IMPORTANT
If you’re new to Non-Boring History, please note: We’re not on our usual schedule of posts and podcasts. I’m just on my way home from New England, with my tolerant spouse, He Who Shall Not Be Named On the Internets (HWSNBNOTI, pronounced Hoosen Benoti), and these are my posts from the road, with (as ever) a historical focus.
Confused? Please review the orientation post. Hope that helps!
I won’t be surprised if you have now decided I’m a terrible grump as a museum visitor after reading my On the Road posts over the past few months.
When it comes to historic houses and museums, my pet peeve is being charged a high admission price only to be:
Bored
Insulted/Belittled
Both
I think that's fair enough. Look, please believe me that I don’t go out of my way to be dissatisfied. On the contrary, I want to love everywhere I visit, and everyone who works there. When I encounter enthusiastic and kind staff, even in a museum or house tour that’s pretty basic and bit iffy, historically speaking, I am thrilled. When a tour is seriously interesting, I am delighted. And when my expectations were pretty low to begin with? That’s doubly a win.
So let me give credit where credit is due. At least one of the places in Salem, Massachusetts I plan to praise will surprise you, because it’s one I already blasted for its dereliction of duty.
First, though, I’m going to start by explaining why and how The House of Seven Gables knocked my socks off. This is the house upon which Nathaniel Hawthorne, Author Everyone is Forced to Read in High School, based his novel of the same name. Hate Hawthorne? Join my club.
I Hate Nathaniel Hawthorne (and I Cannot Lie)
Many years ago, I closed my copy of A Scarlet Letter and made a sacred vow I have not yet broken. As God is my witness, I vowed never to read it, or any book by Nathaniel Hawthorne, so long as I lived. And I have never violated that promise to myself.
The problem is not Victorian literature. I love Dickens, and that’s an adequate self-defense, I think. The problem is not the story, either, a racy number about a 17th century New England woman prosecuted and shamed after her Puritan minister gets her pregnant. Historically, it’s claptrap, but it’s got all the promise of a fun story. Tragically, however, it’s Nathaniel Hawthorne’s book. And with all due apologies, it sucks.
Psst, The Film is Even Worse
Actually, The Scarlet Letter doesn’t suck as much as its movie adaptation, made in 1995 with Demi Moore and Gary Oldman. The only part of it I remember today was when it completely abandoned any pretense at a plot. As things fell apart, my fellow grad student in early American history, Debbie, and I starting laughing so hard we nearly choked on our popcorn.
This was a moment that appears nowhere in the book. The main character (Moore) is gagged(???), set on a scaffold with a noose around her neck, and nearly hanged, alongside distinguished British actress Joan Plowright, before Gary Oldman offers to be offed instead, because reasons that have zero to do with colonial law, or basic sanity. Or maybe the director and writers confused A Scarlet Letter with the Salem Witch Trials. But I digress.
Okay, you get it, already. Move on Laing, you say. Why did you go to The House of the Seven Gables, then?
Honestly?
Because it was there.
More Than One Story
I perked up when I learned that The House of the Seven Gables wasn’t just an inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne to bore more readers senseless, but had a whole history of its own. Something to do with a 17th century sea captain building it. Good enough!
But actually, it turned out to a whole lot more: How to interpret a historic house honestly and creatively. How to appeal to lots of different people, including Hawthorne haters. And how to get across that houses aren’t ever frozen in time, but change with the times, and that it’s great when museums embrace this, and show this to us.
The Best Story of the House Isn’t Hawthorne’s
The first owner of The House of The Seven Gables (the name came later) was the man who built it in 1668: John Turner, a sea captain, trader and merchant in Salem. Originally only two rooms downstairs, two upstairs, and a central chimney, with lots of dark oak beams, the House was added to and updated by his son, with painted paneling in lighter, even more affluent 18th century style . . .
Yes, I can drone on in this vein for a while. But I won’t.
Let’s skip ahead. Because the owner of The House of the Seven Gables who interested me most didn’t buy it until 1908. And it was the tour that let me know she existed, and got me interested in her.
By 1908, the house was a big mansion. It had passed through three families, the last of whom had opened it for tours. By then, the surrounding neighborhood had changed dramatically, from an elite enclave of 17th and 18th century mansions with fabulous views of the wharves and ships and water, to a poor immigrant Polish neighborhood, with small miserable flats carved out of the grand old houses of 17th and 18th century sea captains.
Caroline Emmerton bought The House of the Seven Gables to preserve it. But she also had far greater plans for this place. First, she had it “restored”, returned as much as possible to 17th century style. Then, two years after she bought the House, she opened it to the public, which, even by then, and inexplicably to me, still included many Hawthorne fans.
For their delight, she based the tours on Hawthorne’s book, including one room turned into a little retail shop, just as Hawthorne described the character of Hepzibah Pyncheon operating in the House in his novel, even though it wasn’t ever part of the real house. By the way, this shop also reminds me of the scene of Judi Dench’s character opening a shop selling loose tea in Cranford, based on the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell, a novelist who was writing at the same time as Hawthorne, but was doing it a lot better.
Emmerton also built a tea room to sell tourists refreshments.
But, get this, important though all this work was to Emmerton, it wasn’t her primary goal.
The goal was to raise money for her pet project: Supporting poor immigrants, especially kids.
