisioning;” I don’t see any revisioning at all actually. Maybe that’s coming? This trail could have been recast as a “walking museum” as some cities have done (Memphis!), and thus accomodate both heritage and for-profit sites (in a pop culture category: the history of witchcraft tourism in Salem IS part of our heritage unfortunately) as well as the Peabody Essex Museum’s shuttered sites which are outfitted with “PEM Walks” interpretive audio “postcards“: why not integrate this ready-made interpretation into the Trail? Salem doesn’t have a history museum so a thoughtfully-constructed walking museum could really compensate for this deficiency: this approach could also add some chonological development to the trail, which is completely missing. Authenticity is everything in this digital, virtual age, which is why it is imperative to emphasize the unique geography and history of Salem with real places rather than artifical ones: besides the for-profit sites, I am also troubled by the selection of the new Charlotte Forten Park on Derby Street as a location to highlight Salem’s African-American history: African-Americans (including Charlotte Forten) did not live or work anywhere near it! And as I’ve written about before, the park has been “colonized” effectively by the Real Pirates Museum, which tells the story of pirates (some real, some not) from Cape Cod. More appropriate places to tell the stories of Salem’s African-Americans are Derby Square (which is on the Trail) where a variety of vibrant black businesses were located, and Hamilton Hall, where Salem’s Remond family lived and worked. Actually, a wonderful interpretive location for interpreting African-American history would be Higginson Square, which runs parallel to Derby Square: to tell the truth, the Remonds spent at least as much time at 5 Higginson Square as Hamilton Hall, and Charlotte spent considerable time there too. There could be some kind of creative installation there, which brings to my last point/question: why is Salem’s very dynamic creative community so absent from this revisioning project? My very favorite urban heritage trail is actually that of Asheville, NC, in which stories of the city’s past residents, both well-noted and not-so well-known, are woven together through public art, including commissioned sculptures and pre-existing artifacts. Lke all the best heritage trails, Asheville’s was a process of considerable community engagement: it is a work in process that is still engaging the community. That could happen here too, but only with the realization that all of Salem’s residents are “stakeholders” in our city’s Heritage Trail.
      2.  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?

So those are my three main points but I do want to say a bit about the “future” of Salem’s heritage, which is kind of a funny phrase: isn’t heritage about the past and how can it have a future? Well, heritage has a past, a present and a future: we’re dealing with the present now. After the Executive Director of Destination Salem gave her presentation to the SRA last week, there were a few questions from the board (which only has authority over signage downtown, not content, so I was suprised to see this engagement), including, “why so much witch stuff?” (I am paraphrasing). She answered: (I’m still paraphrasing but this is very close) “well, 85% or our visitors come for the witch trials so we have to give them what they want.” I have no doubt that this is true, because we don’t have a heritage trail that showcases our Samuel McIntire mansions or our Revolutionary resistance or our 445 Revolutionary privateers or our industrious inventors or our treasure- (and history-) hunting Mormons or our dashing Civil War officers or our zealous abolitionists and suffragists or our amazing artists and craftsmen or our brave warriors on both the battle and home fronts or any of our immigrant communities as far as I can see. Maybe all that is coming, but it is clear to me that witchcraft-based tourism is only going to become even more pervasive in Salem if some sort of structural change does not occur because it is self-perpetuating. Destination Salem has always been a thoroughly professional, accessible and effective tourism office, but I’ve never understood how it came to be in charge of heritage, because for me, tourism and heritage are not necessarily the same thing. But in Salem, I guess they are. I suspect that the same old scenario which governed the creation of the first Heritage Trail was present here: the City did not invest enough effort or money, and so left it to the business owners, who quite logically advanced their own interests. So let’s just call it the Tourist Trail, or take advantage of this (golden) opportunity to do something more—and better.

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January 2, 2022

What About Fort Pickering?

