At 18 Winter Street in Salem is a house built in 1848 for Rev. James Conway, who was pastor of St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church from 1846 until his death in 1857. As described in the Municipal History of Essex County in Massachusetts, Vol. I (1922):

Father Conway was ordained in Boston, July 31, 1831. The early years of his priesthood were spent among the Pennobscot Indians, and as assistant to Father McDermott at St. Patrick’s, Lowell. In 1841 he was appointed to the new parish of St. Peter’s in that town, where he remained until his assignment to Salem.

Once settled in Salem (quoting further from the same book),

His first care was to enlarge and beautify the church, increasing its seating capacity by six hundred. The Sunday school and choir were reorganized in 1846; a parochial residence on Winter street (1848) and later (1852) a much larger one on Mall street were his work; he purchased and opened the Catholic Cemetery in 1849. […] In 1855 “the Hodges estate,” on Walnut street, now Hawthorne Boulevard, was secured as the site of the first distinctively Catholic school in Salem. The Sisters of Notre Dame were introduced to Salem in the fall of 1855 and installed in a schoolhouse and convent set up on the site of the present school. They were insulted and almost attacked by the hostile natives, but persevered in their labors with almost immediate, success. Early in the spring of 1857 ground was broken, and the foundation of the present Church of the Immaculate Conception laid. Its walls were just beginning to rise under his supervision when sudden death called him to his eternal reward, May 24, 1857.

The completed Church of the Immaculate Conception, dedicated on January 10, 1858, continues today as the oldest Catholic church building in the Archdiocese of Boston.