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Salem Salem was the capital of the Massachusetts Bay Colony from its founding in 1626, but is better known as “The Witch City,” as every school child knows. During the 1692 witchcraft trials, a group of hysterical women and children caused nineteen innocent people to be sentenced to death. Elements of the witch-hunt heritage are portrayed tastefully at the National Park Service’s excellent Salem Visitor Center and at the Peabody Essex Museum, and less so at more touristy attractions. Facing Washington Square and the broad green that is Salem Common is the imposing Gothic structure built in 1845 as a Unitarian church. Now the Salem Witch Museum, it is considered the best single place to visit for anyone with only a passing interest in the witch story. Its 30-minute multimedia presentation nicely summarizes the events of 1692. A gallery reviews the changing perceptions of witches through the centuries. Some people emerge “so bewitched, bothered and bewildered,” in the words of a guide on the Salem Trolley, that they snap photos of the stern, pilgrim-hatted statue in front of the museum. Too late do they realize it is not a witch but town founder Roger Conant The dark brown and rather foreboding 1642 Witch House at 310 Essex St. is the only home still standing in Salem with direct ties to the witch trials. It was the home of trial judge Jonathan Corwin, who was believed to have done pre-trial examinations of those accused of witchcraft. Restored and furnished to the colonial period, it offers guided tours detailing the history of the house and its occupants as well as their involvement in the trials. The Witch Dungeon Museum at 16 Lynde St.
presents a dramatization of witch trials with mannequins, followed by a
tour through a recreated dungeon. More compelling is Cry Innocent
in the Old Town Hall at Derby Square, a live re-enactment of the
witchcraft examination of Bridget Bishop, the first to hang in the witch
trials. An inter-active show in which the audience acts as the Puritan
grand jury, it’s the longest continuously running show in the state
north of Boston.
Spread across two city blocks, the oldest continuously operating museum in the country possesses some of the most important collections of art, architecture and culture from New England to Imperial China. Founded as the Salem East India Society at the peak of the China trade in 1799, the Peabody required members to collect "natural and artificial curiosities" from the far reaches of their merchant trade routes and has continued to collect aggressively ever since. The Asian-oriented Peabody and the New England-oriented Essex Institute across the street merged in 1992 to produce New England’s largest treasure chest of exotica, as delivered by Salem sea captains from around the globe. Designed by noted architect Moshe Safdie, a $150 million expansion in 2003 produced 250,000 square feet of new and renovated galleries and public spaces. Included are a soaring atrium entry connecting various buildings, six art galleries, public gardens and Yin Yu Tang, a reconstructed 18th-century Qing dynasty merchant’s house relocated with its original furnishings from rural China. The expansion allows visitors to see all of the museum’s permanent collections, revealing more than two million objects that had been hidden in storage for lack of space. Many are extraordinary: its Asian export art collection, which embraces everything from an ornate moon bed to a teapot depicting a Malay village to minute scenes intricately carved into ivory, is the foremost in the world. The Japanese collection of household arts and crafts surpasses anything in Japan. The Korean collection is the first of its kind in the United States, as is the gallery devoted to the contemporary art of India. The marine artworks and Native American exhibits are unparalleled. Some of the finest examples of New England architecture are on display in houses dating from 1684 to 1812. But the star of the show is Yin Yu Tang, the 200-year-old home that housed eight generations of the Huang family. It was dismantled from its southeastern China site and rebuilt on the museum grounds to become the only example of Chinese vernacular architecture in this country. Limited numbers of timed tickets are available for a surcharge. The Peabody also has one of the finest museum gift shops we have seen. (978)
745-9500 or (866) 745-1876. www.pem.org. Open daily, 10 to 5. Adults
$13, students $9, children free. Admission to Yin Yu Tang, $4.
The house that inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne is New England’s oldest surviving mansion and part of one of the earliest historic compounds opened to the public in America. Known as the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion for its early occupants, it was ambitious when it was built by wealthy sea captain John Turner in 1668, but in terms of size the handsome, dark wood structure sidling up to the Salem waterfront would probably qualify only as a McMansion today. Long before Deerfield or Sturbridge or Williamsburg came into historic play, Salem philanthropist Caroline Emmerton assembled a complex of nine 17th-century structures – the largest of its kind in America – around the restored mansion in which the author had visited his Ingersoll cousin. The pioneering preservationist laid out a Jacobean-style seaside garden in 1909 and opened the property for tours, the proceeds of which fund services for her settlement house to this day. Half-hour guided tours start in the original, low-ceilinged Turner kitchen, its enormous hearth built of some of the earliest bricks made in America. From the dining room beyond, a door opens into the hearth and a much-celebrated secret staircase winding steeply to the second floor. The agile duck to all fours to make the climb. Upstairs, the costumed guide takes apart a dollhouse-size model of the house that shows it without four gables the Ingersolls had removed during the Federal period when Hawthorne wrote the novel. You’re told that the servants’ bedroom in the attic represents one of the country’s oldest surviving domestic quarters, and you see the high-ceilinged bedroom a later Turner added in 1675 when the cost was no object. The guided tour ends in the “parlor” below, an elegant space that doubles as a dining room, where the guide points out its original look through paint that weathered blue inside the china cabinet. The room was restored lately to its early verdigris green paint and vivid chintz wallpaper that belies the Puritan reputation for drab colors. The affluent Turners were ahead of the trends with their cutting-edge Georgian interior, it seems. Across the colorful colonial revival garden, reflecting a changing spectrum of period plantings through the seasons, is the circa-1750 red house in which Hawthorne was born in 1804. Furnished to the period but with little connected to the family, it is open for self-guided tours. Others of the nine structures in the historic compound include the 1655 house of famed shipbuilder Retire Beckett, who designed the first American yacht. It serves today as the museum store. The Seamans Visitor Center, in which a year-long exhibition marking Hawthorne’s 200th birthday was shown in 2004-2005, contains a garden café offering a modest sandwich menu. Take a picnic lunch outside to tables beneath the wisteria arbor or along the harborfront. (978)
744-0991. www.7gables.org. Open daily 10 to 5, to 7 July-October. Adults
$11, children $7.25.
