Category: Research

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stacks, not PEM’s though

In 1799, Salem ship captains created a research library that—over 200 years and numerous mergers later—became the world-renowned Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum. For many years, the collection had its home in the stately Plummer Hall on Essex Street in downtown Salem, in the architecturally rich, cultured atmosphere of the Saltonstall reading room, surrounded with bookshelves and ship models.

Over the last 20 years, the reading room closed for long stretches of time for building restoration and renovations, including climate control, modern archival storage, and digital cataloging of the collections. After numerous promises to return the Phillips Library Collections to its longtime home in the 1850s building, PEM abruptly announced in December 2017 that the 400,000 books and 5,500 linear feet of manuscripts were moving permanently to a recently purchased and retrofitted warehouse in Rowley.

In late June 2018, the PEM Collection Center opened at 306 Newburyport Turnpike in Rowley. Much of the warehouse’s 120,000 square feet is storage for 1.8 million museum pieces that are not on exhibit at the museum. Still under construction are the conservation lab, digitization space, a photography studio, and curatorial and research areas.

Hundreds of 12-foot-tall shelves in Room 156 hold the treasures from the Phillips Library, including a rare book section, with room to grow. The stacks are not open for researchers to browse through the book spines (something I truly enjoy doing because I often have aha! research moments that way). However, for the first time in years, the collection is accessible.

Like many special libraries and archives, PEM’s research library has rules to abide by. There are storage lockers for your bags, coats, and pens. Inside, though, you’re welcome to use your laptop computer, the guest Wi-Fi account, and your phone for taking pictures of documents. While the space lacks the beauty of the reading room in Salem, it’s functional and modern despite a shortage of electrical outlets.

What’s available

Let’s start with the mergers first. You’ll find collections from the East India Marine Society (founded 1799); the Essex Historical Society (1821) and Essex County Natural History Society (1833), which formed the revered Essex Institute in 1848; the Peabody Academy of Science (1868), which changed its name to the Peabody Museum of Salem in 1915; materials on art, culture, and exhibitions of the Peabody Essex Museum (1992); and collections from smaller institutions.

Much of the collections were donated by individuals, families, societies, businesses, and institutions with connections to Salem and surrounding towns, particularly Essex county. Since PEM was created by the 1992 merger of the Essex Institute and the Peabody Museum of Salem, subjects cover a broad swath of knowledge, from literary, historical, genealogical, and cultural interests to artistic, architectural, maritime, and scientific pursuits.

Among the books, manuscripts, diaries, photographs, account books, maps, ship logbooks, and printed ephemera, you find original Salem witch trial documents, Winthrop family papers, Nathaniel Hawthorne first editions, Essex county histories, business papers by Philip English and the Touzel family, vital records from Massachusetts towns, Puritan sermons, and shipping reports.

Visiting the collections onsite and online

Salem’s PEM research library at Rowley is free and open to the public. Check hours before you go. (And make sure your GPS sends you to Rowley. The entrance is about half a mile from the Agawam Diner.)

https://www.pem.org/visit/library-02/visiting-the-reading-room

PhilCat searchable catalog

http://pem-voyager.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/vwebv/searchBasic

Manuscript finding aids

https://pem.as.atlas-sys.com/

Digital collections

https://www.pem.org/visit/library-02/online-collections

Salem witch trial records

https://pem.quartexcollections.com/collections/salem-witch-trials-collection/salem-witch-trials-documents

See also:

Collection center for artifacts from Peabody Essex unveiled (Salem News)

Mission impossible: The great collection move of 2018 (PEM)

Peabody Essex Museum’s Phillips Library collections: a timeline from 1799 to 2018

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Sometimes you’re so sure your ancestor is buried in a certain cemetery, but you can’t find any proof. Unfortunately, someone went too far.

Besides the obvious lines to keep the lettering straight, you can tell by the B, the Y, and the shape of the numbers that someone added inscriptions on these stones centuries after the originals were carved. Until 1752, Massachusetts records often used double dating to account for the difference between the Julian and Gregorian calendars. While not every gravestone would show double dating, it’s worth mentioning that Thomas was baptized 28 February 1610/11 and died 16 March 1694/5. For married women, gravestones said “wife of” or “daughter of” if the maiden name was used (for example, “Mary Perkins, wife of Thomas Bradbury,” or “Mary Bradbury, daughter of John Perkins”). Plus, Mary’s dates are wrong.

In 2007, Chester and Julia True printed Burials in some cemeteries in the towns of Salisbury, Amesbury, and Merrimac, in Essex county, Massachusetts. The two markers shown above, whose photos were taken at a later date, are not listed in the book. However, in the Old Burying Ground in Salisbury, you will find the couple’s grandson, Thomas Bradbury (1674-1718). And that’s an original gravestone.

Mary on Trial

On 26 May 1692, Ann Putnam Jr. and others were attacked by specters on Lecture Day, including the specter of Mary Bradbury of Salisbury. A month later, Mary was arrested. Despite friends and neighbors from Salisbury and Ipswich attesting to Mary’s good character, on 10 September 1692, Mary and five others were found guilty of witchcraft and sentenced to hang. From the existing records, it appears Mary escaped jail before the hangings occurred 12 days later.