By daseger

I love commemorations: I have posted about them often here, particularly at the beginning of a new year like 2020, during which the long-planned commemorations (of the achievement of women’s suffrage, the Mayflower voyage, and the bicentennial of the state of Maine) didn’t quite go off as planned, obviously. As I spend much of my time thinking about the past, I relish any moment in which a more collective present is so engaged. In four years’ time, Salem is going to be thrust into a big commemorative year, even bigger than 2020 and hopefully more celebratory and reflective: 2026 will mark the 250th Anniversary of the beginning of the American Revolution and the 400th anniversary of the first European settlement in Salem. Revolution 250 has been planning the regional observance of the Revolutionary anniversary for quite some time in a collaborative and dynamic manner, because “commemorations bring people together.” I think there is some Salem participation in this effort, but I’m really not sure. I’m even less sure about what is being planned for Salem’s 400th anniversary: when I look at the organizing that has been going on in two other cities facing big anniversaries, Portsmouth and Gloucester, I see much more organization than is in evidence here in Salem, but then again these cities’ 400th anniversaries are next year so they better have their acts together! Salem certainly has time, but from what foundation and inspiration will it proceed? Who is in charge and who is involved? What will “Salem 400” entail and hope to achieve? I google that term from time to time but all I get is this. Without a professional historical society or heritage commission to shepherd such an initiative, there is no doubt that the 400th anniversary of Salem’s founding will be a much more “top-down” initiative than that of its sister cities, or even its own Tercentenary, which inspired a multi-layered calendar of commemorative events and expressions, including a parade of 10,000 participants, pageants and performances, musters and medals, open houses, bonfires, and headlines in national newspapers.

Official Tercentenary Program, 1926: you can see some great photographs of the events here.

I can’t imagine 10,000 people turning out for a Quadricentennial parade in 2026! The past century has transformed history into a product in Salem, something to be exploited rather than contemplated or celebrated. A singular focus on 1692 seems to have deadened the city’s interest in nearly everything else, save for the occasional nod to the military or the marginalized. I’m not sure how anyone can engage in history in Salem, save for nostalgic facebook postings. The few references to plans and goals for 2026 seem to acknowledge this by emphasizing places over people, and the present over the past: foremost among them is Mayor Kimberley Driscoll’s “Signature Parks Initiative,” which is “focused on planning and carrying out improvements and preservation work in six of Salem’s busiest and most beloved public parks and open spaces, ensuring that they will remain available and enjoyable for future generations to come: Forest River Park, Palmer Cover Park, Pioneer Village, Salem Common, Salem Willows and Winter Island.” Certainly this initiative is welcome, and will be beneficial to Salem’s residents (as will more trees, also a part of “quadricentennial planning”) but is it commemorative? Is it engaging, inspiring, and challenging the public, as opposed to simply providing for them? Maybe it is for some, or even many, but not for me: I want more history—and more humanity—in my quadricentenary. Compare Mayor Driscoll’s Signature Parks Initiative with the centerpiece of the Gloucester 400 commemoration: the 400 Stories Project, “a citywide undertaking whose goal is to collect, preserve, and share 400 stories of Gloucester and its people” from 1623 until 2023. The Project’s administrators invite Gloucester residents to “help us make history” by sharing their stories. This is a pretty sharp commemorative contrast between these two old Essex County settlements.

“Our People, Our Stories”: I wonder what the tagline of Salem’s Quadricentenary will be?

