A Big Salem History Project, 1952!

I receive gifts from readers of the blog from time to time and they are all very special and much appreciated. A reader sent me a slim, illustrated and bound History of Salem prepared by a “committee of students and teachers of the Salem Public School System” in 1952 several years ago, and I was immediately charmed by it but not quite inspired to post about it. But yesterday I woke up and it was the first thing on (in?) my mind. I think I’m inspired by the end of the academic year and the completion of academic projects, by my own local history project, and by the Salem Quadricentennial planning, or lack thereof. The City has not put a lot of resources or time into planning for Salem’s 400th anniversary in 2026, and there have been meetings only for invited “stakeholders” rather than the general public. A dedicated website went live only last week, and the dedicated coordinator seems largely on her own. I was getting quite depressed about this, especially the lack of public engagement, but last week we came up with a neat (public) initiative at Salem State, so my depression turned into excitement—-and then I thought of this little book.

This little book has a strong voice, and it is a voice from 1952. It really captures the perspective of that year, that moment. Of course, there is the “White Man” and there are the “Indians” and they seem to have a very Thanksgiving-esque relationship. There are entire chapters on civic responsibilities (including a relatively long discussion of TAXES) and “Salem’s Contributions to our Country’s Call.” There are no women, and no one with anything but a very Anglo name, included in the chapter on “Famous Citizens of Salem.” It’s pure unbridled mid-century optimism, but from more of a working-class than privileged perspective. Students from the Salem Vocational High School contributed to this volume (including the great illustrations which I am including here—trying not to crop the names of the illlustrators), along with those from the Salem Classical and High School and the Phillips, Pickering, and Saltonstall Schools. This history portrays a city to which many visitors come to see the architecture, but is not yet Witch City. The Salem Witch Trials get a few pages; the Revolution gets more—even the Civil War gets more (we read about all the Union generals that visited Salem and that in 1866, “111 applications for financial assistance were received by the Naumkeag Army and Navy Relief from Civil War veterans and their families.” Details, details!)  The Salem Fire seems like a very, very recent memory: their parents and grandparents must have impressed it upon them.

And of course, World War II is a much more recent memory, even their memory. At the end of each chapter, there are “suggested activities” for students and two such activities were to “talk with relatives and friends and learn their reaction to the Pearl Harbor affair on December 7, 1941”  and to “bring in any decorations that your relatives have earned.” Pride characterizes this activity and this chapter, but really the tone throughout the entire text is one of pride, pride in Salem because it is an “important” city characterized by beautiful architecture and busy mills (not a contradiction in their representation) and its citizens have made “important” contributions to the nation. The students feel sure that [their readers] will be proud to say “I live in Salem, a city rich with dramatic reminders of the past, a city which with its great industrial power offers me a bright and promising hope for my future.” 

Salem History: my Reading List

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).

May Day Weather

May Day is a day with many associations and representations: an “olde” festival with attendant Green Man and maypoles, a cross-quarter celebration of spring and surviving the winter, a day to celebrate and demonstrate the power of workers everywhere, a signal of alarm. In between its folkloric and political roles, however, it appears to have taken on the more mundane role of annual weather check. I went through some Massachusetts newspapers published in the nineteenth century to see how May Day was celebrated, if at all, and while there were occasional references to May Queens and lots of bad poetry, I found many more assessments of what’s in bloom and how present May Days compared to the past in terms of flora. Actually it was often more about the climate than the weather. Here’s a great evaluation from the Newburyport Herald in 1837: On the whole, we may consider ourselves as gainers in regard to climate. We enjoy longer summers, milder autumns and shorter winters than our ancestors enjoyed. Spring is the only season in regard to which we are losers. The celebrated season of “ethereal mildness” seems to be entirely degenerated — it is nothing but a constant alternation of summer and winter weather. Spring losers!

Dwight William Tryon, Early Spring in New England, 1897. Smithsonian Institution, Freer Gallery of Art. Gift of Charles Lang Freer.

