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In the third episode of season 3, Kendra brings you to The House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts. The home was the inspiration of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables and was owned in the 1800s by his cousin Susannah Ingersoll. The home was originally built by Captain John Turner and was in his family for three generations.
The House of the Seven Gables was no longer a private residence in 1908 when Caroline Emmerton purchased the home to act as both a house museum and a Settlement House. The home was restored to a 1720 interpretation by Joseph Chandler. Four gables had been removed over the years and were added back, along with the addition of a secret staircase.
Thank you to The House of the Seven Gables, Senior Historic Interpreter and Lead Researcher David Moffat, and Community Engagement Director Julie Arrison-Bishop. You can book tour tickets to see The House of the Seven Gables in person.
Images and locations referenced in this episode can be found below. You can find a full transcript of this episode.
The music for our show is by Tim Cahill. Check out his album, Songs From a Bedroom.
If you like this episode and want to hear other episodes like it check out: Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House, The Homes of Harriet Jacobs, Henry Davis Sleeper’s Beauport, and Sailors’ Snug Harbor.
Below is a transcript for S3E3 of Someone Lived Here at The House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts. If you have any questions about the show or suggestions on how to make it more accessible please reach out at someonelivedhere@gmail.com.
Kendra Gaylord (00:02):
In the first of two episodes this October, we’re at The House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts in the garden. There’s a harbor view and ocean breezes, and we’re surrounded by historic homes, but you can barely notice all of that because we’re next to the most iconically spooky house that’s inspired books, art and film. It’s a 350-year-old mansion with black paint, large glass windows, and tall gables that cross each other. Even if you’ve never been here, this home looks familiar. Welcome to Someone Lived Here, a podcast about the places people called home. I’m your host Kendra Gaylord.
Kendra Gaylord (00:42):
Before The House of the Seven Gables was The House of the Seven Gables. It was a captain’s home. As Captain John Turner’s wealth grew so did the home, but it’s hard to know if this house would still be standing here today if it wasn’t immortalized by Nathaniel Hawthorne. When his novel was published, the house had been standing for 180 years and Hawthorne was writing to an imaginary version of the house that he’d never seen for himself. It was his cousin, Susannah who invited him in, told him what the home wants, looked like and shared her stories. I want to learn a little bit more about Susannah Ingersoll, and we’re going to do that in the front parlor. The parlor and the bedroom upstairs were added in 1677. And I’m shocked at how big an area. The nearly 10-foot ceilings in a 17th-century house means you were rich, rich. But after three generations, the Turners lost the house and it was sold to Samuel Ingersoll. We’re now going to talk with David Moffat. He’s a Senior Historic Interpreter and Lead Researcher at The House of the Seven Gables.
David Moffat (01:49):
The house was inherited by his daughter, Susannah. She never marries. We think that decision is influenced by the fact that if she married, she would lose her ownership of her property. This house would become her husband’s maybe she’s worried about marrying some blaggard, that’s going to take her property and leave her with nothing. But she also wants that control. You know, she’s the only surviving child of six. And she tells her minister that this house feels like her prison right around the time her mother passes away in 1811, and she inherits the property, but she goes on to own it until 1858. But it’s Susannah who really influences The House of the Seven Gables the novel because Hawthorne comes to visitor plays cards, talks to her about family history and gets these ideas about this older unmarried woman, living in a big mansion, working to try and save. It seems to draw a lot on his cousin’s real-life experiences. So she plays a really crucial role in this house’s history.
Kendra Gaylord (02:47):
Unlike how I envisioned the home in the book, this room isn’t dark and what’s hidden behind a small cupboard door is in fact not spooky, but very fun.
David Moffat (02:58):
This bar or boffat is the technical term. That’s about 300 years old. So it’s this carved cabinet it’s got columns and a shell made of pine in the center. There’s a bright blue and gold reconstruction. What that looked like originally gold leaf and lacquer on the edges of the shelves, this deep Prussian blue paint. And we think of the Puritans as not being a lot of fun. John Turner the second is building this near the end of the Puritan era in New England, in the 1720s and thirties, but he still a puritan. And he goes to the Puritan church and Puritans drank. They had taverns, they had parties, they played cards. They sang songs. You know, they weren’t the boring people that we think of them as thanks to people like Nathaniel Hawthorne, but they’d have parties in here they’d serve mixed drinks and it’s decorated, this room is designed to be their entertaining room. It’s a very vibrant, bright, floral wallpaper that we also think of the Puritans as being very plain and drab. It’s not the case. If they could afford nice colors like the Turners, could you bet they had really colorful clothes and colorful interiors.