So far the most conspicuous work of the Signature Park Initiative in Salem has been in evidence at Forest River Park in South Salem: one end of the park now features new public pools and trails along with an enlarged and renovated bathhouse while the other is slated for a dramatic alteration revolving around the exchange of the Colonial Revival reproduction “Pioneer Village” currently situated there with the YMCA camp formerly located at Camp Naumkeag in Salem Willows. The writing has been on the wall for Pioneer Village, built for the Massachusetts Tercentenary of 1630, for quite some time as the City has neglected its buildings and landscape for decades and expanded the adjacent baseball field more recently. However, the exchange plan has hit a snag recently, as the City had to apply for a waiver of its own demolition delay ordinance before its own Historical Commission in order to remove the buildings at Camp Naumkeag, which was first established as a tuberculosis camp over a century ago. So far this waiver has not been granted, and a notable resistance to both the destruction of Camp Naumkeag and the relocation of Pioneer Village has emerged. I wrote about Pioneer Village at length last summer, and I have been rather ambivalent up until last month, when several admissions shifted me into the wary and possibly-even-opposed zone: I’m still thinking about it as I find it a particularly vexing public history problem! This is an ambitious plan: Pioneer Village is not simply going to be relocated but rebuilt and re-interpreted with the addition of a visitors’ center and a new focus on the relationship between the European settlers and the indigenous population of pre-Salem Naumkeag. This is an admirable goal for sure, but to my ears, the new interpretive plans sound vague, simplistic and ever-shifting, and above all, lacking in context. They are supposedly the work of the numerous consultants who have worked on the project, paid and unpaid and including several people whom I admire, so it might just be a matter of presentation, but there are several statements that I find concerning. In the first Historical Commission hearing, one consultant responded to the argument that Camp Naumkeag was itself an important historical site because of its role in public health history with an assertion that that role would enhance the new Pioneer Village’s focus on the virgin soil epidemic which devastated the indigenous population even before settlement, as if infectious diseases were interchangeable and detached from time and place! [“Pioneer Village Complicated by History,” Salem News, September 16, 2021] Several months later, the City posted its plans on its website, with this all-encompassing but yet incomprehensible statement of goals: increased access and visibility to the breadth of Salem’s history as represented by the breadth of the site’s history, including Salem Sound’s natural history, the original inhabitants, Fort Lee and the Revolutionary War, the Willows, Camp Naumkeag, and the Pioneer Village. So now it seems as if the newly-situated Pioneer Village will be utilized to interpret almost the entirety, or breadth, of Salem’s history, and in a space which the accompanying plan revealed will have parking for only ten cars. In terms of both interpretation and logistics, this is a flawed plan as presented: its reliance on the seasonal trolley for access is confirmation of its orientation to tourists over residents as well as its seasonal status, in contradiction to the breadth of its stated goals and costs.

The current Plan for the new Pioneer Village on Fort Avenue, on the site of the present-day Camp Naumkeag.

While at face value the inclusion of yet another long-neglected Salem historical resource, Fort Lee, looks like a good thing, I find it concerning. Why should Fort Lee be included in the interpretation of the faux Pioneer Village and not its very authentic (and far more important) neighboring fort on Winter Island, Fort Pickering? This is the guiding principle of the the 2003 study commissioned by the City and the Massachusetts Historic Commission, the Fort Lee and Fort Pickering Conditions Assessment, Cultural Resources Survey, and Maintenance and Restoration Plan: that the forts should be “restored, maintained and interpreted together [emphasis mine] as part of the Salem Neck and Winter Island landscape for enhanced public access.” To its credit, the City has begun a phased rehabilitation of Fort Pickering, but I see much less energy and far fewer resources committed to it than to the Pioneer Village project, which is perplexing given its authenticity and historical importance. Winter Island has served successively as a fishing village, a shipbuilding site, and in continuous military capacities from the very beginning of Salem’s settlement by Europeans to the mid-twentieth century.  The storied fortification which became known as Fort Pickering in 1799 was built on the foundation of the British Fort William, part of a massive effort by the new American government to fortify its eastern coastline beginning in 1794 under the direction of French emigré engineer Stephen Rochefontaine. Fort Pickering was manned, and rebuilt, on the occasions of every nineteenth-century conflict, and was especially busy during the Civil War. Another regional Rochefontaine fort, Fort Sewall in Marblehead, shines under the respectful stewardship of that town. Salem is so fortunate to have so much built history:  why can’t we focus our energies and resources on preserving and re-engaging with authentic sites, rather than creating new ones? (And could someone please find our SIX Massachusetts Tercentenary markers? Every other town in Massachusetts seems to have held on to theirs).

Talk about a site that can illustrate the BREADTH of Salem history: Winter Island was an early site for fishing and fish flakes (and even more substantial “warehouse” structures) as well as the location of Salem’s first fort William/Pickering. The Salem Frigate Essex (depicted by Joseph Howard) was built adjacent to the Fort in 1799, and Winter Island also served as the site of Salem’s “Execution Hill” in the later eighteenth and nineteenth century and of a Coast Guard air station from 1935-70. Members of the US Coast Guard Women’s Reserve, or SPARS, were stationed on the island during World War II. Rochefontaine’s 1794 plan and block house sketches and Frank Cousins’ photographs of the island and fort in the 1890s, Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum. Marblehead’s Fort Sewall on the last day of December, 2021.

