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.

Dorothy Talby

I’m starting out Women’s History Month with a Salem tragedy of the seventeenth century, and gratitude that this story popped into my mind at this time, better late than never. I wrote about Hugh Peter, the fourth pastor of Salem’s First Church and later Oliver Cromwell’s chaplain and thus a doomed regicide in England, for our forthcoming book and I tried to give him a comprehensive, current, and critical treatment even though my piece is one of our shorter “interludes.” I included his slave-holding, documented in Harvard’s recent Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery report, and did a deep dive into the recent historiography of the English Revolution. I thought I had Peter all buttoned up, but then I woke up in the middle of the night last week and thought “Dorothy Talby!” Dorothy became the first entry of a social media series on lesser-known women in Salem’s history on this past Friday and I researched her all weekend, so I could tell her story here and in my revised piece on Peter, once it comes back from peer review.

I don’t know what Dorothy Talby looked like: I’m making “silhouettes” from contemporary sources to depict the women I’m featuring on social media this month and I’m sure several will end up here. There’s a real picture problem with pre-modern women: either they are not pictured at all or they are pictured by romanticized images from the last century or so. I used one of Wenceslaus Hollar’s wonderful images from the collection at the University of Toronto for Dorothy’s “silhouette”.

Like everyone in Salem in the 1630s, Dorothy Talby was an emigré. She and her family arrived from Puritan-centric Lincolnshire in 1635, apparently following the popular pastor John Cotton. The Talbys (spelled Taulbee earlier and in variations in Massachusetts), including Dorothy, her husband John, and their five children, arrived in Salem at a rather anxious time, as several settlers—mostly women—were quite vocal in their support of the expelled Roger Williams and and critical of his replacement by Peter. And down in Boston, there was another woman stirring up schism: Anne Hutchinson and her Antimonian challenge. There’s a happy reference to Dorothy in October of 1636 when her sixth child, a daughter named Difficulty, was baptized, but after that it’s all trouble. She fell in and out of troublesome states when she was violent towards her husband, for which she received public admonishments, whipping, and eventually a sentence of being bound and tied to a stake on one of Salem’s main streets. Judge William Hathorne’s summary order used language a bit less condemning than that in his judgements against Salem’s Quakers several decades later:

Whereas Dorethy the wyfe of John Talbie not only broak that peach & love wch ought to have beene both betwixt them, but also hath violentlie broke the kings peace, by frequent Laying hands upon hir husband to the danger of his Life, & Contemned Authority, not coming before them upon command, It is therefore ordered that for her misdemeaner passed & for prvention of future evills that are feared wilbe committed by hir if shee be Lefte att hir Libertie. That she shall be bound & chained to some post where shee shall be restrained of hir libertye to goe abroad or comminge to hir husband till shee manefest some change of hir course….Only it is pmitted that she shall come to the place of gods worshipp, to enjoy his ordenances.

Dorothy’s course stilled for a spell or two, but it did not change: she strayed intently towards “future evils” as she seeemed to believe that it was her duty to remove her entire family from their earthly misery. In December of 1638, she strangled her youngest child, Difficulty, and confessed to the crime after being threatened with peine forte et dure. She was executed days later in Boston, requesting beheading but denied, stuffing the mask given to her into her collar, swinging her legs towards the ladder until she died. We don’t hear the word “revelation” from Dorothy herself, but we do from John Winthrop’s journel entry (a “revelation from heaven”) as well as from Peter, her pastor, who cautioned the attendees of her execution not to lean into “imaginery revelations”. Both men seem to be throwing Dorothy in with Anne Hutchinson and her immediate revelations, then threatening their church. Winthrop does use the m[elancholy] word; Peter does not. Melencholy was an ancient term, experiencing a revival in early modern health manuals and most especially Robert Burton’s popular Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), yet there was little effort to apply any of its old/new theories to Dorothy Talby; she was in the hands of God only in New England.

A more radical intervention of the age: itinerant surgeon extracting stones from a woman’s head; symbolising the removal of her ‘folly’ (insanity). Line engraving after N. Weydtmans after himself, 17th century. Wellcome Collection.

Centuries later, Dorothy Talby was a useful anecdote for those who wanted to shade the Puritan past, or recount “cruel and unusual punishments of bygone days.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, always ready to mine his family’s past for his own benefit, pictured Dorothy in his Main-Street:”chained to a post at the corner of Prison Lane, with the hot sun blazing on her matronly face, and all for no other offence than lifting her hand against her husband, while Oliver Wendell Holmes judged her “mad as Ophelia.” It’s so easy to diagnose the dead!