Kendra Gaylord (04:16):
We’re now going to head over to the dining room.
David Moffat (04:19):
And so we’ve got a dining room from the late 1600 set up today, as it would have looked in the late 1700s. It’s the second generation of Turners. So when John Turner, the second owns the house that put in all this Georgian style paneling, and it’s an early Georgian interior, we date it to about 1720 and it had this green coloring to it, verdigris that gets its color from oxidized copper. And so you have this put in lavishing in this nice, fancy new English interior style. It’s the third generation that loses the money. So you get the Ingersoll here after the war. The Ingersoll is, are living here in this period where Salem is this cosmopolitan international trading port, where merchants are leaving and traveling to places like France and Russia and Italy and South Africa and Mauritius and Oman, India, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, you name it.
David Moffat (05:17):
Salem was sending ships there. If it could be got to buy water in the late 1700s and early 1800s. And there’s a very interesting feature in this room. As part of the Georgian paneling, there’s a door for a closet. It serves as a firewood closet. They need to find somewhere to store these mountains of firewood. They’re burning to keep the house warm it’s today, a secret passageway, a secret staircase that goes through the reconstructed chimney. And so for over a century, people have been climbing the secret stairs. And if you’re feeling adventurous today, you can climb up. If you’d like, so you can head, I’ll follow you.
Kendra Gaylord (06:03):
It’s amazing. These stairs are surrounded by bricks and that’s because we’re inside the center chimney. And if you’re wondering why you would put stairs in a chimney, the answer is you wouldn’t, unless you wanted to get people talking. And 110 years ago when Caroline Emerton was making the home a destination, that’s exactly what she wanted to do. I’m excited to tell you more about Caroline, but first I think we should talk about the Gable that started it all.
David Moffat (06:30):
And this was the attic we’re on the third floor. It’s an express that takes us from the first right up to the third. This was a storage area. It’s not a real public part of the house. You don’t have to have a dinner party and invite people up to your attic to look at the rafters. So it didn’t get wallpaper or Georgian paneling. And so when we head to the other side of the attic, it’s the most original part of the structure. And we’ll go through a little passage right here, but the rest of the house gets larger too.
Kendra Gaylord (06:57):
We’re going to stop the, uh, the crouching part. Yeah,
David Moffat (07:06):
We’re up in the attic. This is my favorite part of the house personally, because we’re looking at the original construction. These are boards that John and Elizabeth Turner would have seen in 1668. And there are generations of shingle nails still poking out through them. We did dendrochronology. So we dated the beams based on the tree rings, found out that the rafter, there was an oak tree that started growing in 1485. And the end of the room has a big triangular shape because it’s one of the gables. That’s what gives the house, its name. These big peaks are there because of the rooves are steep. They want to keep rain and snow from gathering on top of the house. When the house was first constructed, it looks like a wealthy New Englanders house. There are 10 houses in Salem, give or take one or two, the date to the 1600s. Most of them look something like this. A lot of them are in about half that size. Well, then the Turners add on a back lean-to feature. A lot of those houses have those as well, designed to help carry wind over the structure. Use it as a back, uh, storage area and workshop. And then in 1677, the house has completed to the size that it is now with a big wing on the front.
Kendra Gaylord (08:20):
And as we’ve learned, time and time again on this podcast, nothing stays the same, especially with the house.
