Tag Archives: Salem’s Centuries

January 4, 2026

Salem’s Centuries

By daseger

Yesterday I received three copies of Salem’s Centuries. New Perspectives on the History of an Old American City, and Tuesday is publication day, so I thought I’d provide an introductory post. The crucible of this book is definitely this blog, so I want to thank all of its followers, readers, and commenters: I truly am grateful for your support and inspiration! I can’t believe that I’ve been writing in this space for fifteen years: that’s a long time in internet years. It started out as just a vehicle to satisfy my own curiosity about Salem’s history and showcase Salem’s architecture, though I definitely thought I would move on to more worldly topics, despite its title. But the Salem posts were always the most popular, by far (except for anything to do with maps!) And so a more sustained focus on Salem led to the book, but a book is different than a blog. What I share here are mostly stories, but Salem’s Centuries is all about the history of this storied place.

 

I “posed” the books all over the house!

Salem is indeed a storied place. You (or I) can’t walk down the street without seeing a structure that conjures up some story or inspires the search for one. Stories are part of history, but history is more: layers, context, perspectives. After Covid and the publication of The Practical Renaissance I knew I wanted to write something about Salem for its 400th anniversary in 2026, but I wasn’t sure what—or how. The easiest thing to produce would be a compilation of the Salem stories I have posted here, but I wanted more and I thought Salem deserved more, and so the thought of a proper Salem history emerged. It was an intimidating thought for me, as Salem is an important American city and as I have asserted here time and time again, I am not an American historian. I think I’ve acquired some knowledge and expertise in Salem’s history over these fifteen years, but not enough to sustain a volume that attempts to cover 400 years. So I turned to my colleagues at Salem State, and the result is a collection of essays which explore Salem’s history from different scholarly perspectives across time but centered in place. The key moment in this turn was definitely that in which Brad Austin, our Department chair, 20th century American historian and experienced editor, agreed to be my co-editor. And the rest is history!

Here’s an overview of the book, which will be released everywhere on Tuesday and showcased in a series of events, beginning with a presentation (and hopefully discussion) at Hamilton Hall on January 25. Brad and I are incredibly grateful to the Peabody Essex Museum for centering its PEM Reads podcast on Salem’s Centuries throughout 2026. There’s a lot to discuss, but as both Brad and I realized as we finished this book, there’s also a lot more to learn about Salem’s vast history, so we hope that its reception encourages further research. And that’s exactly where you want to be at the end of a history project: stories end, history doesn’t.

The First Century (note: an innovative feature of our book is its division into full-length chapters and shorter, more focused “interludes” on people, places, and specific events. This was Brad’s idea.):

“Putting Salem on the Maps” is a grand display of historical and geographical context by Brad, and a perfect orientation for our place and book. My colleague Tad Baker has written the definititve history of the Salem Witch Trials, A Storm of Witchcraft, but he is also an archeaologist and historian of the indigenous peoples of New England, and his contributions to our book showcase both these fields of expertise. “The Dispossession of Wenepoykin” gives some much needed historical background of Salem’s “Indian Deed,” and “Gallows Hill’s Long Dark Shadow” is a first-hand account of the revelation of Proctor’s Ledge, a space below Gallows Hill, as the execution site of the victims of 1692, set in historiographical and contemporary contexts. My brief history of Hugh Peter, Salem’s fourth pastor and a regicide of King Charles I, enabled me to indulge in my own scholarly expertise for a bit, and Marilyn Howard’s depiction of John Higginson and his world is a rewrite of one of the best (no, the best) masters’ theses that I have read at Salem State. A magisterial chapter on “Salem and Slavery,” including both indigenous and African-American enslavement in Salem, by my award-winning colleague Bethany Jay, completes this century. Salem’s Centuries contains five pieces on African-American history, all set in larger contexts.