The Salem papers presented poetry for May Day in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century but then switched to more wary but still hopeful assessments of the day and the weather at mid-century. In their stories on the first heralds/flowers of spring, one is immediately struck by the lack of references to tulips and daffodils: bulbs must have been a later thing?  It’s all about woodland natives, found in the “Great Pasture” off Highland Avenue. The Salem Gazette heralded a “May Morning Bouquet” in 1849, noting that May comes to us this year out of the atmosphere of an iceberg, as it were, but it may prove as pleasant a month as the poets avow it to be in less fickle climes. Five plants made up this bouquet: hepatica (which was generally called liverwort), Sanguinaria canadensis (bloodroot), anemones, mayflowers (trailing arbutus), and violets. These hardly flowers “will amply reward a search on May morning amongst the thickets and rocks in the neighborhood. But then it may rain, or freeze, or snow!”

Liverwort and Bloodroot in Charles F. Millspaugh’s Medicinal plants : an illustrated and descriptive guide to plants indigenous to and naturalized in the United States which are used in medicine, their description, origin, history, preparation, chemistry and physiological effects fully described (1892).

Anemone from William B. Barton’s Flora of North America (Volume 2), 1821.

Arbutus (also called Epigaea repens or Mayflower) in Jacob Bigelow’s American medical botany :being a collection of the native medicinal plants of the United States, containing their botanical history and chemical analysis, and properties and uses in medicine, diet and the arts (1817).

Violet from Jacob Sturm’s Deutschlands Flora in Abbildungen nach der Natur mit Beschreibungen (1798).

These are lovely little wildflowers: I have bloodroot in my garden and (unfortunately) violets too, but a bouquet? I think not, we need more robust flora for that. And please, I would prefer to stroll in a sunny green pasture rather than among the “thickets and rocks.” Maybe we should not have abandoned our devotion to the Green Man over here in Puritan New England: we have consequently become spring losers! 

Salem’s Uber-Inglenook

A month or so ago, I was very fortunate to be able to tour Salem’s former Superior Court, a grand Victorian castle, complete with turret, built in 1861 and expanded in the 1880s. It’s been mothballed for quite some time, and is now part of big development/redevelopment project, in which it and its adjoining Greek Revival courthouse will be restored and a new multi-story residential building built alongside Salem’s train station. My husband’s firm, Seger Architects, is working on this project, and so after a big of nagging, I got to tag along on one of their site visits. I recall being in this building before, but I was not really present in the way I was on my recent visit: there were only a few people milling about and I had time to focus on every little detail. And there were so many: iron staircases with intricate designs, all manner of rounded and squared and arched windows, crafted courtrooms, with carved benches and siding and vaulted ceilings, small spaces for conferences delineated by smooth panelled doors and frosted windows, wooden phone booths, tiled floors with mosaic embellishments. But above and beyond all, there is the Essex County Law Library, with its magnificient “walk-in” fireplace. It’s impossible to describe the baronial beauty and presence of this particular room and feature, so I might as well just show you some photographs, of present and past.

My photos of the former Essex County Law Library and the Superior Court exterior from last month; Frank Cousins’ photographs from c. 1891, Cousins Collection, Phillips Library via Digital Commonwealth.

I posted a few photos on facebook, and one of my friends referred to this fireplace as an “inglenook,” which surprised me, as I think of inglenooks as small cozy places in pubs, where one gathers around the fire. This spacious enclosure does not strike me as particularly “nook-like”.  But the definition (according to Curl’s Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture) is more general: “corner of a large fireplace where the opening of the chimney was far larger than needed, and there was space where persons could sit” and “area off a room containing the fireplace, often with a small window, fitted with seats behind the chimney-breast and the wall.” So maybe it is an inglenook–it certainly could be fitted with myriad seats, though it was more purposely filled with bookcases. In the Cousins photographs above, you can see the windows on each side of the fireplace, long blocked-off. This area is more of an inglenook room, though, and its size and scale certainly impressed contemporaries when it was unveiled to the public upon its completion in 1889: “on entering it one is confronted by a fireplace so massive that, like one in the Castle of Chillon, it seems to dominate the whole room” wrote Thomas Franklin Hunt in the 1895 edition of Visitor’s Guide to Salem. I looked at all the Chillon fireplaces, and could not find one to rival Salem’s (imho) and none seem to be encased in inglenooks, so I think we have a very special space here, and also a relatively early example of the great inglenook revival ushered in by the Arts and Crafts movement on both sides of the Atlantic. The original architect of the Superior Court was Enoch Fuller of Boston; the 1880s addition was the commission of Wheeler & Northend of Lynn, the partnership of Holman King Wheeler and and William Wheelwright Northend. I’m not sure which partner designed the Library and its majestic fireplace, but I’d like to think it was Northend as he was from Salem and the younger brother of one of my favorite Salem authors, Mary Harrod Northend. In any case, it was was influenced by a burgeoning Tudor-esque revival of inglenooks, manifested in Britain most notably by the Richard Norman Shaw at Cragside in Northumberland in the 1870s and 1880s  and locally by Arthur Little’s renovation of Caroline Emmerton’s house on Essex Street in the latter decade.