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August 30, 2019

Losing our History? Two Years Later……Where are We with the PEM?

By daseger

Two years ago tomorrow,  the temporary location of the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum shut down rather abruptly with a succinct notice of when it would be reopening but no reference to where. As the Library is the primary repository of documents relating to Salem’s history, there were concerns among scholars (including a friend of mine who was writing her dissertation based on materials in the Phillips and was quite suddenly shut out), but I don’t think the general public was too concerned: increasing inaccessibility in terms of hours–and then location—had been the trend for about a decade. I had never really depended on the Phillips for research or teaching (only this blog) so this was a big wake-up call for me:  I started thinking, what if it is not coming back? And then a few months later, in early December: the big non-announcement at a meeting of the Salem Historical Commission. The Phillips Library of Salem was no more: all of its holdings would be deposited in a giant Collection Center in Rowley, a half hour to the north. The special library—consolidated from collections of both the Peabody Museum and Essex Institute and housed in the spectacular purpose-built Plummer Hall on Essex Street—would now be part of a much larger modern warehouse of texts and objects located on a commercial strip of Route One. An Indiana Jones image formed in my mind, and the contrast between the genteel, accessible Plummer Hall and the post-modern former toy factory seemed too cruel, even discounting the distance factor.

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Early 2018 was all about resistance and defense: there was a very dramatic public forum at the Museum during which then-PEM CEO Dan Monroe justified his decision according to the priority of preservation: it was impossible to house these materials in Salem due to the deficiencies of the Plummer and adjoining Daland buildings and there was no other sufficient space in the city.  The “preservation vs. location” argument is still authoritative: with no discussion of why the PEM did not use the substantial monies donated to it for the library to improve and expand these facilities in Salem. Also still with us is the conflation of objects and texts, justifying the move to the Rowley storage center; the Phillips Library literally gets lost in this configuration. There was lots of press coverage in January, 2018: in both the Salem News and the Boston Globe, where a front-page story included the quote below from Mr. Monroe of which I just can’t let go. A “Friends of the Phillips Library” group, established right after the December 2017 Historical Commission meeting, expanded its presence on Facebook and eventually launched its own website, which remains the essential archive of this story.

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The official way forward seemed to be through a “working group” established by the Mayor of Salem, Kimberley Driscoll, and Mr. Monroe and including members of the city’s heritage organizations, most of which (with the exception of Historic Salem, Inc. and the Salem Athenaeum) were silent during the uproar and remain so. Almost immediately the PEM announced a compromise: a reading room would be reinstated in Plummer Hall (although what would actually be in this reading room is still unknown), a Salem history exhibit installed next door, and rotating exhibits of Phillips Library materials would be installed in the main museum buildings down and across Essex Street. I don’t think we’ve really moved much beyond this agreement, but there were also discussions about digitization, as the focus on the historical collections revealed just how far behind the PEM was in such initiatives, despite misleading news stories to the contrary. Once the library collections were moved to Rowley, digitization of some of the Phillips’ most popular items began, and consequently we can now see Frank Cousins’ photographs of Salem in the 1890s at the Digital Commonwealth and a variety of interesting texts at the Internet Archive. I give all credit for this ongoing development to Collections chief and Library Director John D. Childs, as I remember him stating that digitization was a priority at the January 2018 forum, while Dan Monroe would only offer that it was “expensive”.

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Witch of New EnglandEntrance to the George Peabody Estate, “Kernwood”, in North Salem, Frank Cousins Collection of Glass Plate Negatives at the Phillips Library via Digital Commonwealth; just one Phillips text at the Internet Archive.

And that brings us to the biggest development in these two years: the retirement of Dan Monroe, effective this past July. The new director of the PEM, Brian Kennedy, is not only an experienced museum administrator, but also a scholar, who began his first day at the Museum with a staff meeting in East India Hall referencing the vision of the founders of the Essex Institute and Peabody Museum. This was encouraging to those of us on the outside, as the founders were overwhelmingly Salem men who believed that they were contributing to a repository of Salem history and culture, but we must remember that Mr. Kennedy is learning the lay of the land and that only one trustee on the PEM’s Board is a resident of Salem. The will of the founders—and successive donors—has always been the most pressing factor in my mind: I asked Mr. Monroe about “donor intent” at the January 2018 forum but he expressed no concerns. However, I’ve heard many, many, many concerns here (and in emails) from many of you. Both founder and donor intent can rise to the level of legal action, of course, and are administered within the purview of the office of the Attorney General. Very soon after the “non-announcement” of the move, we found the Essex Institute’s incorporation charter from 1821, which asserted specifically that its “cabinet” be situated in Salem. We assumed that this article was made null and void years ago, or at the very least through the merger of the Institute and Peabody Museum in 1992, but apparently that is not the case.

