One of the best ways to “meet” women from Salem’s past is to visit their homes — see the rooms where they worked, raised their children, and socialized; the furniture and dishes they used; the art they collected; and the personal objects they left behind.

Several of Salem’s historic house museums consciously tell the “upstairs” stories of wealthy women, as well as the “downstairs” stories of their servants. They range in date from colonial times in the seventeenth century, to Salem’s emergence as a leading maritime trading port in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when preservationists during the Colonial Revival worked to preserve Salem’s illustrious past.

In fact, women were centrally involved in the Colonial Revival historic house movement, from the 1876 World's Fair in Philadelphia (100 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence) and romantic colonial hearth displays, to the preservation of Mount Vernon, George Washington's home in Virginia, which is considered the first historic house museum in America. It was saved and opened to the public by the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, which continues to manage the site.

Each one of Salem's historic house museums represents some of the finest architecture in all of New England.

They include, in chronological order:

• Gedney House (1665)
  Historic New England
  (open only on special occasions)

• Turner House (1668)
  The House of the Seven Gables

• Corwin House/Witch House (ca. 1674)
  City of Salem

• Narbonne House (1675)
  Salem Maritime National Historic Site

• John Ward House (ca. 1684)
  Peabody Essex Museum

• Ropes Mansion (1727)
  Peabody Essex Museum
  (closed; will reopen in 2010)

• Crowninshield-Bentley House (ca. 1727-30)
  Peabody Essex Museum
  (closed; will reopen in 2010)

• Nathaniel Hawthorne Birthplace (1750)
  The House of the Seven Gables

• Derby House (1762)
  Salem Maritime National Historic Site

• Pierce-Nichols House (1782)
  Peabody Essex Museum
  (presently closed)

• Phillips House (1800, 1806, 1819, 1911)
  Historic New England

• Yin Yu Tang, a Chinese House (ca. 1800)
  Peabody Essex Museum

• George Francis Dow Period Rooms (1907)
  Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum

• Pioneer Village: Salem in 1630 (1930)
  (replica of what Salem Village might have
  looked like in 1630)