Cragside Inglenook, Royal Academy of Arts; Sir William George Armstrong, 1st Baron Armstrong of Cragside (1810–1900), in the Inglenook at Cragside, by Henry Hetherington Emmerson, National Trust Collection; Arthur Little’s rendering of the dining room inglenook at 328 Essex Street, Salem, American Architect & Building News, November, 1890.

These inglenook fireplaces were the forerunners of more generic variants featured a few decades later in the pages of The Craftsman and on the cover of the Inglenook magazine. Like William Morris in Britain, Gustav Stickley loved these crafted “rooms within rooms”: for every bungalow an inglenook! It seems like this feature came to symbol craftsmanship in the early twentieth century, so it seems appropriate that the ultimate inglenook is right here in Salem, a very well-crafted city until recent decades. It’s not clear what new function the former library will serve in the future, but I’m hopeful that more people will be able to take (walk!) in this treasure in the years to come.

Gustav Stickley, Craftsman houses : a book for home–makers (1913). Cover of the weekly Inglenook magazine, 1906.

Jacobean Style

Has anybody been watching Mary & George? So much texture! Dark and rich. I’m not sure what I think of the whole presentation in terms of its storyline and representations, but the ambiance and environment seem evocative to me, while also exaggerated: in the very first episode Julianne Moore’s Mary snares her second husband wearing a hat embellished by pheasant feathers and rabbit ears! Not being an art historian, I’m never sure whether or not the “Jacobean” style I admire is authentic or revived/amplified. But I like it. To me, it’s as if the early Stuarts ramped up everything Elizabethan—and then added their own more luxurious and whimsical touches. I love the very clever Anne of Denmark in this series: and she is the living, breathing clotheshorse I always thought she was. I’m not sure where the costume designer found her/his inspiration, but if I were charged with the task I would go right to a contemporary visual source: a portfolio of watercolor renderings of Royal, military and court costumes of the time of James I, “probably by an Italian artist.” I’ve been using these images in my classes for years, and while they certainly have a continental/Italian gaze, I still think they are representative of the age. Most of the experts seem to think that these images were made for a contemporary friendship album, called an album amicorum.

I assume these first three images are the King, the Queen, and their eldest son Henry Frederick, who died of typhoid in 1612—if they date from after that date, I guess that’s Prince Charles draped (like his mother) in fleur-de-lis, as the Stuarts were still claiming French sovereignty.

So many courtiers, or are these also the King and Queen? I can’t quite tell.I know those two never went riding around on one horse together, or cuddled under a tree by a big hat and a small castle.

These carriage scenes are great, but the most compelling images in this portfolio are those at the table—for meals and cards, or both. There’s just something about them: I love out-of-scale depictions and those are very BIG cards and wineglasses. The bright colors against the dark walls and the floor! The people somehow look both happy and wooden at the same time.

Julianne Moore is certainly not wooden in Mary & George and below she is in her big-eared hat: could it be a Jacobean variation on hearing all, as depicted by the more subtle (human) ears (and mouths and eyes) on Queen Elizabeth’s dress in her Rainbow Portrait and envisioned by a 21st century eye?

 

Queen Elizabeth, Julianne Moore, and Royal, military and court costumes of the time of James I, Folger Shakespeare Library.