David Moffat (08:25):
The house changes again, quite radically in 1794. We know from the Ingersoll’s minister, that in that year, Samuel Ingersoll took off the back part of the house. He’d lived here for about a dozen years. This back section with the lean-to the summer kitchen was probably rotting away, probably had a dirt floor, and then he takes off the gables that aren’t actually part of the structure, the facade gables. So you end up with a big L-shaped house. Only three gables left at the ends of the walls is that the outfit 1800s just got three gables throughout the entire life. And a Daniel Hawthorne, the house never had seven gables. So why on earth does he write The House of the Seven Gables? His cousin Susannah was 10. When her father made those changes. She had really strong childhood memories growing up in this old-fashioned weird-looking house with seven gables, she brought Hawthorne up to the attic in 1840, showed him specifically where those gables had been, which your father removed, that strikes his imagination.
David Moffat (09:24):
He writes in a letter, The House of the Seven Gables. I feel like I should make something of that idea. 10 years later, he writes this novel or this grand old decaying house stands in for the decline and greed of the Pyncheon family at the heart of the story. This all gives Caroline Emerton a headache in the early 1900s because she just bought a three-gabled house, wants to sell tickets to The House of the Seven Gables. And of course, in that period, it’s quite invoked to take early houses, return them to the way they imagine they would have looked. So Chandler helps to rebuild the back section. How would they imagine it might have looked in the 1600s to add those gables and the dormer back onto the front
Kendra Gaylord (10:05):
Joseph Chandler was an architect and did historic restorations. Another home built by Joseph Chandler was the home of A. Piatt Andrew red roof that might sound familiar from last episode. It was that home and the company inside of it that inspired Henry Davis Sleeper to build Beauport. Now let’s get back to the house at hand. It was really Caroline Emerson’s passion and her bank account that made this house what it is today. She had first visited the house in her early teens. Here’s an account from her book, the Chronicles of three old houses “I went there with a party of young people and I well remembered the thrill that the gaunt old house gave me. When I first caught sight of it. We entered the empty house with its echoing rooms. I remember the circular cupboard in the parlor with its shell-like top. And I remember in the attic, the sketchy outlines of two vanished gables on the sloping walls, they were made by the patching of the boards when the gables were removed and were like shadowy ghosts haunting the scene of their past life.” It wasn’t just the gables that were brought back. Parts of the home were changed to connect it more closely to the book before Emerton. There wasn’t a little storefront in the home, but it was added to look like the little shop run by Hepzibah Pyncheon. And those secret stairs were added because it adds mystery. And it’s also really fun. We’re now going to check out another room that connects with the book, but Caroline Emerton had another use for it
David Moffat (11:38):
And watch the doorframe. And we emerged from that dark attic to this very light room here on the second floor, the accounting room, it’s like the home office. This is where the Turners. And then later the calls are doing the business side of the shipping trade. This is a room that Nathaniel Hawthorne uses in the novel, in the opening of The House of the Seven Gables Colonel pinching, this rich merchant, pretty similar guy to someone like John Turner, the first in real life. Well, he wants a piece of land with a beautiful freshwater well on it. And so what does he do? He accuses the poor carpenter who lives on it. Being a wizard. The carpenter is sent to the gallows and hangs during the witch trials. And he calls out to him, Pyncheon. God will give you blood to drink Pyncheon, not superstitious. He builds his seven gabled mansion. In fact, he uses the carpenter’s son to build the house for him. And then he’s found Lockton’s accounting room by his servants. When he throws a big house warming party, dead blood, covering his beard and shirts seeming to make the prophecy come true. And so that’s the opening chapter of Hawthorne’s. The House of the Seven Gables would have taken place in this accounting room if it were to actually have taken place in the house.
Kendra Gaylord (12:57):
And it’s no coincidence that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about the ramifications of the Salem witch trials. John Hawthorne was his great great-grandfather and Suzanne his great-grandfather. He was one of the lead judges at the Salem witch trials, and it was his leading questioning of Rebecca nurse and Bridget Bishop that often stands out like this line of questioning of Bridget Bishop “How can you know, you are no witch and yet not know what a witch is?” And later this month, we’re going to go to the Rebecca nurse homestead and hear more about the witch trials and her story. So if you want more, which stuff it’s coming, Nathaniel Hawthorne is writing this book, trying to understand the connection between his family’s past and their present.
