Salem Women's
History and
Business Community
History and
Business Community
Salem Maritime NHS
Associated women:
• Louise du Pont Crowninshield
• Cynthia Pollack
Other historic house museums
Other topics below:
• Staff "Firsts"
• Salem as An International Port
• African American History
• "Immigrants"
• Louise du Pont Crowninshield
• Cynthia Pollack
Other historic house museums
Other topics below:
• Staff "Firsts"
• Salem as An International Port
• African American History
• "Immigrants"
Orientation Center — Open to the Public
193 Derby Street
Visitor Center — Open to the Public
2 New Liberty Street
Established in 1938 under President Franklin Roosevelt, the Salem Maritime National Historic Site is the oldest National Park Service historic site in the nation. “Salem Maritime,” as it is known locally, is comprised of the Derby House, Custom House, a Scale House, Public Stores, Hawkes House, Narbonne House, Pedrick Storehouse, St. Joseph Hall, West India Dry Goods Store, Derby Wharf (and lighthouse), Hatch’s Wharf, Central Wharf, the replica ship Friendship, and an Orientation Center. All of these structures are located on Salem’s waterfront, clustered around Derby Wharf. In the heart of downtown Salem and across from the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem Maritime also maintains a world-class Visitor Center just behind Armory Memorial Park.
Along with maintaining and interpreting these properties, Park Service staff members are endlessly engaged in conducting research, creating publications, developing walking tours, hosting lectures and events, working with school groups, and generally figuring out ways in which to engage visitors and residents in the rich history of Salem and its surrounding county, Essex County. Their work benefits residents and visitors alike enormously.
The Women's Stories
Women’s history stories connected to Salem Maritime begin with Louise du Pont Crowninshield, a native of Delaware who married into one of Salem’s most prominent shipping families, the Crowninshields of nearby Marblehead. According to Park Service staff, she was singularly responsible for preserving the 1762 Derby House, which was a wedding gift to Elias Hasket Derby and his bride, Elizabeth Crowninshield. As a preservationist and collector, “Mrs. Crowninshield” wished to preserve this living legacy to her husband’s family heritage. In the 1930s, as a board member of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities which owned the Derby House, she helped pay off its mortgage to enable the Park Service to acquire the property for the new Historic Site. At the time, the Park Service considered the Derby House “the most important structure of the site.”
Louise Crowninshield then “took on the task of furnishing the house, personally purchasing needed items as well as arranging loans and gifts from individuals and institutions, and exercising control over the final product,” according to the Park Service’s history of the site. She had worked with the Park Service earlier in Virginia where she helped to preserve George Washington’s birthplace, Wakefield. In Salem, working with the Essex Institute, she had also furnished the Pingree House and Peirce-Nichols House (today, properties of the Peabody Essex Museum where she also created the Crowninshield Gallery). She would go on to become one of the founders of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which continues to issue an achievement award in her name (Mrs. Francis B. Crowninshield).
At the newly created Salem Maritime NHS, Louise Crowninshield expanded her involvement by serving as president of the Salem Maritime Historical Association, “which published site materials and ran the sales concession until it was taken over by Eastern National Park and Monument Association in the 1970s,” according to the Park Service. They go on to say that “her very connection to the site gave it credibility with Massachusetts ‘Brahmins’ who tended to be distrustful of the federal government…she was essential to the flourishing of the site.”
Staff “Firsts”
Fast forward to 1984, when Cynthia Pollack was appointed superintendent of the Salem Maritime National Historic Site—the first woman (and among the first within the Park Service as a whole), and an “activist” superintendent at that who understood the value of public-private partnerships and community relations. At the time, Salem Maritime had reached a “low point.” The empty warehouse on Derby Wharf “had just been burned by vandals and stood boarded up and abandoned.” The surrounding area was home to drunks and vandals, and the historic wharves also suffered from years of neglect and flood damage. Pollack arranged with the City of Salem to open a temporary visitor center on the waterfront. A new group, the Friends of Salem Maritime, successfully saved the lighthouse on Derby Wharf. A community group kept watch over the waterfront. Eventually, what started as “The Salem Project” to do even more morphed into the public-private Salem Partnership comprised of leading business, community, and municipal leaders with whom Pollack worked closely to call attention to the Park Service’s role in Salem and beyond. Together, they built a regional Visitor Center, Orientation Center, and transformed Salem Maritime into the successful National Park Service site it is today.
