Tag: Peabody Essex Museum

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In January 2023, the Peabody Essex Museum’s Phillips Library returned 527 Salem witch trials (SWT) documents to the Judicial Archives at the Massachusetts State Archives facility in Boston.

Established in 1692 after the dismissal of the Court of Oyer and Terminer, the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature heard the final witch trials in Salem. However, the court papers apparently did not depart with the judges. Over the years, some SWT documents ended up at other repositories or in private collections, though the majority stayed in Salem. Due to lack of storage space in the old Superior Court building on Federal Street, in December 1980 the SWT documents were temporarily reposited with the Essex Institute (EI) at Plummer Hall. The SWT papers remained in the custody of EI’s Phillips Library after the Essex Institute merged with the Peabody Museum of Salem in 1992 to form the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM). In 2018, the Phillips Library collections moved to Rowley.

Once in its new location, the Phillips Library team digitized all of the SWT documents in its possession before the transfer. In addition to the 527 SWT documents owned by the Commonwealth, PEM digitized 31 SWT papers that had been donated to the Essex Institute.

Access to the original documents from the Judicial Archives is limited. Years ago, I was able to get access to my ancestor’s 1721 probate only because the microfilm was missing a few pages. With the digital scans online, few valid reasons exist for being able to touch the fragile originals. And it’s not likely that being a descendant will give you access, since millions of people can say the same!

Related links

Salem Witch Trials Collection, Phillips Library Digital Collection, Peabody Essex Museum (images of SJC/PEM documents)

Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt by Bernard Rosenthal, et al. (book, transcription of all known documents, totaling 977)

Judicial Archives at the Massachusetts State Archives, 220 Morrissey Blvd., Boston, Massachusetts

The Phillips Library reading room, 306 Newburyport Turnpike, Rowley, Massachusetts

SWT holdings from various archives (2002)

Treasures of the Salem court house

Why go to Rowley? Salem’s PEM research library of course

press release: Peabody Essex Museum and Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Announce Return of Historic Salem Witch Trial Documents, 12 January 2023

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Charter Street Cemetery, Salem, Massachusetts, photo by Frank Cousins

With the new Welcome Center now open inside the circa 1665 Samuel Pickman house and after the major restoration work on headstones, box tombs, and landscaping at the Charter Street Cemetery, let’s look back at this historic burying ground through the eyes of Frank Cousins (1851-1925).

In 1868, Cousins opened a general store at 170-174 Essex Street in Salem, Massachusetts. Besides the necessities of local Salemites, his shop carried photo postcards and other knickknacks for tourists. At first, he bought other photographers’ images, but then he became interested in photography and sold his own images. (He also was interested in the colonial architecture of Salem and wrote a book about it.)

The Old Burying Point (or Charter Street Cemetery) was first used in 1637, though the earliest surviving gravestone dates to 1673.

Just inside the Charter Street gate.
In the center of this photo, you can see the box tomb of Governor Simon Bradstreet (1604-1697). He was acting governor at the beginning of the witch accusations until May 1692, when Rev. Increase Mather returned from London with the new Massachusetts charter and the new governor, William Phips.
The plaque on Governor Simon Bradstreet’s box tomb.
At the time of Nathaniel Mather’s death at age 19 in 1688, his father Rev. Increase Mather (1639-1723) was in London lobbying the king for the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter. Increase first visited his son’s grave while in Salem for the 1692 witch trials.
At two years old, Samuel Shattock (1678-1695) suffered from fits and catatonia. By 1692, his health issues were unresolved. During the Salem witch trials, people said he was bewitched. His parents, Samuel and Sarah Shattock, testified against accused witch Bridget Bishop.
Mary Corey was the second wife of accused witch Giles Corey. In 1678, she was charged with cursing & swearing, being drunk, and using abusive speech. She died in 1684, aged 63 years. Giles and his third wife Martha were executed as witches in 1692, Giles by peine forte et dure (stone weight torture) and Martha by hanging.
This dual headstone, featuring a death head and an urn, is for William Hollingsworth (1655-1688) and his mother Eleanor (1630-1689). Eleanor’s daughter Mary married the prosperous merchant Philip English (1651-1736) in 1675. Mary and Philip English were arrested for witchcraft in 1692. They escaped from the Boston jail and returned home after the trials were over.
This is my favorite Frank Cousins’ image from Charter Street Cemetery, and not because it’s the gravestone for Col. John Hathorne (1641-1717). This stone was encased in cement after being seriously damaged many years ago. (I’d guess the damage happened in the 1930s, based on a postcard.) Hathorne was the magistrate who handled the early arrests of accused witches and depositions of their accusers. He also became a judge on the Court of Oyer and Terminer in 1692.