Salem’s most informative, personalized house tour is offered free, of all things. That’s because a descendant left an endowment for the house as well as student scholarships. The only Federal mansion on famed Chestnut Street that is open to the public, the house dates to 1800 when it was built in nearby Danvers by the daughter of Elias Derby, a self-made millionaire from the Salem sea trade. The daughter’s divorced husband, wealthy shipping merchant Nathaniel West, had the house dragged in two pieces by a team of oxen into Salem, where the two parts were erected with a wide interior hall between them and a third floor and a back ell were added. The house was purchased nearly a century later by Stephen Phillips, descendant of a Salem merchant sea captain, who moved in with his wife and five generations of family furnishings. He lived in the house until his death in 1955 and the house remains as it was then – an understated display of eclectic collections representing the illustrious Salem family’s world travels. The hour-long tour starts in the rear kitchen, where you find preparations under way for a dinner party. The guide shows the hand-written menu, the plate warmers, the copper sink for washing the prized Limoges china and the elegant dining-room table set for six. The men gathered in the front library with its wall shelf of first editions for a history lecture, and the women were invited to the upstairs sitting room where Anna Phillips might sing an aria. “So you earned your dinner,” visitors are told. Son Stevie’s front bedroom with a canopy bed is more formal than his parents’ master bedroom in the rear. The
personal tales of how a wealthy family and servants lived early in the
20th century impress more than the collections in a house furnished in
what the guide called mix-and-match styles and eras. Little beyond Fiji
paddles, African wood carvings and China porcelain stands out, except
for vehicles in the rear carriage house. There you get up close to the
family’s 1936 Pierce-Arrow limousine, a 1924 Pierce-Arrow touring car,
a 1929 Ford Model A, a ladies’ wicker phaeton with a rumble seat for
the stable boy, a one-horse open sleigh and even a canoe. (978)
744-0440; Fax (978) 740-1086. Open Memorial Day through October,
Monday-Saturday 10 to 4:30. Free.
Twelve structures from 1670 to the early 1900s along the Derby Street waterfront are part of this nine-acre national historic site, the first in the national park system. The site documents New England’s maritime history, which was centered in Salem into the early 19th century. Start at the orientation center in the restored Central Wharf Warehouse, which shows an eighteen-minute film on the pioneering development of the lucrative East Indies and China luxury trade that turned Salem into the sixth largest city – and richest per capita – in the country. Salem’s merchants took great risks and reaped great rewards in sending ships on long trading voyages “To the Farthest Ports of the Rich East” – the title of the movie. Park rangers lead tours for 25 people up to ten times daily to three buildings across Derby Street. The major one is the 1819 Custom House, whose front windows face Derby Wharf, the longest and last of more than 50 wharves that were once lined with cargo warehouses. It was here that Nathaniel Hawthorne was in charge of fifteen customs officers as surveyor for the Port of Salem for four years until his political enemies got him fired – a dismissal that, combined with his mother’s death, preceded the publication of The Scarlet Letter, a story into which he poured all the rage and frustration of the summer of 1849. The introduction to the novel is set in the Custom House. Objects belonging to Hawthorne, including the desk he used, are on display n the office. Also open during guided tours is the nearby Derby House, the oldest brick house in Salem, built in 1762 for shipowner Elias Haske Derby, the “king” of Salem’s waterfront and America’s first millionaire. Rangers also open the Narbonne-Hale House, built in the 17th century as a home and shop for craftsmen and tradesmen. Tour participants can board the tall ship Friendship moored along Central Wharf in the harbor. The largest wooden sailing vessel to be constructed in more than a century, it’s a replica of the three-masted Salem East Indiaman built in 1797 by shipwright Enos Briggs at his shipyard across from the site. Also part of the historic site is the scale house where customs officers weighed cargo to collect duties, the 1780 Hawkes House that Derby used as a privateer prize warehouse and, dwarfed by its larger neighbors, the tiny West India Goods Store where imported cargoes were sold at retail. You can walk out to the end of Derby Wharf to see the 1871 lighthouse. (978)
740-1660; Fax (978) 740-1665. Orientation center and site open daily 9
to 5, free. Reservations advised for tours for up to 25 participants,
scheduled seven to ten times daily in summer, two or three times daily
October to May; adults $5, children $3.
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