Tag Archives: South Salem

A Slave Trader in Salem

I’ve learned a lot about Salem’s African-American history while writing this blog; I don’t think I would look at the city the same way otherwise. I associate Chestnut Street, where I live, much more with the Remond family and their myriad activities centered on Hamilton Hall than with any particular Salem merchant or sea captain. When I walk to work down Lafayette Street, I pass a neighborhood of parallel streets on my right, beginning with Pond and ending with Cedar, on which numerous African-American families lived in the mid- and late nineteenth century: John Remond had a house on Pond, and his eldest daughter Nancy Shearman lived in the neighborhood with her family, along with his successor as caterer to Hamilton Hall, Edward Cassell. I don’t have the same place-association as I do with the Hall on Chestnut Street, as all the structures on these streets burned to the ground during the Great Salem Fire of 1914, but I think about the neighborhood that was there before. The city directories make it clear that this wasn’t an African-American neighborhood; it was rather an integrated neighborhood, just like the Salem public schools from 1844. This neighborhood was so diverse that it was even home to a notorious Virginian slave trader, who resided at 29 Cedar Street intermittently for a decade or so, from 1851 to the beginning of the Civil War, along with his common-law African-American wife and their four children. As they say, you can’t make it up.

Part of Salem’s Ward Five: Henry McIntyre / H. E. B. Taylor / Friend & Aub’s Lith., MAP OF THE CITY OF SALEM MASS. From an actual Survey By H. McINTYRE. Cl. Engr. H. E. B. TAYLOR, ASSISTANT. Philadelphia: Henry McIntyre, 1851.

The slave trader in question was named Bacon Tait and his common-law wife was named Courtney Fountain. Both came from interesting Virginia families. I certainly did not discover their stories: as much as the limited sources allow, Hank Trent pieced together what can be known about their lives in a slim well-sourced volume entitled The Secret Life of Bacon Tait. A White Slave Trader Married to a Free Woman of Color (LSU Press, 2017) and you can also read an excellent summary at the Encyclopedia Virginia. But I think we need more Salem context, and I have questions; actually, just one: how did a notorious domestic slave trader maintain a residence in which was supposedly such an abolitionist stronghold as Salem? Obviously there are two assumptions in that particular question: that Tait was notorious (or at the very least conspicuous) and that Salem was abolitionist. To support the first assumption, we’ve got to start in Richmond, the second-largest slave-trading market of the antebellum domestic slave trade (after New Orleans). When he traveled to the United States as secretary to the popular novelist William Makepeace Thackeray in 1852-1853, the artist Eyre Crowe took advantage of downtime in Richmond to walk several blocks from his fashionable hotel to the slave market to sketch the scenes he saw there (before he was asked to leave), publishing them in the Illustrated London News upon his return to Britain. These sketches were studies for two paintings which illustrated and publicized the process of slave-trading on both sides of the Atlantic: Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia and After the Sale: Slaves Going South from Richmond.

Eyre Crowe, Slaves Waiting for Salem, Richmond, Virginia (1861), Heinz Collection, Washington D.C.; After the Sale: Slaves Going South from RIchmond (1853), Chicago History Museum.

Bacon Tait was a major player in this Richmond trade and in Richmond itself: the pages of the Richmond Enquirer, the Richmond Dispatch, the Richmond Daily Times and the Richmond Whig record his real estate transactions, his political successes, and his slave-trading activities from the 1820s to the Civil War, even after he had moved to Salem in 1851: he traveled back to conduct business and also employed surrogates. His trade is also documented in the Slave Ship Manifests at the National Archives (a chilling source that I had never consulted before: not my period, thank goodness!) Notices of his “holding” facilities are particularly lengthy, and the Visitor’s Guide to Richmond (1871) records that Tait was the original builder of the infamous “Lumpkin’s Jail” (otherwise known as the “Devil’s half-acre”) in 1825. An “under new management’ advertisement from several years later reveals the inhuman dimensions of this particular side of the business.

In Massachusetts, William Lloyd Garrison’s weekly abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, printed excerpts from the Richmond papers frequently, with lengthy commentary and annotations. When Tait announced the opening of his new “private jail” in 1834, The Liberator reprinted the copy and commented upon it, and a certain “P.H.” took the liberty of rewriting it for its readers: the entire piece was featured prominently on the front page of the December 27, 1834 edition of the paper. Charles Lenox Remond was the agent of The Liberator in Salem at the time: it’s unlikely that this item escaped his notice.

Tait’s relationship with Courtney Fountain began in the early 1840s, while she might have been in his employ as a housekeeper. She was originally from Winchester, Virginia and part of a minority (10%) of free blacks in Richmond at the time, but members of her family resided in the North and were active in abolitionist circles in both New York State and Massachusetts. It’s not entirely clear from Trent’s book how they ended up here, but Courtney’s sister Ann and brother John resided in Salem, as well as several cousins. Tait and Courtney had four children in the 1840s: Celine, Constance, Bacon Jr. and Josephine, each two years apart. Salem’s schools were desegregated in 1844 (thanks to the efforts of the Remonds) and Massachusetts abolished its anti-miscegenation law the year before. You can certainly understand the lure of Salem for Courtney, but it’s hard to picture Tait as a doting family man, which seems to be the only incentive for his departure from Richmond in 1852. In any case, he purchased the Leach House at 29 Cedar Street in July of that year: it looks like it was a lovely property, located on a bluff at the end of the street overlooking Mill Pond.