Salem and the Eclipse of 1806

Apparently we have not seen a solar eclipse of such long “totality” since 1806, and in that year the “point of greatest duration” of daytime darkness was Salem, timed at 4 minutes and 48 seconds! When I read that, I had to drop everything and do a little research into this very notable eclipse in early America, starting with a pamphlet by Boston instrument maker Andrew Newell entitled Darkness at Noon (more than a century before and much more literal than Koestler). This is a wonderful little book that Newell published just before the 1806 eclipse, to get everybody ready, and it actually made me more excited for the great North American Eclipse of 2024! I will not be following Newell’s advice for eclipse-viewing, however, using “a piece of common window glass, smoaked on both sides sufficiently to prevent any injury to the eye.” The author James Fenimore Cooper offered colored panes of glass to friends and family viewing the eclipse in New York State, where Spanish astronomer José Joaquín de Ferrer, made measurements and drawings of its totality in Kinderhook, and coined the term corona.

Andrew Newell, Darkness at Noon: or, the Great Solar Eclipse of the 16^th of June, 1806. Boston: D. Carlisle & A. Newell, 1806 (you can read the entire text at the Linda Hall Library); Ferrer’s Corona Sketch, 1806.

Back in Salem, the famed mathemetician Nathaniel Bowditch was also recording observations of the phenomena he observed on June 16, 1806, right in his backyard. They were later published as a Memoir on the Solar Eclipse of June 16, 1806 (plus an addition). You can sense the intellectual community in which he lived from his notes:  The time of conjunction deduced from my observations at Salem compared with the time of conjunction at Paris, computed by La Lande, gives, by allowing 53 seconds for the difference of meridians of Salem and Cambridge, the longitude of Cambridge Ah. 44 24 *9 W from Greenwich, as is shown in the additional observations on that eclipse given in this memoir. Among the general population, there is no sense of fear, only wonder, and the most popular adjective in day-after reports of the eclipse was sublime. The Salem Gazette’s report was purely descriptive: Yesterday the great solar eclipse took place, agreeably to the calculations which had been made. The day was very favorable to viewing it. The air was remarkably clear, and there was not a cloud in the hemisphere. As the sun shut in, the stars appeared, and many were visible at the time of total darkness. A considerable alteration in the temperature was felt during the continuance of the eclipse.

Philadelphia publisher John Poulson adapted Newell’s pamphlet for his Philadelphia readers in the  “Approaching Solar Eclipse” (courtesy Boston Rare Maps) and Simeon De Witt, the Surveyor General of New York State, described the eclipse in Albany in a letter to the American Philosophical Society which was accompaned by a painting of its corona by local artist Ezra Ames. (I’m kind of anxious about how these guys captured their coronas!) The broad swath of the 1806 eclipse.

Spring 2024 Reading List

I have been reading! I intend to read more! So much writing and so much teaching over the past few years, I’ve had very little time for general reading, as opposed to targeted reading, trying to find the answer to some very specific question in as little time as possible. That’s not really reading, so I’m trying to get back into the “practice”.  We have our Salem’s Centuries manuscript in now, and the semester is winding down, so I’ve ordered up a stack of books and am digging in. If you’re familiar with my reading lists you know there’s never a lot of fiction: novels cannot retain my attention unless I’m on a plane. Otherwise, I put them back in the stack and generally forget about them. I do have one novel on this list, Richard Harris’s Act of Oblivion, which is about the manhunt for two regicides in seventeenth-century New England, a topic I can’t resist. I haven’t started it yet, and I’ll be thrilled if I finish it. I like the idea of reading novels and I hope to return to fiction at some point, but that time is not now; I’m just too hungry for information, even when reading for pleasure. Most of these books are adjacent to some of my scholarly interests, but not spot-on, although I could have written this first one and wish I did!