David Moffat (13:36):
And he’s thinking, what does it mean that she lives in this house that’s from generations ago? What does it mean that we live in this world inherited from our ancestors. He feels quite a bit of guilt about his family’s place in history. And he writes this novel about a family wrestling with that becomes a best seller. It’s incredibly popular. It’s just a year after the Scarlet letter together they’re best sellers. They don’t compare at all to some of the women writers at the time like, uh, Harriet Beecher, Stowe, who Hawthorn’s, um, house of seven Gables sells 67,000 copies. I think Uncle Tom’s Cabin sells 300,000. Um, so not quite in that stratosphere of popularity, but incredibly well.
Kendra Gaylord (14:19):
I really appreciate that. David mentioned the female bestsellers of the time because I think it would have really annoyed Hawthorne. He wrote this in a letter to his editor, “America is now wholly given over to a mob of scribbling women. And I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash and should be ashamed of myself. If I did succeed” also in that letter, he had actually censored the word damned. Now we’re going to head out of the accounting room. I mentioned that that space didn’t used to be part of the museum and neither did this next room. That’s because Caroline Emerton had two very different missions when restoring The House of the Seven Gables,
David Moffat (15:02):
Because these two spaces, the accounting room, we were just in and this large empty room that we’re in now, where used as housing for the social workers.
Kendra Gaylord (15:12):
Caroline Emerton had been on a committee working to get a settlement house in Salem. Settlement houses were popularized in the US by Jane Adams, after a visit to London, the house she built in 1889 was called Hull house. And it provided kindergarten, a nursery, bathrooms, and classes to Chicago’s large immigrant population. A big piece of Jane Adams. His model was to then have middle and upper-class social workers and volunteers, research and fight for legislative reform. This idea made its way to Salem. Caroline Emerton wrote in her book, “In passing and repassing The House of the Seven Gables. The idea occurred to me that the old house would have many advantages as a settlement headquarters.”
David Moffat (15:56):
This was two small bedrooms. People were living here. They’d get up in the morning and go teach English or kindergarten, come back and sleep in The House of the Seven Gables.
Kendra Gaylord (16:06):
We’re going to see one more bedroom up here and go back in time once more.
David Moffat (16:13):
And so it’s one of the largest rooms I’ve ever seen in the house from that period. It’s got huge dimensions. In addition to the high ceiling, John Turner, the second adds on a new layer of wall adds a little bit of insulation, but he thinks his dad’s style has gotten old fashioned. He wants crown molding handling window seats. This is the size of the windows were in the early 1700s. We’re talking huge 10 over 15 pane windows got these queen and chairs, early 18th century dressers, and then a reproduction of what the Turner’s bed looked like.
Kendra Gaylord (16:51):
The bed has a canopy with curtains around the sides and a bright red bedspread.
David Moffat (16:56):
And it was worth 42 pounds, which is an enormous amount of money in 1742. That is, um, compared to most people’s beds maybe five, seven pounds. The whole estate has up to 36,000 pounds. So you’re talking about incredible wealth a thousand times, what someone might make in a year.
Kendra Gaylord (17:16):
And how did they make that much money? We’ve talked before about John Turner and his son being captains and merchants. I often get caught in the trap of the word merchant, and it’s worth being more curious about what someone was trading and the implications of that.
David Moffat (17:32):
And the trade that the Turners are engaging in is all about slavery. They’re bringing dried Codfish down to the plantations in Barbados, which becomes the main food that enslaved people are eating in exchange. They’re getting sugar, which is produced and manufactured with slave labor. They’re distilling it into rum, which is sometimes sold on the coast of Africa in exchange for enslaved people.
Kendra Gaylord (17:54):
And we know that there were enslaved people living at The House of the Seven Gables
David Moffat (17:58):
We know about these figures from the probate inventory of one John Turner, the second dies and it’s about 15 pages of a list of what he owns. But that document also tells us that three enslaved people were living in this house in 1742, Titus, Rebecca and Lewis. We know from other documents that there was a woman named Phyllis who was enslaved by the Turners in 1731. And then in the 1750s and sixties, Mary Turner had an enslaved woman named Jane. We know a little bit about the lives of the five people who were enslaved here, Titus and Phyllis were married to each other. Louis was inherited by one of John Turner. The second daughter is Yunus, and we know that Titus and Lewis both came down with smallpox in the 1770s that Lewis died, but Titus survived. So there’s little tiny pieces we can see to try and find some of the humanity of these people who were enslaved here. But unfortunately, because of their status in the society, we don’t know a lot about them.