No convicted witches executed at Proctor’s Ledge in 1692 are buried at Charter Street Cemetery. Their remains were taken from the shallow graves near the gallows and buried in secret by their family and friends. Their burial locations remain unknown. Requiescat in pace.

Digital Commonwealth features 2,669 images of the Frank Cousins Collection of Glass Plate Negatives 1890-1920, courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum. The original negatives are located at PEM’s Phillips Library in Rowley, Massachusetts.

Read more: If these stones could speak

By Posted on Posted in Research Tagged with ,

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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Philip English mansion (Peabody Essex Museum)

There’s a certain charm in old travel books. I read them to learn about houses and objects that have disappeared or have since been hidden from view. Take, for example, The Book of Boston by Robert Shackleton (1860-1923).

One hundred years ago, the author ventured to “the famous old Seaport of Salem.” He found much of interest, from the mansions on Chestnut Street to the “staid old homes” built around Washington Square.

“Yet, if all these old houses, with their wealth of belongings, should be destroyed, the Salem of the past would still be represented if it should still retain the treasures of its Essex Institute. The building that holds these treasures is a three-story structure of generous portions, standing near the center of the city, on Essex Street. …The Essex Institute holds, in itself, Old Salem. Enter the door…and instantly you are generations away from the present, for there is nothing that does not tell of the past, and the past is shown with infinite picturesqueness and particularity. There is a great central portion, and there are little alcove rooms full-furnished as rooms of the olden time, all in ship-shape order….

“Here in Essex Institute is the furniture of our forefathers, tables and sideboards and chairs, and among them is a black, heavy three-slat chair with high-turned posts which was the favorite chair of that beloved Mary English, who, with her husband, the richest shipowner of Salem, had to flee from Massachusetts for very life under the shadow of witchcraft accusation; and this excellent old chair seems to stand as a reminder that neither wealth nor high character nor charm of manner nor social position can be relied upon to check a popular delusion.”

Provenance of Mary English’s Chair

Mary English chairIn the 1908 Annual Report of the Essex Institute, we learn that Miss Mary R. Crowninshield of Madrid, Spain, donated the “wooden-seated armchair that formerly belonged to Mary English.” The report also mentions its provenance and how it came to have a certain inscription—details critically important to museum pieces.

“This chair is unlike any other chair in the museum and is of greatest interest because of its association with an important character at the time of the witchcraft delusion in Salem. Miss Crowninshield is a great-granddaughter of Mrs. Hannah Crowninshield with whom Rev. William Bentley lived for many years and in his diary is recorded the following:

“June 3, 1793: Ordered the chair received from the family of English in memory of 1692 to be painted green, and on the back 1692, upper slat; middle slat, M. English; lower slat, Apr. 22, the time of her mittimus; on the front upper slat, “It shall be told of her.”

“This inscription placed upon the ancient chair over a century ago at the direction of Doctor Bentley yet remains and in our safe and careful custody will exist for generations, a memorial to a noble woman who suffered unjustly during a time of great mental delusion.”

The donation was so notable that scores of newspapers across the country picked up the story. For instance, the Boston Daily Globe (10 Jan. 1909) wrote of the “Relic of Witchcraft Days” and described Mary English’s arrest, imprisonment, and escape. The wording is the same from The Republic (Columbus, Ohio) and the Wichita Searchlight (Kansas) to the Times Herald (Olean, New York), though some articles include more or less detail, depending how many inches of copy they had to place. The last line is particularly poignant:

“The chair in the Institute is one of the few memorials to them, or to witchcraft victims, in Salem.”

Let’s hope, as the Peabody Essex Museum expands, it once again will display the witch-hunt documents and related objects, including Mary English’s chair, to “invite visitors to discover the inextricable connections” between “the past and the present” (as stated on PEM’s website).

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1684 John Ward house (PEM)

For the 300th anniversary of the Salem witch trials, the Peabody Essex Museum created the Days of Judgement: Salem in 1692 exhibit and video. On display were original trial documents along with artifacts belonging to some people involved in the trials. Items included Judge Jonathan Corwin’s chest, Mary (Hollingsworth) English’s embroidered sampler, old George Jacobs’ canes, and John Proctor’s sundial.

Besides the exhibit, the Peabody Essex offered The Everyday & the Extraordinary: Salem in 1692 tours to school groups. Originally located across the street from the “old witch gaol,” the 1684 John Ward house helped students imagine what 17th-century life was like, from its simple furnishings to outmoded kitchen implements. The old home set the stage for talking about the social, economic, religious, and political conditions that led to the witch hunt.