This first batch of books (above) could be generally classified as early modern cultural history and I’m kidding, I certainly could not have written Jill Burke’s great book about beauty culture in Renaissance Italy. I included a few recipes for cosmetics in my book, The Practical Renaissance, and made both a mental and actual note (in one of my writing notebooks) to dig a little deeper into that realm but then forgot all about it. Burke’s book is both scholarly and accessible and if you’re interested in learning more about her topic check out the Wellcome Collection’s “Cult of Beauty” exhibit. Ulinka Rublack is another early modern historian whom I admire and her latest work is on the shifting patronage environment in that era, through the perspective of Albrecht Durer’s career. Like Burke, Rublack really opens what has been/could be a much more contained “world”.  Marcy Norton’s The Tame and the Wild. People and Animals after 1492 is also global in its orientation and focused on a topic which I explore in several of my courses (now that I think about it, ALL of my courses): how Europeans viewed the New World/ how the New World impacted the Old. In this case, all about animals. Spycraft is not quite out yet, but soon, and I really want to read it so I put it on this list. I just finished The Wisest Fool, a very engaging biography of King James I and VI, as I wanted to be all ready for the debut of Mary & George this week! Victoria Finlay’s Fabric: the Hidden History of the Material World, is one of those sweeping “commodity histories” which are always on my lists—I haven’t read this yet, but I enjoyed her last book on color.

The last three books are a bit more local: as noted above, Act of Oblivion is historical fiction, largely set in New England, Flee North is about the African-American shoemaker//abolitionist/author/ liberator Thomas Smallwood, and A House Restored is about the restoration of a Massachusetts house.  Flee North is the only book on this list with any sort of Salem connection: Smallwood worked with Charles Torrey, former minister at the Howard Street Church in Salem, to organze escapes of enslaved men and women from the Washington-Baltimore region. I believe that Lee McColgan, whose restoration of the first-period Loring House in Pembroke, Massachusetts is detailed in A House Restored, is going to be one of the speakers at Historic Salem’s annual meeting next month, so I will be reading his soon-to-be released book in advance.

Salem Women’s History Month 2024

As kind of a follow-up to that big commemorative year of 2020, during which I focused on Salem women’s history every Saturday in commemoration of the centennial suffrage anniversary, I have spotlighted notable Salem women on social media every day during this Women’s History Month of March. So this is a summary post of that effort as we near the month’s end. My primary motivation was to feature women who are seldom featured on social media because there is no visual image attached to them: no photograph, no portrait, not even a romantic Victorian illustration. Social media is of course a very visual medium, so a lot of people from the past, women and men, get left off and out. My impression, however (and it is just an impression, not a scientific survey), is that there are 10 photos of men for every 1 of women once we get into the photographic age, however, so I think women get left out more than men. Before photography, all bets are off, but visual depictions are likely a bit more gender-neutral as only the elites get “pictured”. I think about this lack of visualization, mostly because I see the same images of Salem women popping up all the time, mostly illustrations from books or from English pamphlets of the poor women accused of witchcraft in 1692. These women seem to be the exclusive representatives of Salem women in the seventeenth century, so I was also motivated to feature some some Salem women from that century who actually had nothing to do with the Salem Witch Trials. To represent women who have no visual representation, from that century and after, I had to be a bit creative: essentially I created “silhouettes” from prints or photographs of contemporary women. There was a lot of image doctoring, I admit freely! I just wanted to get these women’s stories out there. Below are some collages of my posts as well as a few individual ones: they were accompanied by relatively short narratives and I really want to dig deeper into some of these women’s stories here. I’d love to hear who intrigues you, and who is missing!

I don’t know what the very impressive chairwomen of the Salem Sanitary Society, who worked tirelessly to collect and send supplies to Salem soldiers at the front(s) during the Civil War, really looked like, nor Salem High School student Margaret Tileston, whose great diaries at Harvard really capture schoolgirl life in the 1880s. But we there are extant images of Salem Normal School’s (now Salem State University) first Japanese student, Kin Kato, and the extraordinary Anna Northend Benjamin, the first female war photojournalist in American history: I can’t believe these women, and so many women, have been lost to (in) history. After more than a decade of blogging and an entire manuscript on Salem history, I thought I knew a bit about it, but no, there’s always much more to learn.