Bacon Tait is listed in the Salem Directories of the 1850s as a “merchant” living at 29 Cedar Street and in the 1855 state and 1860 federal censuses as well: there are no indications that Salem residents were outraged by his residence in their town or even aware of his existence. Charles Lenox Remond was living on Pond Street during the 1850s, just three streets over, and just a few doors down Cedar Street lived Adeline Roberts, a Salem schoolteacher and long-time corresponding secretary of the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society. Miss Roberts corresponded regularly with William Lloyd Garrison, Lucretia Mott, and other abolitionist leaders, and in the very year that Tait moved to Salem, she was organizing a series of seven lectures on the abolition movement to be held at the Salem Lyceum in the fall. Tait never appears in her letters, but she must have been aware of his residency. Were there whispers at the Lyceum before every lecture? Was Salem society gossiping behind closed doors? I just don’t know. Tait seems like a ghost in Salem, but he was still conducting his business in Richmond: I suspect a lot of family letter-burning later on. That’s the problem: we can’t see (or hear) whispers from the past or letters that have been destroyed, we can only speculate. I’m assuming that Courtney’s family was protecting her and her children (and by extension, him), and I’m also assuming he kept his head down and conducted his trade via post and travel. All census documents from Salem indicate that Courtney and Tait were married, but there is a difference between state and federal censuses in designation of race: the federal census indicates that the entire family was white while the Massachusetts censuses indicate that Courtney and her children were of mixed race. I’m not sure what this means in terms of their presentation or perception.

What happened when the war broke out? Tait seems to have returned to Richmond permanently, leaving his family in Salem. He instructed one of his daughters to sell the house on Cedar Street in 1864, yet they all appear on the Massachusetts census as living there in 1865. Both Courtney and Tait died in 1871: she in Salem, he in Richmond: their four children remained in Salem, residing at various addresses. Tait left several wills, and the most recent one, leaving his fortune “to his illegitimate children by a mulatto woman, who held to him the relation of housekeeper, he having no lawful wife” was contested by various partners and employees in Richmond. Many transactions dissolving his real estate ensued, but I have no idea where the money went. Courney’s death notice was printed in the Salem Register (as “Mrs. Courtney Tait, Richmond papers please copy,”) as was Tait’s, with no further identification or detail. She is buried in Harmony Grove Cemetery with a lovely epitaph from her children; he is buried at another Gothic Revival cemetery, Hollywood in Richmond, with no epitaph at all. As for his reception, or lack thereof, in Salem, I haven’t found the answer to my question, but maybe my presumption is wrong. Maybe Salem wasn’t an “abolitionist stronghold;” maybe it was home to only a small minority of very vocal abolitionists in the 1850s who invited William Lloyd Garrison to speak every other month, protested the Dredd Scott decision vehemently, organized August 1st Emancipation Day celebrations, and pushed for Charlotte Forten’s appointment as the first African-American teacher in the Salem public schools. We always want righteous causes to be more popular than they generally were. Or maybe Tait just maintained his privacy: this seems more possible at that time than today. As I think about the past and the present I am struck by how wide the gap was between Bacon Tait and many of his Salem neighbors: we tend to think of our own time as divisive, but our divisions seem relatively insignificant compared to theirs.

No stigma in Salem: Celine Tait Burding, Courtney and Tate’s eldest child, commissioned a Tait family plot in Harmony Grove Cemetery for her mother as well as her own family: she married Willard Burding in 1873, had four children, and died in Salem in 1886. Courtney’s gravestone in the center reads simply “Our Mother” and bears an inscription derived from Shall we Gather at the River, published only six years before: “on the March of the Beautiful River that flows by the Throne of God she waits for us.” In Virginia, Tait’s family is described in less reverential terms: Petersburg Progress-Index, June 21, 1871.


The Skeletons of Lagrange Street

Salem is a place where everybody always says that the “past is present” or something to that effect; one discerns the ongoing presence of the past in the old structures and streets and cemeteries. That used to ring true for me, but not so much anymore. I still have a sense of Salem as a palimpest city, though: with layers and layers of history beneath my feet, reinforced when I walk by one of the seldom-ceasing infrastructure projects downtown and see all the cobblestones that lie beneath. I often think of Salem in the nineteenth century, when there was so much new but also so much more old all around, as a time when people must really have been aware of the past in a material way because of the contrast: the factories were so big and noisy and the surviving relics of the “olden time” so decayed, rather than perfectly preserved (if they survive) today. And it seems as if every time one of those relics was demolished for new construction, more relics were found underground, sometimes human remains. Nathaniel Hawthorne has a story in one of his notebooks of a skeleton that was found, in parts, underneath High Streeet, identified by one of the older residents of the neighborhood as a Frenchmen who came to town. It was a notable, but not a shocking, discovery: I perused nineteenth-century Salem and Boston newspapers and regular reports of skeletons uncovered in Essex Country appeared fairly regularly, generally presumed to be Native Americans. Even early in the century, Salem’s great diarist, the Reverend William Bentley, ran over as soon as remains and “curiosities” emerged from the soil: to Winter Island, to Northfields, and to Southfields. Over time, the majority of the reported skeletons of Salem seem to have surfaced in a pretty specific area: in South Salem, along Palmer’s Cove, on a street that was called Lagrange in the 19th century and is now Leavitt. Here is the unfolding tale of their uncovering:

So, some awareness that there might have been an Indian Burial Ground in what was then Southfields as early as the 1850s, and a succession of extractions from 1809 on with no apparent effort to protect the site. Of course not, this follows in the tradition of founding father Thomas Jefferson, who conducted an archaelogical dig adjacent to Monticello even as he noted local Native Americans making “sorrowful” visitations, and Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes, who directed U.S. Army medical officers to collect the skulls of Native Americans in 1868, so that the craniological collection of the Army Medical Museum could facilitate “the progress of anthropological science by obtaining measurements of a large number of skulls of the aboriginal races of North America.” Later in the nineteenth century, the pseudo “race sciences” of phrenology and eugenics continued to justify this competitive collecting. The reference above to the Essex Insitute’s possession of an infant skeleton is not surprising, given that one of its founding institutions was the Essex County Natural History Society. It’s my only clue as to where any of these skeletons might have wound up (so far), but it is leading me nowhere: the Peabody Essex Museum’s 2018 completed inventory of human remains and associated funerary objects (in compliance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act or NAGPRA of 1990) does not reference remains from the Lagrange area specifically. The inventory includes “the physical remains of 45 individuals of Native American ancestry” taken from sites in Salisbury, Newbury, Ipswich, Gloucester, Marblehead, Revere and Salem. The Salem remains were taken from an “old cistern in Front Cellar in 1993” (????) and south Salem, so this could be Lagrange Street: the cranial fragments unearthed from this site apparently belonged to a teenager. It looks like one skeleton (in the 1892 clip) simply dissolved in the open air, but I am curious about how the rest of the remains were treated, and what became of them. My only remaining thread is intrepid medical examiner Frank S. Atwood, who seems to be taking the remains into professional custody, at the very least. Called to the scene of yet another discovery at the corner of English and Essex Streets in 1909, it is reported that he ordered their burial elsewhere. In just the past year or so, several unmarked graves of African-Americans have been identified and restored, and I’m wondering if that is within the realm of partial possibility for these earlier, displaced, settlers of Salem.

Lagrange Street on the 1911 Salem Atlas: in three years all this would be swept away by the great Salem Fire, and then rebuilding, again.


Dutch Treats

I believe that I am running out of architectural styles manifest in Salem: I’ve featured First Period houses several times, also Georgians, it’s always about Federals in this city, and I have also posted on both Greek and Gothic Revival houses. There are so many variations of Victorians: but certainly I have featured Italianate and Queen Anne houses. Like the Federal style, the Colonial Revival is very predominate in Salem so I could never really “cover” its breadth of expression, but every time I go off on an “Olde Salem” tangent I’m in that realm. I’m not sure I could find enough bungalows in Salem for a post (perhaps) and I’m just not interested in anything built after World War II. One conspicuous omission from this laundry list is Dutch Colonial, one of the most popular residential styles of the era between the wars. Salem certainly has some Dutch Colonials, so I set off on foot to see as many as I could. For the most part, this meant leaving the downtown for North and South Salem, as this was chiefly a “suburban” style in its heyday—when it was featured very prominently in all the architectural periodicals and popular texts like Richardson Little Wright’s Low Cost Suburban Homes. A Book of Suggestions for the Man with the Moderate Purse (1916). I love the caption under a rendering by architect Norman Baird Baker:  “the Dutch Colonial gambrel roof type of house stands preeminent for suburban life. Its roof provides ample room and the general lines are attractive and comfortable”.

Dutch collage

Dutch collage 2

The Dutch Colonials of North Salem do not seem like “starter homes” at all: more like homes which one would aspire to live in throughout one’s life! And one is for sale—or, rather, under contract. I’m also including this charming little house on Walter Street which strikes me as more Dutch than Dutch Colonial: it’s clearly earlier but I just think it belongs in this company.

Dutch North

Dutch North a

Dutch Colonial North Salem

Dutch Treat Walter Street

The Dutch Colonials of South Salem were all built after the Great Salem Fire of 1914: while their counterparts in the northern section of the city were constructed in a pastoral setting, these houses sprung from a wasteland! And that is why we have a more unusual example of a stucco Dutch Colonial: as fire prevention was at least as important as design.

Dutch South

Dutch South Roslyn

Dutch South Stucco

The Fire took out many buildings on the western end of the McIntire District in central Salem as well; a few Dutch Colonials arose in their place, adding to the very diverse streetscapes of the twentieth-century city. Those built-in benches above and below were definitely the must-have feature of 1919, or 1923.

Dutch Treat

Dutch Treat Warren


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