On 14 January 1693, Judge William Stoughton signed death warrants for five condemned witches from the previous Court of Oyer and Terminer, including Mary Bradbury. In his report to Governor William Phips, however, King’s Attorney Anthony Checkley was of the opinion that the earlier cases were much like the cleared cases before the new Supreme Court of Judicature, being based on spectral evidence. On 1 February 1693, Gov. Phips sent a reprieve to the Salem court, which infuriated Judge Stoughton, but saved the lives of Mary Bradbury and seven others who were expected to be hanged that day.

For many 17th-century people, their gravestones do not exist today. But, Mary, we remember you.

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Wrong! Edward & Sarah Bishop house site

One of my reasons for creating the Witches of Massachusetts Bay website is to right the wrongs. Even though it’s been 325 years since the witch trials, the topic is still popular and relevant in our society. That’s why new discoveries and better interpretations are made. Yet we keep hearing, reading, and seeing the same historical inaccuracies repeated. Why? Our brains are more apt to believe something wrong but oft-repeated than to replace it with new (and correct) information.

Today, I wanted to know if a structure exists where Edward and Sarah Bishop once held raucous, late-night shuffleboard parties at their unlicensed tavern on the outskirts of Salem Village. Naturally, I turned to Google maps and typed in 238 Conant Street, Danvers. Ironically, a lawyer has an office at that location.

Then I saw in the Google box that the address was labeled a landmark for Bridget Bishop. (Of course, I had to send Google a correction.)

On April 19, 1692, Bridget Bishop was confronted by Mercy Lewis, Ann Putnam Jr., and others who charged her with “sundry acts of witchcraft” (RSWH, doc. 63, pp. 183-184). Judge Jonathan Hathorne did not believe Bishop’s claim that she didn’t know these girls. But it’s true. Bridget Bishop lived in Salem Town and probably had no reason to visit Salem Village.

“I doe tell the truth I never hurt these persons in [my] life I never saw them before”

In 1981, The American Genealogist (TAG) published David L. Greene’s article showing how the court and historians confused two women named Goody Bishop (“Salem Witches I: Bridget Bishop,” vol. 157, p. 130). It was three-times-married Bridget (Playfer) (Wasselbe) (Oliver) Bishop (c.1640-1692) who wore the flashy red bodice, lived in Salem Town, and was the first person hanged in 1692. Bridget’s home was at the corner of what’s now Washington and Church streets, with her orchard located at 43 Church Street in Salem, currently occupied by Turner’s Seafood at Lyceum Hall.*

Like Bridget, Sarah (Wildes) Bishop was married to a man named Edward Bishop (1648-1711). These two disturbed their neighbors with their drunken parties in Salem Village, now Danvers, near the Beverly line. Sarah and her husband Edward were accused of witchcraft, but they escaped from jail. By 1703, they had moved to Rehoboth where they opened an inn.

So 238 Conant Street in Danvers? Site of Sarah’s house, not Bridget’s.

* updated 8 July 2018

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An international art, architectural, and cultural museum, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem started as the East India Marine Society in 1799. Through mergers of several societies, the museum grew from seafaring treasures to include local history, nature, and science collections. Most of these materials were donated by local families, businesses, and organizations from Salem and Essex county.
Complaint against George Burroughs, 30 April 1692, in the Phillips Library collections

The Peabody Essex became stewards of what’s known as the Phillips Library. The collections contain 520+ originalhttps://www.pem.org/visit/library/catalog Salem witch trial documents; Puritan religious tracts and Bibles; local genealogies; the Winthrop papers; scrapbooks and manuscripts; Frank Cousins’ negatives and photographs of Salem and Essex county sites; “Essex county history reports, circulars, advertisements, and other publications of Essex County societies, businesses, municipalities, and other institutions”; full newspaper runs; 600+ volumes of works by authors of Essex county; “as well as the publications (books and periodicals) of local presses and publishers.”

A decade ago, Plummer Hall, which housed the Phillips Library, was renovated to include “the addition of climate-controlled archives, galleries, reading rooms, and a new compact storage space for the library’s extensive collection.” Curiously, in 2011, the Phillips Library closed again for major renovations and its collections were moved to a temporary facility in Peabody, with limited hours for visitors. In September 2017, that temporary facility was closed and “all access to the collection of books and manuscripts is suspended through Spring 2018.”

Donna Seger, history professor at Salem State University, wrote a must-read post called “Losing Our History” on her blog, Streets of Salem, about this closure.

On December 6, 2017, the Peabody Essex needed permission from the Historical Commission for outside renovations to Plummer Hall. Thanks to concerned citizens on social media, people attended the Historical Commission meeting to find out the Peabody Essex’s intent, which changed the tenor of the meeting from architectural changes to PEM’s plans for its historic library collections. It turns out that, unbeknownst to the people who use the collections, the Phillips Library is turning into office space and the bulk of its collections will be in Rowley, Massachusetts.

The Peabody Essex had acquired “a 112,000-square-foot building located 40 minutes from the museum that is currently being retrofitted to serve as PEM’s new Collections Center. It will provide fully climate-controlled storage for all of the museum’s collections, the highest level of security protection, space for a new Conservation Lab, Photography Studio, scholarly research, and special small-scale programs related to the collections,” according to information on its website. Touted in a press release, “Research and access to the collection is a key priority for the museum.” Taking the collections away from the city does not sound like improved access.

Read the Salem News story, “Bulk of Phillips Library collection won’t return to Salem.”

Professor Seger calls the Peabody Essex “Shameless Stewards” for taking the Salem collections outside the city, especially without letting the public know beforehand.

Read the Peabody Essex Museum’s “Statement regarding PEM’s Phillips Library” (12/8/2017).