As Cynthia Pollack explained in a 1991 interview, “What we’re trying to do is show that we have so much, that it’s nationally significant, and it’s all tied together. People need to see it’s the only way it will get preserved. People need to see that their history was really vital and alive, and it’s still alive.” A commemorative plaque in Pollack’s honor hangs in the Visitor Center auditorium that bears her name. It reads, “She was a visionary. She knew there was more to Salem Maritime National Historic Site than historic buildings and wharves. There were stories to be told, and she want-ed visitors to see, touch, smell, and feel the maritime spirit that the site embodies.”
In 2008, the second woman superintendent of Salem Maritime, Patricia Trap, appointed Emily A. Murphy as the first woman Park Historian of Salem Maritime. Murphy received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University. Her thesis topic? The Derby family of Salem, specifically, how their business and political interests intersected. Murphy is also a skilled costumed interpreter, frequently leading tours as Elizabeth Derby West or Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, whose husband, the author Nathaniel Hawthorne, worked in the Custom House.
Salem as an International Trading Port
One of the Park Service’s guided tours, “Home from the Sea,” discusses the impact on women’s lives of the goods that were brought to Salem from around the world. Spices, pepper, tea, coffee, porcelain, cotton, silk, and finished products—women were the ones who made the daily purchases that filled Salem homes with these desirable items. The Derby House provides the perfect setting to illustrate this upper class, urban lifestyle. Recent scholarship further documents the fact that Elizabeth Crowninshield Derby was centrally involved in planning the new Derby mansion in Salem that she and her husband would inhabit, along with their estate in nearby Danvers. Her role in these matters was “exceptional,” according to Park historian Emily Murphy.
Nearby, the 1675 Narbonne House shows a much more modest lifestyle, where entrepreneurial Sarah Narbonne and her sister Mary ran a “Cent Shop,” selling all kinds of hard goods to their working class neighbors and also working as seamstresses. There were other Cent Shops in Salem as well, also known as “Thread and Needle Shops” or “Button Stores,” which were traditionally run by women from an “ell” attached to their home. Caroline Emmerton recreated one at The House of the Seven Gables. At the Narbonne House, recent archaeological findings turned up sewing needles, straight pins, and thimbles.
Salem Maritime’s Friendship is a compelling reminder of Salem’s maritime history and the physicality of life at sea. While men and boys sailed to “all corners of the globe” during the Great Age of Sail, wives, mothers, and grandmothers remained at home praying for their safe return—which did not always happen. Meanwhile, women ran businesses, took care of their families, and did what needed to be done—as women always do. But in some cases, women and children were left destitute by the loss of a husband and father. In response, prominent citizens in Salem established charities to care for widows and orphans. These included the Seaman’s Bethel, Seamen’s Orphan and Children’s Friend Society, Seamen’s Widow and Orphan Association of Salem, Salem Marine Society, Salem East India Marine Society. Interestingly, one of the investors in the original Friendship’s first voyages was Abigail Williams. The Park Service is trying to find out more about her, but very little documentation remains.
African American History
Salem Maritime created a walking trail of African American history sites several years ago which features Charlotte Forten and Sarah Parker Remond. Today, Park Service staff is actively engaged in research to learn more about “Rose the slave girl” who was “owned” by Elias Hasket Derby, Richard Derby’s “servant” who is as yet unnamed, and the many connections between Salem merchants and mill owners and the slave trade that took place elsewhere in the world. As documented in the recent PBS film “Traces of the Trade,” the wealth accumulated by upper class whites in places like Salem had direct ties to the enforced labor of African Americans. While Salem was not a slave trading port, its merchants traded in cotton, leather, sugar products, and other raw materials purchased from the plantations of the American South and the Caribbean islands.
