One of the chapters I wrote for the forthcoming (on January 6!) Salem’s Centuries was on the Colonial Revival, and in it I  explored Salem’s experience of that cultural movement as well as Salem’s influence in that cultural movement. I am no art historian, so my purview is very broad, and more focused on popular distillations of “Salem style” than original creations.  There were so many references to “Old Salem” in the first three decades of the twentieth century; now when you hear that phrase it is generally referring to Old Salem Museum & Gardens in North Carolina. But in the 1920s and 1930s, you could buy silverware, furniture, rugs, wallpaper, draperies, and ceramics influenced by “Old Salem.” One product that was particularly effective at conjuring up an image of a very romanticized Salem during its commercial heyday was the “Old Salem” line of china manufactured by Copeland starting in Salem’s tricentennial year of 1926 into the 1950s. This was a “Blue Room” issue marketed under Copeland’s original name Spode, for extra transferware sentimental appeal. I think it was first issued in a polychrome pattern, but the blue-and-white version really took off in the U.S., if advertisements and auction lots are any indication.

I’ve included a snip of text from a House Beautiful feature on “colonial” dinnerware from the 1930s in this last image because there’s a lot there/here. First of all, I love this line about how Old Salem the pattern evokes Old Salem the place, a place lost in time, when “the shoe factories had not yet banished the salty flavor of its existence.” Very Colonial Revival. The author wants to emphasize the pattern’s revival and continuity: it was originally produced back in that “salty” past and New Englanders have always bought Spode. I do find the “original production” assertion a bit confusing as the pattern does indeed feature ships, though not exclusively Salem ships, and the settings are clearly European. In fact, Old Salem, which was produced with old copper plate transfers of Italian views, is kind of a composite view in several ways: old world, new world, maritime, floral, all fused together by the magic of transferware for Salem’s 400th and America’s 150th.