The Second Century: 

You would think that an eastern American city as venerable and consequential as Salem would have a published history of its myriad roles during the American Revolution, but no. Hans Schwartz, also a graduate student at Salem State who went on to get his Ph.D. at Clark University, has contributed a succinct yet comprehensive history of these roles in Chapter Four, with an emphasis on the social and economic changes brought about by the Revolution. Another one of our graduate students, Maria Pride, contributes some of her dissertation research on privateering in an interlude on Salem’s “hero among heroes,” Jonathan Haraden, with a little public history push by me. A strong theme of the book is Salem’s continuous “outward entrepreneurialism,” which Dane Morrison’s and Kimberly Alexander’s chapter on the rather tragic expatriate residency of the Kinsman family represents well. “Sabe and Rose” summarizes the collaborative research of Professor Jay and Salem Maritime National Historic Park Education Specialist Maryann Zujewski into the lives of the two people enslaved by Salem’s wealthy Derby family. The much-told story of Mary Spencer, “the Gibralter Woman” who (ironically) made and sold her famous hard candy with slave-made sugar while simultaneoulsy maintaining (and passing down) a fierce Abolitionist stance, gets the Austin treatment while I am able to indulge in a longer history of the man who inspired me to dig in, and dig in deeper, to Salem’s history: patriarch, entrepreneur and abolitonist John Remond.

The Third Century:

The Third Century opens with two studies of Salem and the Civil War by former Salem State graduate students Robert McMicken and Brian Valimont. McMicken contributes a general overview (like the Revolution, there isn’t one!) and Valimont a more focused piece on Captain Luis Emilio of the Massachusetts 54th. Here we have another Salem hero with no statue while a fictional witch reigns in Salem’s most historic square (at least Haraden has a plaque, even though it’s in the Korean barbecue restaurant which stands where his home once did). Our colleague Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello contributes a valuable overview of Salem’s Catholic parishes (Irish, French, Italian and Polish) with her chapter on “Immigrant Catholicisms” and we have another example of Salem’s many connections to Asia in Chapter Nine, “A Salem Scholar Abroad: the Worldview of Walter G. Whitman” by our department’s South Asian historian, Michele Louro, and the Dean of the Salem State Library, Elizabeth McKeigue. This chapter is based on Whitman’s writings and lantern slides of his time in Asia in the SSU Library’s Special Collections, and could definitely be the basis of a larger project. There are two focused studies on Salem Willows in this Century: mine on the evolution of Salem’s famed “Black Picnic” from the eighteenth century to the present, and Brad’s portrayal of the Willows as the “playground” of the North Shore. My chapter on four notable Salem representatives of the Colonial Revival movement definitely transitions well in the twentieth century, while my examination of the 1879 “School Suffrage” election is pretty focused on that one year.

The Fourth Century: 

We were slightly deferential to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as Salem historiography has been so focused on the witch trials and maritime history and felt that this last century has been a bit ignored. From a department perspective, we also have several acclaimed twentieth-century historians and wanted to showcase their work. Brad and I worked together on all the editing and introductions in Salem’s Centuries, but the one chapter we co-wrote is an overview Salem’s urban development over the twentieth century, beginning with the aftermath of the Great Salem Fire of 1914. This chapter enabled me to finally figure out Salem’s experience of urban renewal in the 1960s and 1970s! Avi Chomsky, an eminent Latin Americanist who also studies labor history and Hispanic communities here in the US, contributed two pieces to this century, one on the 1933 strike at Salem’s largest employer, the Naumkeag Steam Cotton Company, and another on Salem’s changing demographics in the later twentieth and twenty-first century. Brad worked with SSU archivist Susan Edwards on a chapter on Salem during World War II and with Professor Duclos-Orsello on the Salem State community during the lively 1960s: both pieces are based on SSU archival holdings, which we also wanted to showcase. Readers of this blog have read my rather struggling posts about Salem’s public history in its present “tourism era,” but our book contains two much more illuminating studies by public history professionals Margo Shea and Andrew Darien. Drew Darien, our former chair and now Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at SSU, presents an analysis of oral histories taken during and after a conference held on the occasion of the 325th anniversary of the Witch Trials back in 2017, which Professor Shea and her former graduate student Theresa Giard explore the lure and meaning of one of Salem’s most popular present attractions, ghost tours. Finally, we have an epilogue (by me, exploring or maybe the better word is summarizing 400 years of Salem history through the perspective of one place, Town House Square) and a coda, by our colleague in the English department, J.D. Scrimgeour, Salem’s very first Poet Laureate.

Salem’s Centuries. New Perspectives on the History of an Old American City. Temple University Press, 2026.