“In my joy I was as a bouncing sparrow”

We are in the last week of February and I have yet to produce a post for Black History Month, so here it is!  I like to engage with historical markers and months; it keeps history “current” for me. I’ve known about two formerly enslaved men with connections to Salem for a while, but have never wrote about either Jacob Stroyer or John Andrew Jackson. Both came from South Carolina and both wrote narratives of their lives in the South. Stroyer’s My life in the South (1879)is the better-known book, and he lived in Salem for a much longer time, arriving in 1876 as a newly-ordinated Methodist Episcopal pastor and establishing a chapel for Salem’s small African American community on Lafayette Street shortly thereafter, a mission which he oversaw for the rest of his life. Jackson’s time in Salem was relatively short, and his memoir less well-known, but he’s my focus today. I first learned about him a decade or so ago when I came across an advertising piece for a talk he gave on a ship in Salem Harbor, the SS Alliance, in 1867: a fundraiser for a school he hoped to open in his native state in particular, and for the Freedmen’s Bureau in general. It was just about this time that the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society was shifting its focus to the Bureau, so I imagine Jackson’s talk was well-attended.

American Antiquarian Society

As you can see, the event flyer featured the same “flyer” as the title page of Jackson’s book from five years before: this was definitely Jackson’s calling card, and it evokes the personality on display in his book. Stroyer was emancipated, but Jackson escaped, and the details of his adventurous journeys balance those of his more harrowing experience of enslavement (somewhat–not really). First he fled to Charleston during the Christmas celebrations of 1846, and then he was New England-bound on a ship whose captain vowed to put him off on the first southbound vessel they met. Fortunately for Jackson, they met none, and  he made it to Boston where he felt his first sense of freedom on  February 10, 1847:  I had escaped from hell to heaven, for I felt as I had never felt before — that is, master of myself \ and in my joy I was as a bouncing sparrow.

Jackson worked in Boston briefly but then made his way to Salem, where he worked in tanneries during the day and a sawmill at night: he was desperate to raise enough money to purchase his family members and his inquiries toward that aim eventually endangered his position in Massachusetts, especially after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. Just as I was beginning to be settled at Salem, he writes, that most atrocious of all laws….was passed, and I was compelled to flee in disguise from a comfortable home (on Pratt Street), a comfortable situation, and good wages, to take refuge in Canada. Jackson made his way north along the Underground Railroad, staying at none other than Harriet Beecher Stowe’s house in Brunswick, Maine en route. She listened to his story and even examined the scars on his back, one year before beginning to work on what would become Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Jackson’s journey(s) continued from New Brunswick to Great Britain, where he lectured on the Anti-Slavery circuit: I keep wondering if he crossed paths with Sarah Remond Parker there, but I think I can’t find any documentation (yet).

Maine and New Hampshire: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s House in Brunswick, now owned by Bowdoin College, and the African-American Burial Ground in Portsmouth, NH: the statue on the right made me think of Jackson yesterday morning. 

After the war and his return to America, Jackson became an agent for the Freedmen’s Bureau and lived in the Connecticut River Valley, taking frequent trips back to South Carolina and returning to Salem at least once, to lecture at the Salem Lyceum in 1872. He had missions: of finding family members, building schools in the South, even buying the plantation on which he was enslaved to provide work opportunities for the his fellow formerly-enslaved brethren. He didn’t accomplish any of those goals, but he told his story, really well and to as many people as possible,  in both print and person, demolishing the folklore of that most “peculiar institution.”

Salem Register, March 13, 1871

New York Library Digital Collections

A new collection of 19th century speeches by African Americans in Britain and Ireland from Edinburgh University Press will be published next month—including speeches by the Remonds—not sure about Jackson. The connections—-metaphorical, literary, artistic—between birds and slavery are many of course, and the National Audobon Society has been under intense pressure over the past few years to change its name as its namesake was a slaveowner: see statement here.

A Salem Walking Tour for Presidents Day

Sorry I’m a little late with this Presidents Day post, but I woke up this morning with an earnest desire to take a walk around Salem, an urge I haven’t felt for quite some time. And since it was Presidents Day, I had a walking theme, which is always nice. We had a lovely weekend in New Hampshire with old friends and a equally lovely dinner with my brother and brother-in-law when we returned last night, and I woke up feeling happy and finally rested from finishing THE BOOK. So off I went in search of presidential places on this sunny but chilly day. This is a little breezy, I certainly didn’t do any research, so feel free to make corrections and/or additions. I’ve plotted my tour on a 1915 “New Map of Salem for the for Motorists and Tourists” from the Library of Congress, and most of the tour stops (marked with stars) are standing today: one had yet to be built (the Hawthorne Hotel) and another (the Ruck House, marked by a special star) was torn down to make way for the new Post Office in the 1920s, along with 50+ other old structures in the vicinity.