The Grass is Greener

I’m home now from my spring break road trip, so this is part two: the way home. Looking through my photographs, all I could think of was green. You know I’m a die-hard New Englander, but the mid-atlantic and southern states simply have better springs, period. All is green rather than brown. We’ll get that green, but it won’t be for a while. Picking up where I left off with my last post, I drove south from Mount Vernon into Virginia, stopping at Fredericksburg, Richmond, Williamsburg and Yorktown before turning north towards home. I was still following my George Washington route, and Fredericksburg is really GW-central, with his childhood, mother’s and sister’s home located there, as well as his brother’s house, which is now a tavern. Everything was great, Fredericksburg is a really nice town, but the world kind of slowed down for me when I walked through the doors of Kenmore, the house of his sister and her family. It immediately became my favorite house, displacing Gardner-Pingree here in Salem and last year’s spring break highlight, the Read House in New Castle, Delaware. I’m never loyal, there’s always a new favorite house around the corner, but wow, this 177os house is something: it experienced the typical Colonial Revival restoration and then a later one and is primarily known for its elaborately-designed stucco ceilings, crafted by the same anonymous “Stucco Man” (presumably an enslaved or indentured servant) who worked on Mount Vernon.

It’s quite a house, representing a significant investment of money and labor. Betsy Washington Lewis (pictured in this last photo) and her husband Fielding were both patriots and slaveowners, representing and presenting the typical Virginia conundrum. The interpretation at Kenmore emphasizes both aspects of its owners’ lives, including the financial hardships incurred by their contributions to the cause and the life and work of the over 130 enslaved persons who inhabited the Lewis plantation. The Civil War experience of what was once a working plantation but now seems like a stately townhouse in the midst of Fredericksburg, presents another dichotomy: that beautiful dining room pictured above served as a surgery and there are both Union and Confederate cannonballs embedded in its brick exterior.

I spent so much time at Kenmore that I slighted the rest of charming Fredericksburg, which seemed to me like a perfect town for tourists and residents alike—-I didn’t get to the Civil War history or even to the James Monroe Museum, went quickly through Mary Washington’s house (much more humble than that of her daughter’s, the charming garden is above) and then I was off to see my sisters-in-law in Richmond. The following day was the best: Richmond really has it all for the heritage tourist. First off, it is a city that has made a thoughful and engaging (and likely expensive) commitment to public history: only Arthur Ashe remains on Monument Avenue and on the waterfront, adjacent to the new American Civil War Museum, is a poignant statue commemorating emancipation as well as a creative installation on the fall of Richmond in April of 1865 on a bridge/dam walk across the James River. There are well-marked heritage trails within the historic districts of the city, and mansions outside. And the Poe Museum, located in a cluster of buildings which include Richmond’s oldest house! You really can have it all. We went to an amazing performance (??? lecture??? I wouldn’t call it a tour) at St. John’s Episcopal Church, where Patrick Henry gave his give me liberty or give me death speech, and now I am a complete Henry fan.

Richmond! Brown’s Island, Liberty Trail, Agecroft Hall and the Virginia House, Poe Museum.

In my last few days, I drove down to Surry, Virginia to see Bacon’s Castle, a very rare and beautifully restored Jacobean plantation house with outbuildings (including an 1830 slave dwelling) and gardens: this was a nice tidewater comparison to the Sotterly plantation I had seen in Maryland just days before. Then if was across the river (by ferry!) to Williamsburg and Yorktown, to finish the George Washington tour. I had been to both places before, so no surprises, but I was trying to look at all of the places that I visited on this trip (my Jersey stops, Annapolis, Alexandria, as well as Fredericksburg and Richmond) as more of a tourist than an historian, so that I could try to look at Salem the same way and perhaps become a bit more comfortable with its evolution into a year-round tourist destination. Could smooth brick sidewalks, plentiful public bathrooms and parking, a diverse array of shops, and aesthetic and informative signage be in our future? Fixed-in-time Colonial Williamsburg is certainly an unrealistic and unfair comparison, but there were more robust tourist infrastructures nearly everwhere I went.

Bacon’s Castle, the Nelson House at Yorktown and Whythe House in Williamsburg on Palace Green, where General Washington was headquartered before Yorktown. Dream garden—ready to go.