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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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October 4, 2023

It Happened in Town House Square

By daseger

I didn’t expect to be posting on Salem for a while as I’m on my way to Maine to escape the Halloween Hordes (haven’t quite broken away yet!) but I’m in the midst of writing the last chapter for Salem’s Centuries and I thought posting would help. It’s why I started this blog in the first place, so long ago, to indulge my curiosity about Salem’s lost history and free up my writing from its academic constraints! This last chapter is on the long history of Salem’s center, Town House Square, and I’m just kind of enraptured with everything that happened there, but also haven’t figured out the meaning of it all. I’m trying to use the chapter to summarize the book Salem’s Centuries and also Salem’s centuries by using the Square as kind of a “stage” (at least that’s the word I’m using now). So this will be kind of a sketchy post as it is a work in progress and I welcome all comments and corrections.

I’m happy with my opening paragraph:

A crowd filled Town House Square on a sunny day in June of 2005, cheering and jeering the unveiling of a bronze statue of the actress Elizabeth Montgomery in character as Samantha Stevens of the television series Bewitched. The rationale for the statue was the filming of a few episodes of the series in Salem in 1970, commencing a successful intensification of witchcraft-focused tourism in the view of those who cheered, while less-enthusiastic attendees noted the impropriety of installing a fictitious witch within view of the sites where the victims of 1692 were accused and tried. The Reverend Jeffrey Barz-Snell, 31st pastor of the First Church of Salem, which stood across the street for centuries, was among those who had urged the Salem Redevelopment Authority to reject the statue weeks before“in due deference to our history”and its location: “we must object to this statue being sponsored by the city of Salem, less than twenty yards away from site where we committed, arguably, one of the worst…..crimes in the history of this city.” This argument was countered by the majority opinion, expressed succinctly by Salem City Councilor Thomas Furey: “Salem is the Witch City. I think we all need to lighten up, take a breath, and let Salem have fun.” This moment in time and place is representative of the continuous significance of a small parcel of land, more of an intersection than a square, over Salem’s centuries. The crowd, the expression of civic identity, representations of church, state and commerce: all have had their role to play in Town House Square.

Then I go back to the seventeenth century and start with the English settlement of Salem from 1626, including a brief discussion of how the topography shaped the town and its center at the intersections of its two main thoroughfares, later called Essex and Washington Streets. This became known as Town House Square in the 18th century, and that’s still its place-name, although I wonder how many Salem residents (much less tourists) know it as such today. Then it’s all about meeting houses—-four on the same site: it really took a lot of time to figure out all that building history. First there was a small meeting house built in 1634 which was long thought to be the small building you can see in the rear of Plummer Hall on the Peabody Essex Museum’s campus, a larger though still quite simple structure built around 1670, the first “churchly” meeting house with a belfry, built in 1718, and finally the present building (1826) which long served as the Daniel Low & Co. store after the First Church departed to its present building further along Essex Street. Salem’s meeting houses are confusing, both before and after the First Church splits up into successor congregations: East, North, South and Tabernacle. Thank goodness I don’t have to go into the theological and factional disputes: I’m sticking to Town House Square.

So, once I set the stage, action will begin: here’s what happened in Town House Square, with an emphasis on the public. Obviously lots of other things happened in this vicinity over 400 years but why do some leave a mark or record and others not? And do the happenings in the Square reveal its public nature and role? Just questions I’m asking myself as I am writing.