I always start my walking tours at Hamilton Hall on lower Chestnut Street because I live right next door. So many things happened at the Hall, however, that it is not only a convenient place but also a logical place to start a Salem history tour. Quite a few presidents have visited the Hall, John Quincy Adams, Martin van Buren, and Theodore Roosevelt for certain. The latter came up to Salem from Harvard for debutante assemblies in the later 1870s, and I think he might have even met his first wife, Alice Lee, there, as several letters in the Pusey Library refer to their courtship amidst the assemblies. Then Vice-President Van Buren reportedly referred to Chestnut Street as “the most beautiful street I have ever seen” at an 1817 reception though this oft-quoted opinion has been attributed to others.

Keep walking up Chestnut and cross over to Essex on Flint, then walk eastward towards Grace Church, our second stop. President William Howard Taft, who maintained  “Summer White Houses” over in Beverly for several seasons, attended services here occasionally from 1909-1912. Like several other presidents, Taft also visited the Peabody Museum and the Essex Institute and spoke at the Salem Armory, and an endorsement from Mrs. Taft indicates that he was a big fan of the chocolates at the Moustakis Brothers’ “Palace of the Sweets” at 220 Essex Street (although I’m pretty sure he didn’t shop for them there himself.) Continue walking eastward on Essex and cross over to Federal Street at Monroe, after passing the Cabot-Low-Endicott house on the right: I really think President Grover Cleveland visited his first Secretary of War, William Crowninshield Endicottt, there but I can’t find the documentation.

On Federal, we’re just going to head west for a bit until we come to the Peabody Essex Museum’s Assembly House, where President George Washington was wined and dined at a reception during his big trip to Salem in October of 1789–he stayed at the Joshua Ward House on the street that would be renamed in his honor after this visit, now The Merchant Hotel. Then it’s a long walk towards downtown along Federal Street to Washington and the Tabernacle Church, where Calvin Coolidge attended services while maintaining his Summer White House in Swampscott in the 1920s. Then we walk down to Town House Square where several presidents traversed and campaigned, including Ulysses S. Grant, Chester Arthur, and Theodore Roosevelt.

President and Mrs. Coolidge attending services at the Tabernacle Church, Salem, on July 4, 1925, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.

Walk down Essex Street to the East India Marine Hall of the Peabody Essex Museum, which was visited by a succession of presidents from John Quincy Adams to Taft and Coolidge. The Salem Armory (or what’s left of it) also hosted several presidential receptions. It’s difficult to orient yourself historically on Essex Street as so much is new, but Thomas Jefferson (1784), James Monroe (1817), and Andrew Jackson (1833) all visited famous dwellings in this vicinity. Jackson was not popular, and he did not attend a special  “handsome and good dinner including mock turtle soup” for 150 attendees on June 26 prepared by famed Hamilton Hall caterer John Remond, pleading illness. His great opponent, the former president John Quincy Adams, later expressed his doubts about Jackson’s debility, which he called “politic,” at best.

Make your way over to Salem Common by the Hawthorne Hotel, from which President George H.W. Bush WALKED down Hawthorne Boulevard and Lafayette Streets for his speech at Salem State College (now University) in May of 1994. I’m not sure whether or not his fellow presidential speakers in the famed series, Presidents Ford, Carter, and Clinton, stayed or were “received” at the Hotel, but they were certainly in Salem!

On the Common, head for the northeast corner and the Washington Arch, recently restored by the Salem Common Neighborhood Association. (unfortunately the attendant sign is incorrect: while Salem’s privateering record is impressive, the port did not account for half of the estimated 1800 captured British vessels during the Revolution. This kind of sloppiness is unfortunately all too common with Salem’s historical signage). From the arch you can look at two “presidential” houses at either side of this corner, the former Silsbee house (now beautiful condos!) and the Joseph Story house, both of which served as venues for the reception of President James Monroe in the summer of 1817. From this vantage point, I can also imagine President James K. Polk’s entourage speeding down Winter Street towards Beverly in 1847.

Walk south towards Salem Harbor and Derby Street, where you will find the stately Brookhouse Home for Aged Women right next to the Custom House. It was built for Benjamin Crowninshield, who was a US representative and Secretary of the Navy under both Presidents Madison and Monroe, and the latter stayed her during his 1817 visit to Salem. From there its a pretty straight shot along Derby, Charter and Front Streets to the Joshua Ward House/Merchant, where President Washington stayed  in October of 1789. A friend of ours restored the building (very meticulously!) and so as soon as it was open for business, we booked the very room in which Washington slept, which was quite a thrill! From the Merchant you can look out to where the Ruck house once stood, now occupied by the Salem Post Office. This was the home of Abigail Adams’ sister and brother-in-law so often visited by the Adamses in his pre-presidential years. The two wonderful pastel portraits of Abigail and John by Salem artist Benjamin Blyth were no doubt a product of their familiarity with this house and Salem.

Abigail and John Adams by Benjamin Blyth, c. 1766, Massachusetts Historical Society.