The Road to Mount Vernon

We have spring break this week, so I’m on one of my road trips, loosely following the footsteps of George Washington. I always feel like I need a theme beyond “interesting old houses” but often I find one along the way which replaces my original intention. Not this year though: George has been pretty present! I started out in northern New Jersey, where I visited a house that I’d long wanted to see because I love Gothic Revival architecture and it looked like the ultimate GR cottage, but it turned out to be much older with a Washington connection: the Hermitage in Ho-Ho-Kus. General Washington was headquartered here following the Battle of Monmouth and during the court martial of General Charles Lee in the summer of 1778, in the company of his aide Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette. Aaron Burr was there too, and a secret romance was initiated between the future Vice-President/duelist and the lady of the house, Theodosia Prevost, who happened to be married to a British officer. At the close of the war and after the death of Theodosia’s husband, the two were married. Decades later this very strategic house was “gothicized” and acquired its present appearance.

Not too far away is a house where Washington and his men spent much more time: the Dey Mansion in Wayne, New Jersey, which served as the General’s headquarters for several months in 1780. This is a beautiful property, maintained and interpreted by Passaic County, which acquired the house in 1934 after which it underwent an extensive restoration. A very knowledgeable guide took me all around the house, even into the atttic, which was absolutely necessary as I couldn’t understand how so many people could have lived in this house during the General’s residence: the Dey family did not vacate! You’re not going to see the house’s gambrel-esque roof that accomodates all this space because I didn’t have a drone with me, but check out the website. It’s a stately house for sure, but the spacious attic made everything clear. Washington, of course, was given the two best rooms, a large parlor/office on the first floor and a bedroom just above, by the master of the house, Colonel Theunis Dey.

The Dey Mansion: the first photos above—all the way down to the blue parlor—are rooms used by George Washington and his aides, including Alexander Hamilton. Then there’s the semi-detached restoration kitchen, and the spacious attic.

So at this point and place, if you really want to do the Washington tour, you should probably drive to Morristown, Trenton, Princeton, east to the Monmouth Battlefield, west to Valley Forge. But I’ve been to all those places several times, so I drove to the General’s last Jersey and last period headquarters in Franklin Township, a rather isolated farmhouse called Rockingham. No Pennsylvania for me; I headed south into Maryland to Annapolis, where Washington resigned his commission at the beautiful State House (obviously my chronology is all over the place, but these two stops did dovetail). I just really wanted to go to Annapolis in any case; George was just an excuse.

Rockingham: Washington’s last headquarters—and on to Annapolis.

A bronze George in the old Senate Chambers of the Maryland State House (Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass are just across the way); Hammond-Harwood, Shiplap and row houses in Annapolis.

On to Alexandria, where Washington touchstones abound, given its proximity to Mount Vernon. Like Annapolis, but MORE, Alexandria is full of beautiful townhouses: I started in the center of the Old Town and made my Washington stops—his church, his townhouse (actually a reproduction thereof) his pub—and then walked the streets taking photographs of doorways and wreaths, myriad details, spite and skinny houses. A bright sunshiney day: you almost can’t see this bronze Washington, sitting on a bench outside Duvall’s Tavern, where he was feted after his great victory.

From my parking place on North Washington Street, I drove straight out to Alexandria to Mount Vernon, mere miles away, along the George Washington Memorial Parkway. It definitely felt kind of like a pilgrimage at this point! I have been to Mount Vernon before, but have no vivid memories—an obligatory school trip, I think. It’s one of those houses that looks much bigger on the outside than the inside: it feels quite intimate within, especially as one side was closed off for renovations. I signed up for the “in-depth” tour so I could get some interpretation–and up into the third floor. While the mansion is a must-see, I think you can actually learn more about Washington from the many outbuildings on the estate: he was “Farmer George” and for all of his heroism he was also a slaveowner who seemed to have no regrets in that capacity. There are a lot of Washington contradictions, and there are a lot of Mount Vernon contradictions: while the subject of slavery is addressed up front the overall impression—reinforced especially at the museum adjacent to the orientation center—is of a “great man.” It was a bit too ra-ra for me, but I’m still headed to Yorktown for the last leg of my trip.

Mount Vernon: a house with 10 bedrooms and no bathrooms: the white-canopied bed is in the bedroom where Washington died. The presidential desk, parlor and dining room, key to the Bastille (a gift from Lafayette), greenhouse and garden, and view of the Potomac from the porch.