Historic Buildings of Massachusetts

Joseph Story (1779-1845) was a lawyer and jurist who served on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1811 to 1845. He was also the author of a famous work of Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States. Story’s house, at 26 Winter Street in Salem, was constructed in 1811 by the builder Joshua Upham. Story’s son, the poet and sculptor, William Wetmore Story, was born in the house in 1819. The current entry porch and the side wing with bay window were added in the early twentieth century by owner George C. Vaughn, president of the Salem Safe Deposit & Trust Company. In 2006, artist Kathleen Ward-Salem, who was raised in the Story House, sold the residence to lawyer Neil Chayet, who has renovated the house, making it energy-efficient and environmentally friendly. The Story House has recently been LEED-certified.

In 1805, Israel Williams, a Salem merchant, purchased an unfinished house at 19 Chestnut Street, begun by President Grover Cleveland’s great-uncle, Rev. Charles Cleveland. Williams was the first captain of the Salem East Indiaman Friendship, launched in 1797. He soon completed the house, which remained in his family until 1857. As explained in Cousins and Riley’s The Colonial Architecture of Salem, “Of broad street frontage but no great depth, this is one of the many three-story wood houses of this period that are oblong rather than square and depend on a two-story L in the rear for several rooms.” The house was next owned by merchant Henry W. Peabody until 1905 and then by architect William G. Rantoul from 1907 to 1939. Rantoul restored the house, adding the entryway (copied from the nearby Towne House), window frames and a balustrade along the roof (since removed).

The life of Ezekiel Savage, Esq. is described as follows in “Old Boston Families, Number Three, The Savage Family,” by Lawrence Park, in The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, Vol. LXVII (October 1913):

born in Boston 17 Oct. 1760, lived with his mother (who became a widow about two months after his birth) in Boston until shortly after his fifth birthday, when his mother, having married again, removed to Milton, Mass., where Ezekiel lived until he entered Harvard College in 1774. After graduating at Harvard in 1778 he began to study for the ministry with Rev. William Smith of Weymouth, Mass, but it does not appear that he was ever settled as a minister over any parish, and owing to ill health he abandoned this profession about the time of his first marriage (1783). In 1783 he was a merchant of Boston, in partnership with his half-brother Habijah […], but this partnership was soon dissolved, for Ezekiel Savage early in 1784 removed to Salem, where he continued to reside uniil about 1788, when he returned to Boston. In 1789 he was a ” shopkeeper” on Fish Street, with a house on Fleet Street, and in 1791 and in 1793 he was called “tobacconist.” In 1794 he returned to Salem, where as ” Squire Savage” he was well known as a civil magistrate for many years. On 22 Feb. 1800 he delivered at St. Peter’s Church, Salem, “An Eulogy on General Washington,” which was published at Salem in 1800 by Joshua Gushing. In 1812—14 he represented Salem in the General Court. His office was on Essex Street, and he lived not far away, in an old, two-story, gambrel-roofed house, until 1808, when he moved into a new house on the corner of Broad and Hathorne Streets, where he died 22 June 1837. He is buried in a tomb in the Broad Street Burying-Ground, Salem.

His Federal-style house still stands at 29 Broad Street in Salem.