Next, the students congregated in the one-room meetinghouse, which was similar to the 17th-century courthouse with bench seating, where they learned about court procedures. Afterward, the students reenacted the parts of accuser and accused using testimonies from the witch trials.

Recommended for middle and high school students, the program also provided teachers with a 50-page curriculum packet and reading list. Developed and tested by educators, the lesson plans introduced the basic story of the witch hunt and covered four themes: jurisprudence/law; folk belief and magic; group dynamics and prejudice; and material culture.

What the Witch Hunts Teach Us

Between the museum visits and the classroom lessons, students discovered why studying the Salem witch hunt is still relevant today. Some of the ideas include:

  • The importance of primary sources and how secondary accounts and later interpretations can change how we view history
  • The difference between bias and objectivity, and how loaded words can influence the audience
  • How group dynamics and mob mentality can influence outcomes
  • How to weigh evidence based upon what you know, and what’s admissible evidence within the historical context
  • How laws, scientific knowledge, and belief systems change over time
  • How traditions and practices are different among groups of people and through time
  • How ethnocentric groups discriminate, stereotype, and scapegoat others; and how we can combat intolerance and prejudice by recognizing it
  • How the roles of women have changed over 300 years; and why gender, ethnicity, religious beliefs, race, culture, etc., influence us today
  • How to have courage and believe in yourself, like the innocent victims who would not falsely confess to witchcraft and were hanged

In 1998, the Peabody Essex Museum opened The Real Witchcraft Papers “permanent exhibit” at the Phillips Library across the street from the main museum. Before 2011, when the Phillips Library collection was moved to a “temporary” collection center during renovations to the building, the so-called permanent exhibit was dismantled and taken off display.

Today, the Peabody Essex no longer maintains a permanent witch-hunt exhibit nor offers witch-hunt-themed school programs, despite the huge value of using these artifacts and original documents as teaching tools. Over the last 10+ years, the Peabody Essex Museum changed its mission by focusing on art and culture, while relegating “history” to the tourist attractions. Unfortunately, those businesses don’t have the historical settings, artifacts, original documents, educational resources, and prestige to put together an influential exhibit and educational program like PEM did with The Everyday & the Extraordinary: Salem in 1692.

Note: Since this post was written, PEM’s Phillips Library moved to Rowley, Massachusetts. The Peabody Essex Museum also presented two Salem witch trials exhibits, with plans for more. Check the PEM site for upcoming events and exhibits.

To see photos of some of PEM’s Salem witch trials artifacts, check out The Salem Witchcraft Trials, a booklet by Katherine Richardson (1983).

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Kindness Rocks Project, Artist Row, Salem

The Salem of today is a vibrant city—upbeat, artsy, multicultural, progressive. That vibrancy comes from people who are willing to make their world a little better. Take, for example, Caroline Emmerton (1866-1942) who not only preserved the House of the Seven Gables and other historic Salem buildings, she used the income generated by the museum to support a settlement society that provided immigrants with medical care, education, job skills, and recreational opportunities.

But she was not alone. All around the city, from its maritime heyday to its manufacturing boom and the lulls in between, Salemites worked together to create a better society. The Marine Society at Salem (1766) offered relief to disabled and aged members and their families. The Salem Athenaeum (1810) provided books and conversation to its members years before Captain John Bertram’s family donated its mansion for the Salem Public Library (1889). The Salem Lyceum Society (1830) provided educational lectures and entertainment, including the first public telephone transmission between Alexander Graham Bell in Salem and Thomas Watson in Boston (1877). The Essex Institute (1848) encouraged the study of local history, genealogy, and art, while the Peabody Academy of Science (1867) explored the maritime history of New England, Pacific and Japanese ethnology, and the natural history of Essex county.

Yet one thing they didn’t do? Preserve the remnants of the Salem witch trials.

When people visit Salem today, they expect to see evidence of the 1692 witch trials. But where is the court house? The documents? The tangible objects that remind us of the victims, the accusers, the judges?*

Before there was such a thing as the tourist industry, people came to Salem to see “the witches.” In 1766, future U.S. president John Adams (1735-1826) visited “Witchcraft Hill” and mentioned in his journal the locust trees planted in memory of the witch-hunt victims. In 1831, Charles W. Upham started lecturing on the trials years before he published his Salem Witchcraft book (1867).