Kendra Gaylord (19:07):
Nathaniel Hawthorne started writing The House of the Seven Gables in 1850. The same year Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act that required free states to assist in returning any escaped enslaved people. It was in that same year that Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote to an editor with her plan to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin “I feel now that the time has come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak. I hope every woman who can write will not be silent.” Many of his neighbors and friends in Concord were focused on abolition and the Fugitive Slave Act galvanized them. But in The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne is looking at New England’s past, focusing on guilt surrounding a witch trial that happened 150 years ago, instead of manhunts that were happening right then we’re going to leave the house now. And as we head outside, you can see how many houses are on this property throughout the early 1900s, historic houses throughout Salem moved here, making a type of historic house campus. One of which is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s birthplace. Before we leave, I want to hear a bit about how this house handles Halloween with Julie Arrison-Bishop, the community engagement director here
Speaker 3 (20:24):
From the exterior of our historic site. It really fits the mold for Halloween. It’s the black house, the pointed Gables in the evening. It’s kind of that spooky feel that you get when you walk around the site, but when you cross the threshold, people are really introduced to an authentic history here in Salem that stretches back, you know, so much of what we share is based on like the 353 years, the house was built. And it’s such a wonderful opportunity for us to share an authentic side of Salem in an authentic history, in a setting that really fits the aesthetic of what Salem is for haunted happenings and Halloween. And I would encourage visitors who are coming to Salem for Halloween and haunted happenings to certainly have fun, enjoy the community, uh, but certainly find places where you can get some of that real and authentic history and learn Salem story to enhance your Halloween experience in Salem.
Kendra Gaylord (21:23):
And if you’re wondering what happened to the settlement association, it’s still going strong.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
And today what we do with our settlement programming is we provide adult ESL and citizenship classes. We have the opportunity to serve. I think we serve anywhere from a hundred to 150 people kind of each semester with our English as a second language and citizenship programming. We often host a naturalization ceremony here at The House of the Seven Gables. So it’s a really magical opportunity to become a citizen in front of this icon of American history.
Kendra Gaylord (21:56):
And what I love about The House of the Seven Gables is how reality and fiction have weaved around each other to make a house that’s like no other.
Kendra Gaylord (22:05):
Thank you for listening to Someone Lived Here. I’m your host, Kendra Gaylord. I have a few fun announcements. So stick around first off, I would highly recommend you see this house it’s here all year, not just October and the event that you ever visit the site, take a look at the calligraphy on the walls of the Nathaniel Hawthorne birthplace. It was done by my mom, Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord in 2011. And if you like spooky witchy things, I made a YouTube video of the best, which houses in movies and TV. It even has a home inspired by The House of the Seven Gables. You can find that on my YouTube channel, Kendra from Someone Lived Here. I also want to say hi and thank you to all of our new listeners from tick-tock.
Kendra Gaylord (22:48):
And if you didn’t know, we had a TikTok it’s @KendraGaylord. I include a lot of photo research and videos from when I recorded the episodes. Thank you to David Moffat for the wonderful tour and Julie Arison-Bishop for bringing this all together. Tim Cahill created our music. Next next Monday, I’ll be at the Rebecca Nurse homestead. If you have any questions or thoughts about this episode, you can comment on the blog post at someonelivedhere.com. And if you like the show, keep me encouraged and write a review on apple podcast. I think that’s all the announcements. Thanks everybody for listening.
Sources:
The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851
The Chronicles of Three Old Houses by Caroline Emmerton, 1935
Hawthorne: A Life by Brenda Wineapple, 2003
A Gracious Host: Visiting the Gables Through the Years by David Moffat and Ryan Conary, 2015
Caroline Emmerton: Unbounded Vision by David Moffat, 2016
The Salem Witch Trials by Marilynne K. Roach, 2002
Lettering the Walls of Hawthorne’s Birthplace, Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord’s Blog, 2012
Ingersoll- Hathorne Family Tree, Find A Grave
