The Payson-Fettyplace House, at 16 Winter Street in Salem, was built around 1845 for Edward H. Payson. In a book published in 1886, it’s explained that Payson, “at the age of eighty, is still cashier of the First National (formerly the Commercial) Bank, to which office he was elected in 1826.” From 1850 to 1911, the house was home to the Fettyplace family. The house is now a Bed & breakfast named the Amelia Payson House in honor of Edward’s wife.
The Captain Charles Leonard House, at 663 Main Street in Agawam, was built in 1805 and is attributed as the work of Asher Benjamin. A Harvard graduate, farmer and militia captain, Charles Leonard built the house to serve as a tavern. It had many owners over the years and had become a multifamily rental property by the early twentieth century. The house was purchased and restored by prominent Agawam citizen Mrs. Minerva Davis, who made it Agawam’s Community House. Today, the house can be rented for events.
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.
The Nancy Curtis House is Greek Revival Double house, built in 1846-1847 on Federal Street in Salem. Curtis occupied one half of the house.
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.
Is this a haunted mansion posted for Halloween? No, it’s the Town Hall of Saugus, built in 1875. An earlier town hall, built in 1837, is now an American Legion hall. Construction of the 1875 building put the town $50,000 in debt and was one of the reasons the neighborhood of East Saugus almost seceded to become a part of Lynn (the residents were unable to get a bill in both houses of the state legislature and the issue was dropped after the town appropriated $5,000 for laying water pipes in East Saugus). The Town Hall, which originally had the high school and library in the rear wing, was designed in the High Victorian Gothic and Stick styles by Lord & Fuller and underwent a $3 million restoration in 1998, when the building was returned to its original multi-colored, earth-toned exterior paint scheme. The Town Hall’s conference room was recently dedicated to the town’s history. There is also an organization called The Friends of Saugus town Hall.
The oldest sections of the house at 1 Mugford Street in Marblehead, known as the Old Bowen House, are believed to date to 1695. Located near Marblehead’s Old Town House, the building was the home of Nathan Bowen, a merchant who served as Justice of the Peace and Notary Public, and then of Nathan’s son, Ashley Bowen, a sailor, who kept a detailed journal and wrote an autobiography. Ashley Bowen also illustrated his Journal with his own paintings. Ashley Bowen’s nephew, Nathan Bowen, was a noted cabinetmaker. In the twentieth century, the Bowen House was used as the model for a house described in H.P. Lovecraft’s story “The Festival” (1925). Lovecraft‘s fictional town of Kingsport is based on Marblehead.
