Category: Salem

Nathan P. Gifford House (1893)

by Dan//Colonial Revival, Houses, Salem

In 1892-1893, when lumber dealer Nathan P. Gifford constructed his Colonial Revival home at 377 Essex Street in Salem, he incorporated an earlier house on the site, which had been built by James Ford in 1764. The house is also referred to as the Ford-Emerson-Ives-Gifford House, because it had been occupied, earlier in the nineteenth century, by Rev. Brown Emerson, pastor of South Church, and David P. Ives. The Ford-Emerson-Ives-Gifford House served as the residence and office for a succession of doctors in the twentieth century and was recently converted into three large apartments.

Crowninshield-Bentley House (1727)

by Dan//Colonial, Houses, Salem

The Crowninshield-Bentley House was built in 1727 to 1730 on Essex Street in Salem. Four generations of Crowninshields lived in the house, until 1832, beginning with merchant and sea captain John Crowninshield. The building may have begun as a half-house (the east half of the house) and was enlarged by 1761, when John Crowninshield died and his widow Hannah and son Benjamin divided the property. Benjamin added a new addition in 1794, while his mother rented her half of the house out to boarders. The house is also named for Reverend William Bentley, who boarded here from 1791 to 1819, while he was pastor of East Church. Bentley was a Unitarian minister and scholar, famous for his diary. The house was sold to the Hawthorne Hotel in the 1940s and in 1959 the Hotel donated it to the Essex institute. The house‘s modern additions were then removed and it was moved to the grounds of the Essex Institute, where it was restored as a memorial to the wealthy preservationist Louise DuPont Crowninshield. The house, which is a house museum owned by the Peabody Essex Museum, has recently had an extensive restoration.

Gedney House (1665)

by Dan//Colonial, Houses, Salem

Gedney House in Salem is believed to have been built as early as 1665. As originally built by shipwright Eleazer Gedney, the house had two stories with a gabled attic to the left and a parlor with lean-to roof to the right. Gedney, who was married to the sister of John Turner, builder of the House of Seven Gables, passed the house on to his descendants, who made alterations in 1712. The Gedney family later sold the home to Benjamin Cox, who added two town house ells to the building around 1800, thus converting it to a multi-family residence. In later years, the house served as a boarding house and tenement in what became an Italian-American neighborhood. In 1967, when the house was being prepared for demolition, it was acquired by Historic New England. Now an unfurnished house museum, the original wood structure of the building’s interior is left exposed to display to visitors its original seventeenth-century construction.

John Ward House (1684)

by Dan//Colonial, Houses, Salem

The John Ward House in Salem is a First Period house built in 1684. John Ward was a currier (leather finisher), who is believed to have fled the plague in England around 1660. The house originally stood at 38 St. Peter Street and consisted of one room over one room. At some point around the time of Ward’s death in 1732, the house was expanded with a matching set of rooms. The house went through various changes over the years, with the original front gables being removed. The building‘s eighteenth-century ell was once used for a cent shop and for a time, Sarah W. Symonds, a Salem artist, had her studio and gallery in the home. In 1910, the house was acquired by the Essex Institute and moved to its current location on Brown Street. It was restored under the direction of preservationist George Francis Dow, with period rooms containing seventeenth-century furnishings. Today, the house is a museum owned by the Peabody Essex Museum.

Lydia E. Pinkham Memorial Clinic (1922)

by Dan//Colonial Revival, Commercial, Salem

Pinkham Memorial

In the nineteenth century, Lydia E. Pinkham started a company which produced a popular patent medicine named for its creator. It was an herbal-alcoholic tonic, or “Vegetable Compound,” created to relieve menstrual and menopausal discomfort. Her daughter, Aroline Chase Pinkham Gove, a supporter of what is now the North Shore Children’s Hospital, also established a baby clinic, in honor of her mother, in 1922. The Lydia E. Pinkham Memorial, designed by the Boston architectural firm of Haven and Hoyt, is a distinctive Colonial Revival building at the intersection of New Derby Street and Hawthorne Boulevard in Salem.

Salem Custom House (1819)

by Dan//Federal, Public Buildings, Salem

salem-custom-house.jpg

The last in a series of 13 custom houses built in Salem since 1649, the Salem Custom House of 1819 is famous for being featured in the introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne‘s The Scarlet Letter (1850). Hawthorne worked in the Custom House for the U.S. Custom Service as Surveyor in 1846-1849. The building housed offices and an attached warehouse, the Public Stores, which contained bonded and impounded cargo. The structure was designed in the Federal style by Perley Putnam, a Weigher and Gauger for the U.S. Custom Service. A wooden eagle, carved by Salem craftsman Joseph True, was placed atop the Custom House in 1826. It was was replaced with a fiberglass replica in 2004. The Custom House is now a part of the Salem Maritime National Historic Site.