Caroline Emmerton was a wealthy woman. Her grandfathers were both involved in international shipping trade out of Salem. Her father was a modern man, big in the new industrial manufacturing economy of Salem in the late 19th century, specifically in chemicals.
But Caroline was of yet another generation, who looked at the huge inequality and misery around her, and wanted to make a difference. So she put Nathaniel Hawthorne and The House of the Seven Gables to work, bringing in tourist dollars to support her programs for the immigrant poor.
Emmerton turned The House of the Seven Gables into not only a tourist attraction, but also a Settlement House, a place where wealthy and middle class volunteers (usually women) tried to lift people out of poverty, with education, training, and help. They couldn’t fix poverty, but they could offer support.
The first Settlement House was in one of the worst slums of the East End of London, Toynbee Hall (1884).
Its success inspired Jane Addams of Chicago to create Hull House, the first settlement house in the United States, during the Progressive (Brits: Edwardian) era.
When we started on this trip, driving south from Madison, Wisconsin, through Rockford, Illinois, Hoosen and I saw we were on the Jane Addams freeway. Now, a thousand miles away in Salem Massachusetts, here was a connection.
Caroline Emmerton helped start the first proto-Boys and Girls Club in Salem, served on the boards of orphanages, and a home for elderly women. Her work at the House of the Seven Gables included sewing classes, dance, gymnastics, and a clinic for pregnant mothers. The place was a community center for the immigrants who worked in Salem’s textile mills, and lived in the tenements that were built out of the old mansions, especially Poles and Russians, but also Irish, Italians and Africans.
It’s kind of fashionable to mock “do gooders” from this era, wealthy women like Caroline Emmerton, telling the immigrant poor how to live their lives in the guise of social services. But let me put it this way: Better she had spent all her money on herself, and sat on her bum sipping tea? Come on.
A Story of Changes ad Connections
Normally, a historic house would interpret just one year or period, and ignore everything that came before or later, or only mention it briefly.
I’m delighted to say that the nonprofit that runs the House is turning one room into a representation of the Settlement House, and that it’s transparent about how the House has changed over the centuries. Which is a real revelation to most visitors, more honest, and more real.
Isabella and the Tour
Our tour guide, Isabella, was young and cheerful, well informed, and most of all enthusiastic, something that came across loud and clear, even through a mask. Our tour group of all ages was happy to be there, too, but I think we let Isabella down when we admitted that, except for maybe one person, none of us were fans of Hawthorne’s book.
Isabella looked a little crestfallen. But she soon cheered up. She explained the 17th century kitchen, telling us that women cooks kept their long skirts wet to keep their wearers cool, and resist sparks that might result in their going up in flames. This was news to me.
She led us up a secret staircase, the very definition of narrow and rickety, an adventure I ended by vowing to go on a diet. If you can picture this, at one point, where the landing should have been, I had to try to move sideways, like a crab, up a step while also rounding the corner. I am not even remotely slim. There was one split second when I visualized the fire department being summoned. But determination will take you far. Plus the prospect of utter humiliation.
I did not, under the circumstances, get a photo.
Isabella explained how the House has changed over the years with this handy model:
She knew all about the objects, the wallpaper, and the shift from 17th century interior design to 18th century. The warmth (or lack thereof ) of rooms. The Hawthorne connections. She received our questions with rapture, and had good answers.
And above all, like everyone else on the staff that Hoosen and I met, she was friendly and down to earth. No snotty condescension here!
We declined her kind offer afterward to lead us around Hawthorne’s birthplace, but only because we were pushed for time that day.
In short, if you run a museum in New England and you want to do better? Come here and learn.
Oh, and The House of The Seven Gables is no longer a Settlement House, of course. As the neighborhood gentrified, immigrants moved elsewhere. So the Settlement House followed them.
But it’s still in Salem today, as The House of the Seven Gables Settlement Association. Providing classes in literacy, assistance in college prep, and cultural programming, its changed its methods, but it’s still welcoming people to America.
After all, who do you think owns The House of the Seven Gables? And where do you think your ticket sales go? Just as Caroline Emmerton intended, the Settlement House still helps preserve Hawthorne’s memory and The House of the Seven Gables, and Hawthorne and the House help fund the Settlement House. As the Settlement Association’s mission statement says, their goal is for the museum To be a welcoming, thriving, historic site and community resource that engages people of all backgrounds in our inclusive American story.
They certainly made us feel happy and welcome, all of them, from the ticket seller to the gift shop clerk. See? I do sometimes have lovely things to say about a museum, and especially when they give me good reason to do so, and stimulate my curiosity. Heck, I might even try reading Hawthorne again.
How many actual academic historians write stuff like this for the public at all, much less full time? Fortunately, just one. Me. If you enjoy and learn from my work, please support it *yes, you*, not some pretendy other person. Can’t do this on no money, luv, and that’s no lie. Look, here’s a special offer, you twisted my arm:
Helyn and I also had a great experience at the House of Seven Gables though I almost chickened out of taking the claustrophobic-inducing secret stairs. We had an architect in our group who supplemented the guide with observations about the authenticity of the window panes because of flaws that occurred in the glass-making process of the time and other obscure building features. The little shop was my favorite room. It seems like I wanted some tea--I always like a bit of refreshment--but I don't recall finding anything there. We went across the street to buy some of that ancient candy.