Essex Institute Incorporation

And so at the invitation of Mr. Michael Harrington, former Congressman and present owner of the Hawthorne Hotel who has taken a very active interest in this “case”, a group of concerned citizens, heritage professionals, and local political leaders met with Attorney General Maura Healey and her staff this past eventful July. It was a great meeting to which I was privileged to be invited. Ms. Healey listened intently to us over several hours, and explained the process by which the PEM has to petition the court to be released from the above article, a process that is overseen by her office. Apparently the PEM has not initiated this process (at least formally) yet, but can at any time, and presumably will (although they haven’t indicated that they were bound by any restrictions to date, so I’m wondering if things will just continue as they are). I voiced all of the concerns I’ve written about and heard here at this meeting, as well as my belief that the removal of the Phillips Library will cause economic harm to Salem over the long run, as the city has no professional historical society or museum to take its place. When history is only for sale, money determines everything: the topic, the take, the truth.

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I’m not sure what will happen now; obviously the Attorney General’s office is invested in this issue but it has been for some time. The Peabody Essex Museum is focused, with good reason, on opening its brand new wing at the end of September and branding itself as the #newpem. No doubt Mr. Kennedy is preoccupied with that, and with learning all about his new institution. Not only has the new wing been completed recently but substantive renovations to both the interiors and exteriors of the Plummer and Daland buildings are ongoing: the 1960s “stacks” addition has been shorn off, and many wonder where the Phillips materials could be housed if they were returned to Salem. The PEM had a viable plan for the expansion of the Phillips Library in these buildings and in Salem, but that plan was abandoned in favor of the new wing and Collection Center in Rowley.

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So I think that’s where we are, but any good summary should also include what remains to be seen, or what I still don’t understand. After two years of immersion in this very singular issue: these are the concerns, problems, and questions that still linger in my mind:

  1. I don’t understand why the City didn’t try harder to retain our history. It’s been dawning on me for some time that this entire proceeding reveals more about the City of Salem than the Peabody Essex Museum. Recently I’ve heard that the City’s tourism office, Destination Salem, plans to focus on genealogy or “roots” tourism over the next few years. This makes sense on one level, as this is the most dynamic trend in the tourism industry currently and Salem is Ellis Island for many Anglo-Americans, but it makes no sense on another, as Salem has no genealogical records because they are all in Rowley.
  2. I don’t understand how the Phillips Library is going to survive as a library in Rowley: a real library, with regular patrons, events, talks, exhibits and a sense of community. I can understand how it will exist as a repository, but not a library. Every research library I’ve ever worked in–the Folger, Houghton, the Massachusetts Historical Society—is an active gathering place, but I can’t see people gathering at that sterile place in Rowley. It’s a professional operation to be sure, and researchers will go there to do their research, but that’s about it. I guess that’s what the PEM wants, as the promise to offer exhibitions of Phillips collections is being kept, with a Hawthorne exhibition opening next month in the new wing, in Salem.
  3. Speaking of comparable research libraries, I don’t understand why a “Harvard Depository” system cannot be utilized with the Phillips Library, retaining the offsite Collection Center as a storage facility from which materials can be retrieved and brought to the MAIN Library, which could be reinstated in the Plummer and Daland buildings on Essex Street in Salem. This would solve the storage issue and retain the traditional space, place, and role of the Phillips Library, and it could be operated as an accessible facility that would serve researchers and the general (curious) public. I’m sure there’s a reason why this can’t happen, but I wish I knew what it was, as it seems like the reasonable solution to a layperson like me, and one which would benefit all parties: the PEM, the City of Salem, and the Phillips Library itself.

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