  1. Lots of Quaker resistance: holding their own meetings right next to the First Church/Meeting House, wearing their hats into the latter, and then in 1662, Quaker Deborah Buffum Wilson, accompanied by her mother and half-sister, walked “naked for a sign” down Washington Street in imitation of an Old Testament episode (Isaiah 20.2-3) and in denunciation of the spiritual “nudity” of those who condemned them. Yes, a NAKED QUAKER walked down Washington Street. This resistance was met with an equal (or larger) measure of persecution, especially by the William Hathorne, who lived right on the Square.
  2. Anti-Royalist protests: by the same William Hathorne, who as Major of the Salem Militia, assembled his armed soldiers in Town House Square for his impassioned speech against the Royal Commissioners present in Massachusetts in 1664, after which he himself was summoned to England on the charge of refusing to submit to royal authority.
  3. The Salem Witch Trials: also happened in Town House Square once the judicial proceedings moved from Salem Village to Salem Town. Close quarters! Judge John Hathorne, son of William, lived right there, as did the Reverend Nicholas Noyes, and victim Bridget Bishop. The combined courthouse/schoolhouse at the northern end of the Square, made of the framing of the 1634 meeting house, separated the properties of Noyes and Bishop, and High Sheriff George Corwin resided at the southern end of the Square.
  4. Salem’s first July 4th: came before the Revolution! There was a huge party at the Town House (sometimes called the provincial Court House, sometimes even the State House—think of the old State House in Boston) to celebrate Sir William Pepperrell, the hero of the Siege of Louisbourg, in 1746. The cannons surounding the Town House were fired after every toast, and there were many.
  5. Big Town Meeting Protests: against British taxation, commencing with the Stamp Act (1765), at the Town House. (But less than 20 years earlier they were celebrating the hero of a war they were not willing to pay for–just a British historian’s perspective.)
  6. Salem’s “Tea Party”: a crate of tea from Boston is seized and burned in Town House Square on October 4, 1774, “in the presence of several hundred spectators.”
  7. Last meeting of the Massachusetts Provincial Assembly: against the orders of Governor Thomas Gage, electing delegates to the new Provincial Congress which met in Concord on October 7, 1774.
  8. Colonel Alexander Leslie and his regiment passed through Town House Square on their way to the North River to recover rumored cannon, and back again on their retreat, February 1775.
  9. Presidential Parades: George Washinton in 1789, and Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.
  10. Salem’s “big digs”: the first railroad tunnel built in 1839, and rebuilt in the later 1950s.
  11. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s romanticized view of colonial history set against Town House Square in two stories: A Rill from the Town Pump and Endicott and the Red Cross.
  12. Town House Square Transportation Hub: trains, trolleys, and later, buses.
  13. Daniel Low & Co. established in the former fourth meeting house of the First Church, 1867. A mail order innovator, the store also issued a catalog which projected both Salem and Town House Square to the entire country.
  14. War Bond Rallies: the Square was the center of  “community chest” and war bond events during both World War I and World War II, including one which featured  fake Germans attacking during the former!
  15. Restaurant action: I think this can take me from the second half of the twentieth century into the twenty-first, from the long-running Gerber’s “Little Town Hall” restaurant through various fast-food experiments to today.
  16. And then came Samantha……back where I started. I don’t really believe in historical objectivity, but I know that I can’t even try to write about that awful statue in a balanced way, so I better close with a reprise of Reverend Barz-Snell’s and Councillor Furey’s statements.

John Smibert’s portrait of Sir William Pepperrell, Peabody Essex Museum; the “Salem Tea Party” of October 4, 1774; there are great historic placques in Town House Square but I don’t think the tourists are really interested. Where can I Get a Car?, 1894; The Story of a Store, 1926. Boy, what a devolution of opponents: from King George to Burger King. Town House Square today, or yesterday: it’s Samantha’s neighborhood.

11 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Culture, History, Salem

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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May 19, 2023

Some Salem News and Views

By daseger

A whirlwind of a week! Or should I say a rollercoaster, from my personal perspective. Against the backdrop of finishing the semester, grading and graduation was Salem’s special mayoral election, as our previous Mayor ascended (?) to the office of Lieutenant Governor in last fall’s election. The first new Mayor in 17 years: an exciting and momentous occasion, especially given all that’s happened over those years, particularly the intensification of both development and Haunted Happenings. I was with the candidate who expressed some concerns about both trends, and he lost to the candidate who served as our former mayor’s right-hand man, so I assume that both trends will continue unabated. A disappointing outcome for me, but not nearly as disappointing as the turnout: a miserable 28% of the electorate. Both candidates were out there, there was was spirited debate, and signs everywhere, but as they say, signs don’t vote, and neither did the vast majority of Salem people. So I had a day to process that disheartening development, and then the clouds cleared when my co-editor and I received word that Temple University Press was extending a contract to us for our proposed book on Salem history tentatively titled Salem’s Centuries: New Perspectives on the History of an Old American City, 1626-2026! This is a project we put together for Salem’s coming 400th anniversary in 2026, and I couldn’t be more pleased and excited that it will materialize.

