Monthly Archives: November 2008

Designed by the famous builder and wood carver, Samuel McIntire, the Clifford Crowninshield House is an impressive Federal style mansion on the southeast corner of Salem Common. The house was built 1804-1806 for the merchant, Clifford Crowninsheld, who died in 1809. In 1802, the Minerva, a ship owned by Crowninshield and Nathaniel West, was the first Salem vessel to circumnavigate the globe. The house was next occupied by Crowninshield’s sister, Sarah, and her husband, James Devereux. In 1799, Devereux was captain of the Franklin when it became the first American vessel to trade with Japan. Devereux returned from Nagasaki with a variety of items, some of which are now in the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. On June 23, 1800, Rev. William Bentley visited Devereux’s (earlier) house in Salem, where the captain “exhibited such things as engaged his attention,” including “Stone Tables, Tea Tables, Servers, Knife Cases, Small Cabinets,” and paintings. Bentley observed that the “stuffed gowns, which on both sides silk, are filled with a very fine cotton, were luxuries.” The house was later inherited by Devereux’s daughter, Abigail, who had married Captain William Dean Waters. In 1892, the Crowninshield-Devereux-Waters House was altered by its then owner, Zina Goodell, a successful Salem businessman, who had begun as a blacksmith and machinist. Before 1892, the house had been like many such Federal structures in Salem, in which, according to The Colonial Architecture of Salem, by Frank Cousins and Phil M. Riley, “a wing extended to one side of the main house along the street, instead of an L projecting from the rear, and thus by greatly elongating the oblong arrangement reduced in a measure the apparent height of a three-story structure.” Goodell, not finding the “ell” “good,” moved it from the side to the rear of the house, “about doubling the depth of the building.” He also moved the house closer to the corner of Forrester Street (the house’s address is on Washington Square East).