Identity crisis in Salem, Mass.

The 'Witch City's' identity crisis

ANDREW MANGRAVITE

I recently returned from spending a week in a very surprising little city.

If you grew up on such fare as Arthur Miller’s The Crucible or the little-known British horror film City of the Dead, your vision of Salem, Massachusetts is likely to be that of an isolated rustic farm community where neighbors spent a lot of time spying on neighbors. That is, your vision of Salem is probably similar to that of many Americans who still think of Philadelphia only in terms of Ben Franklin and William Penn. I didn’t do much advance reading because I wanted Salem to hit me cold. Imagine my surprise at discovering that colonial Salem was a seaport! And not just any old seaport, the second richest city in colonial America.

One of its citizens, the merchant Elias Haskett Derby, was the new republic’s first bona-fide millionaire. Realizing that America’s definitive break with England jeopardized the continuance of the profitable “Triangle Trade,” one leg of which involved sailing into and trading with British-controlled ports in the West Indies, Derby conceived the out-of-the-box notion of sending a Salem ship clear off to China. Everyone laughed until the ship returned and Derby realized an 800% profit on his investment. Thereafter, “China Trade” became Salem’s middle name.

So, you may ask, what happened to the witches? Were Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Miller and Christopher Lee all liars?

The bustling port vs. its kid-brother rustic village

Well, yes and no. There was the port of Salem, a bustling place where all races and all creeds mingled fairly freely in pursuit of the dollar. Then there was Salem Village, an inland farming community, a mere satellite of the larger Salem and perhaps resentful of its kid brother status. Salem Village had a relatively inexperienced minister named Samuel Parris who had spent most of his life as a merchant. Woefully out of his depth in dealing with a major psychological crisis within his community in 1692, Parris dolefully wrote: “The Devil hath been raised amongst us, & his Rage is vehement & terrible & when he shall be silenc’d the Lord only knows.”

When indeed? And what would poor pastor Parris make of those “Witch City” emblems that now freely adorn Salem? It seems strange that an incident lasting for so short a period of time has managed to cast such a long shadow through the centuries. In a sense the little brother Salem has had his revenge by upstaging the illustrious doings of his older brother.

Everywhere in modern Salem you see this dichotomy. Salem exists largely as a bedroom community to Boston and as a tourist center. Its great days as a seaport whose ships could be glimpsed at anchor in every port of the world ended before the Civil War. The ambition of its great merchant families— to extend their wharves farther and farther out into the harbor to accommodate larger numbers of vessels— had accelerated the natural tendency of the harbor to silt up. Today, at low tide you can clearly see the harbor bottom from any Salem jetty, and I saw one old timer rather far out in the harbor digging for clams.

The old, the new, and the suburban

This is not to say that Salem lives on its memories, except in a professional way. Salem was built in successive waves. The old Salem of quaint wooden colonial structures, some of which predate the good pastor Parris, hugs the harbor. A “second Salem” of stately brick mansions and townhouses ringing Salem Common radiates a bit farther out, marching inexorably toward what once had been Salem Village.

Then there is a new Salem: a post-World War II suburban community of single homes on tree-lined streets that developed along the farther reaches of the old harbor. We need not concern ourselves with this newest of Salems.

What interests me is the clash between the two perceptions of Salem. Salem the historical port city, with its wealth of Colonial, Federalist and Victorian structures, constantly clashes with and rubs up against “Witch City,” where there’s a statue honoring Elizabeth Montgomery and her TV show “Bewitched,” and an innocent and wholly inoffensive 17th Century house—well, not wholly innocent: one of the witch trial judges, Jonathan Corwin, lived in it—is touted as “The Salem Witch House,” and various ghost tours and witch tours are regularly offered.

(It’s worth noting as an aside that the National Park Service eschews any of this activity, confining itself to purely historical tours of the harbor area and the Custom House, where Nathaniel Hawthorne toiled in dreary solitude holding down an important post in a no-longer important port.)

‘Witchcraft is groovy’

Then there’s the schism among the historic Salem forces themselves. Those who feel that witchcraft is groovy, for either commercial or religious reasons, are at least on the same page as to who and what they honor. They conduct the ghost tours and place bunches of flowers at the graves of the executed men and women of Salem Village. (Once they were buried outside the walls of the Old Burying Point Cemetery; today the locations are marked by slabs set into the wall and jutting out just far enough to receive floral tributes, but not to be mistaken for benches.)

No such unanimity exists among the lovers of historic Salem. The Peabody Essex Museum is a major player in this part of Salem’s life. Aside from its status as a museum, it administers many of Salem’s historic homes, some of which can be toured daily, others by appointment only. But the Peabody Essex collection is itself somewhat skewed. On one hand it functions as Old Salem’s official attic, containing the tea services, the exquisite ship models and the ancestral portraits that collectively detail Salem’s rise and fall in the greater world. But the Peabody Essex also houses an ambitious collection of Asian Art, the rationale here being: How did Salem get rich? Through trade with the Orient—and I’m certain that fine pieces of Chinese, Japanese and Korean art that once belonged to the illustrious merchant families of Salem once formed the core of this collection. But I’ve heard a few complaints that the Peabody Essex has gone overboard in its concentration on Asian Art, neglecting its original purpose to showcase the history of the City of Salem.

Not being a native of the place, I remain firmly on the fence. But I will say that I didn’t feel the two collections merged that well.

Centuries old, untouched since the 1980s

Also, the Peabody Essex Museum's reconstructed Yin Yu Tang House, while fascinating and certainly a tourist attraction (I went to see it, after all), has little to do with Salem, aside from the fact that it now resides within the museum's walls. The Huang family, who lived in it, wasn’t involved in trade with Salem, and while the house itself is several centuries old, it’s been left exactly as it was when the last member of the Huang family moved out the 1980s— right down to the battered bicycle leaning against the courtyard wall. It’s all very fascinating but has less to do with Salem than “The Witch House” or its more famous kin, “The House of the Seven Gables.”

An old city contains many tender egos, I imagine. Perhaps the Peabody Essex rubbed a lot of those egos raw just by daring to erecting a modern structure to house its collections. At least one fine old Salem mansion has fallen victim to its owner’s pique at the local government. It was extravagantly restored for a new incarnation as a showplace hotel, but the plans fell through. Now it’s being allowed to die a death of neglect, with kicked in windows and rotting wooden cornices making a mockery of its too-brief rebirth as a jewel in Salem’s crown. I thought that sort of thing happened only in Philadelphia.