As soon as you know you’re going to get a book published, you think about the cover! Or at least I do. One of the major reasons I started blogging is my interest in historical imagery: I’m always matching words and pictures in my head. I’ve always liked past and present blended photographs, so I made one for our big announcement, but my co-editor and colleague Brad Austin chose a crop of Salem artist George Ropes’ Salem Common on Training Day (Peabody Essex Museum) for our proposal image. I love this painting too, but I think it’s been used too much over the last decade so I’d like to find something else for our cover: I have a digital file of all my favorite Salem images and I’m sure I’ll be creating various compilations, collages and compositions over the next year or so, particularly when I’m struggling to write! I also welcome all suggestions. Whatever we choose will need to feature Salem people, as our book is first and foremost a social history of Salem: early Salem settlers and those who lived on the land before it became Salem, traders, farmers, and the accused and the enslaved, soldiers from Salem who served in the Revolutionary, Civil, and World Wars, entrepreneurs and privateers, Salem expats in the East, Salem families, Salem African-Americans, Irish-Americans, Polish-Americans, Italian-Americans, French Canadian-Americans and Hispanic-Americans, Salem antiquarians and reformers, Salem students, Salem men and Salem women, as individuals and as members of the community, the parish, and the neighborhood. Another photograph which we featured in our proposal was of the dedication ceremony for the “Mourning Victory” statue erected in Lafayette Square in 1947 to honor the men and women of St. Joseph’s Parish who served in both World War I and World War II. Contrast this with a more recent photograph of the crowd at the dedication (I think that’s the wrong word)/ revealing of the Bewitched statue in June of 2005: what a difference! Unity and division, service and entertainment, but both Salem.

The dedication of “Mourning Victory” in September 1947; the unveiling of the Bewitched statue in Town House Square, photograph from the June 16, 2005 edition of the Lynn Daily Item.

I plan to write the concluding chapter of Salem’s Centuries on the evolution of the square in which Samantha stands, formally known as Town House Square as this is where Salem’s first meeting house was built as well as the site of other notable buildings, from the seventeenth century to the present. I’m also writing several other chapters, as well as the introduction with my colleague and co-editor Brad Austin, but the remaining chapters will be written by our colleagues at Salem State (and also several of our grad students who have gone on to Ph.D. programs) according to their fields and expertise. We have an amazing department: we’ve been together for a while and we have a very united front when it comes to teaching and our role in the university, but we also have very different research fields so this project represents a unique opportunity to work together. This makes me very happy, and you should be happy too, dear readers, especially those of you who have been following along for a while, because the strident, snippy and snarky writer of recent years, clearly and consistently frustrated by the state of historical affairs in Salem, will retreat! The reason that I have been so frustrated with Salem’s arbitrary heritage initiatives is their inability to engage: both the past in meaningful ways, and the public in representative ways. Select committees of “stakeholders” (one of our former Mayor’s favorite words, along with “hip”) responded to the Peabody Essex Museum’s removal of Salem primary historical resource and repository, the Phillips Library, oversaw a plan (with some very expensive consultants) to move Salem’s Colonial Revival Pioneer Village, beloved by many people in our city) to Salem Willows, plotted out Salem’s “new” Heritage Trail, and are currently planning Salem’s 400th anniversary celebrations. I have learned that there’s no way to penetrate the structure of these select stakeholder committees, so I’m delighted that I will be engaged in a more constructive activity from now on. I do wonder if this restricted access to civic heritage, along with its commodification, has had some impact on declining civic engagement in Salem? I think that question is beyond the bounds of our book, but it’s something to consider.

I tried! It’s great that we have Remond Park, but there’s no association of place and the sign is incorrect: a “large population of African Americans” did not live in the vicinity; I can’t find one African-American resident of this neighborhood. I presented my evidence to the powers that be years ago: no response– the inclusive moment had passed. There ARE two Salem neighborhoods which were quite cohesive in terms of African-American communities at different times in the nineteenth century: neither are recognized by the City, and one is in imminent danger of being overshadowed and overwhelmed by a proposed over-sized development. We will have several chapters on Salem’s African-American history in the Salem’s Centuries and some smaller pieces too: we’ve got an interesting format which will feature longer academic chapters and shorter topical “interludes” which we hope will attract a range of readers.

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