Travel with Nat: Salem: much more than witches

Salem Harbour

While there seem to be witch museums around every corner, we managed to avoid all of them, only buying some spooky souvenirs for a certain Halloween-loving friend.

The temperature was a fresh 17C with intermittent rain, which we thought enhanced the sombre history of the town. Salem was a great seaport and so has some great architecture, often sea captains' homes. The houses are almost all wooden, many in the colonial style. Later Victorian houses look a bit Munsterish in their gothic styles and those with the plain eighteenth century houses added bay windows and other decorations. Then again in the early nineteenth century, the Colonial revival style meant that people then took off the Victorian decorations added earlier.

Of course, we went to the House of the Seven Gables, or the Turner-Ingersoll mansion, made famous by Hawthorne's novel and built overlooking the harbour in the seventeenth century, forty or so years after the area was settled in 1629. I was surprised to learn that Hawthorne never actually saw the house with seven gables, as eighteenth century tastes had led the owners to demolish four of them and a back lean-to. He stayed at the house often at the invitation of his cousin, Susannah Ingersoll, who inherited the house when her father, a sea captain, and brother died of yellow fever on a voyage. She was unusual in those days, an unmarried businesswoman. The house was rescued from dereliction by Caroline Emmerton in 1908, who re-applied the original seventeenth century architecture. She also added some fictional details related to the book, including a narrow hidden staircase behind the chimney. Several of the rooms are decorated in the Georgian style as they would have been for the Ingersolls. In the attic we saw original beams and floorboards of the 1668 house.

The House of the Seven Gables

Right next door was the Nathaniel Hawthorne birthplace house, transported by truck in the 1950s to its present position. It was seemingly quite common even in previous centuries to move houses. We visited one house that was the product of a bitter divorce in the nineteenth century. The husband inherited a third of the marital home on the death of one of his daughters. He actually sawed off his third and had it transported to its new location, where it eventually became the Phillips House, decorated in the Colonial Revival style around the start of the twentieth century.

The Phillips House
The front two bottom and upper rooms were cut from another building after a divorce.

Had a great tour of the Phillips House, which is furnished as it would have been in 1919, with amazing old cars in the converted stables. The chauffeur chose the 12 cylinder rather than the 8 cylinder limousine when consulted at the showroom. Our guide was a young guy doing his very first tour: he'll have plenty of time to get his patter down over the summer. The table was set for a particular meal in 1919, when the family of little Stevie's friend Bunny came over. Little Stevie went to Harvard like most of his male relatives, but was wealthy enough to have an occupation of 'Philanthropist' and continue his parents' extensive touring.