Click to enlarge article from The Pharmaceutical Era, 1898

Druggist George P. Farrington (1808-1885), who operated his pharmacy in Judge Jonathan Corwin’s old house (known as the Witch House), gave tours and charged admission. Abner C. Goodell (1831-1914), who collected works on witchcraft from all over the world, lectured and gave private tours of his home, which previously was the old Salem county jail before the new one was built around the corner in 1813. (The 1684 structure was rebuilt in 1763, with the frame and original timbers.) In 1935, his son Alfred P. Goodell (1877-1954) opened the Old Witch Jail and Dungeon after discovering an original 1692 bill for “keeping witches” in his home. Shortly after his death, the city of Salem tore down the historic building.

Why?

Salem is praised for its architecture, even for its doorways. Yet the city only has a few First Period houses (1626-1725) remaining, unlike Ipswich which boasts 59. Probably no one missed Bridget Bishop’s home and orchard, or remembrances of her sharp tongue, but why demolish Philip English’s mansion? Was it an effort to erase history?

Even today, people question why we’re so interested in the past, in understanding the events of 1692, when they wish to forget.

The Salem witch-hunt has much to teach us as individuals and as a society.

Sign at 10 Federal Street

It has nothing to do with Halloween and the macabre. Some of the accused may have dabbled in fortunetelling, folk-healing, and the like, but they were not witches who made pacts with the devil, performed Satanic rites, or shapeshifted to harm their neighbors. They were ordinary people with flaws, just like you and me.

* The Salem court house was torn down in 1760. The existing witch trial documents are scattered through various libraries and archives. The Peabody Essex Museum owns numerous objects of witch-hunt victims, most of which are not on display.

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Sidney Perley at Proctor’s Ledge

The year 2017 marked the 325th anniversary of the Salem witch trials in which 19 people were found guilty of witchcraft and were hanged between June and September 1692. 

Lessons and legacies of 1692 symposium

On June 10, the anniversary of the hanging of Bridget Bishop, hundreds gathered at Salem State University for a special symposium, Salem’s Trials: Lessons and Legacies of 1692, sponsored by Salem State University’s history department, the Voices Against Injustice, and the Essex National Heritage Area. C-SPAN recorded four of the six sessions.

Proctor’s Ledge dedicated

In January 2016, the Gallows Hill Project team announced it had confirmed historian Sidney Perley’s theory that Proctor’s Ledge was the site of the hangings, not the summit of Gallows Hill or anywhere else. Using Perley’s research, a 1692 eyewitness account of the hangings, ground-penetrating radar, high-tech aerial photography, and maps, the team reached its conclusion. Fortunately, in 1936 the city had purchased the land between Pope and Proctor streets and in 2017, a memorial was created. The official unveiling of the memorial was held on July 19, with numerous descendants of the victims attending.

Reproduction of the meetinghouse at Rebecca Nurse homestead

Having her day

Governor Charlie Baker declared July 19 Rebecca Nurse Day in Massachusetts. At the Rebecca Nurse homestead in Danvers, archivist Richard Trask spoke on behalf of the five women executed 325 years before, including 71-year-old Nurse. Afterwards, a wreath was ceremoniously placed at the Nurse memorial inside the family cemetery.

Talks and walks

At History Camp: Boston 2017, presentations included Marilynne K. Roach on How Governor Phips Stopped the Salem Witch Trials (sort of); Jeanne Pickering on From Witchcraft to Slavery: The History of the Hoar/Slew Family; and Lori Stokes on Puritans. Margo Burns, project manager for the Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, traveled throughout New Hampshire and parts of Massachusetts with her talk on The Capital Crime of Witchcraft: What the Sources Tell Us. At the North Andover Historical Society, Richard Hite gave a talk on witch trial-related burials at the Old Burial Ground and Char Lyons gave a tour of the cemetery. Kelly Daniell spoke at the Peabody Historical Society on the Life and Death of John Proctor. Emerson Baker gave a Salem Witch Trials Walking Tour. And Intramersive debuted its game theater experience, Daemonologie, in Salem.

World bewitch’d exhibit

On October 31, Cornell University opened its The World Bewitch’d: Visions of Witchcraft from the Cornell Collections exhibit. With 3,000+ items, Cornell owns the largest collection of books, manuscripts, and ephemera in North America about witchcraft, spanning from the 15th to 20th centuries. The exhibit, open through August 31, 2018, focuses on the spread of witchcraft beliefs in Europe, which ultimately caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people.

PEM library access

In December, the Peabody Essex Museum announced most of the Phillips Library collection will be moved to its new collections center in Rowley. People have been protesting the news, especially since much of the archives and materials form the backbone of Salem’s historical past, from documents of the Salem witch trials and seafaring ventures to local organizations’ records. The museum said it could not procure a Salem building fit for a climate-controlled space for storage and research facilities.

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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).