“Immigrants”
Although the former Naumkeag Mills are not part of Salem Maritime NHS, the restored mill buildings are just across the mouth of the South River from Derby Wharf. They are a reminder of the thousands of workers from Poland, Ireland, and French Canada who arrived in Salem in the late 1800s and early 1900s to work in the cotton mills. Salem Maritime’s newly restored St. Joseph Club on Derby Street, a grand, brick community center with a massive function hall, served the Polish community for generations. The Park Service is now in the process of fleshing out the building’s social history, including the women’s stories. Half a block away stands The House of the Seven Gables Settlement House, which provided a myriad of services to Salem’s immigrant communities. The histories of these two properties is inextricably linked.
Sources:
Administrative History of the Salem Maritime National Historic Site, 1993.
Emily A. Murphy interview, 10 July 2009.
193 Derby Street
Visitor Center — Open to the Public
2 New Liberty Street
Established in 1938 under President Franklin Roosevelt, the Salem Maritime National Historic Site is the oldest National Park Service historic site in the nation. “Salem Maritime,” as it is known locally, is comprised of the Derby House, Custom House, a Scale House, Public Stores, Hawkes House, Narbonne House, Pedrick Storehouse, St. Joseph Hall, West India Dry Goods Store, Derby Wharf (and lighthouse), Hatch’s Wharf, Central Wharf, the replica ship Friendship, and an Orientation Center. All of these structures are located on Salem’s waterfront, clustered around Derby Wharf. In the heart of downtown Salem and across from the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem Maritime also maintains a world-class Visitor Center just behind Armory Memorial Park.
Along with maintaining and interpreting these properties, Park Service staff members are endlessly engaged in conducting research, creating publications, developing walking tours, hosting lectures and events, working with school groups, and generally figuring out ways in which to engage visitors and residents in the rich history of Salem and its surrounding county, Essex County. Their work benefits residents and visitors alike enormously.
The Women's Stories
Women’s history stories connected to Salem Maritime begin with Louise du Pont Crowninshield, a native of Delaware who married into one of Salem’s most prominent shipping families, the Crowninshields of nearby Marblehead. According to Park Service staff, she was singularly responsible for preserving the 1762 Derby House, which was a wedding gift to Elias Hasket Derby and his bride, Elizabeth Crowninshield. As a preservationist and collector, “Mrs. Crowninshield” wished to preserve this living legacy to her husband’s family heritage. In the 1930s, as a board member of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities which owned the Derby House, she helped pay off its mortgage to enable the Park Service to acquire the property for the new Historic Site. At the time, the Park Service considered the Derby House “the most important structure of the site.”
Louise Crowninshield then “took on the task of furnishing the house, personally purchasing needed items as well as arranging loans and gifts from individuals and institutions, and exercising control over the final product,” according to the Park Service’s history of the site. She had worked with the Park Service earlier in Virginia where she helped to preserve George Washington’s birthplace, Wakefield. In Salem, working with the Essex Institute, she had also furnished the Pingree House and Peirce-Nichols House (today, properties of the Peabody Essex Museum where she also created the Crowninshield Gallery). She would go on to become one of the founders of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which continues to issue an achievement award in her name (Mrs. Francis B. Crowninshield).
At the newly created Salem Maritime NHS, Louise Crowninshield expanded her involvement by serving as president of the Salem Maritime Historical Association, “which published site materials and ran the sales concession until it was taken over by Eastern National Park and Monument Association in the 1970s,” according to the Park Service. They go on to say that “her very connection to the site gave it credibility with Massachusetts ‘Brahmins’ who tended to be distrustful of the federal government…she was essential to the flourishing of the site.”
Staff “Firsts”
Fast forward to 1984, when Cynthia Pollack was appointed superintendent of the Salem Maritime National Historic Site—the first woman (and among the first within the Park Service as a whole), and an “activist” superintendent at that who understood the value of public-private partnerships and community relations. At the time, Salem Maritime had reached a “low point.” The empty warehouse on Derby Wharf “had just been burned by vandals and stood boarded up and abandoned.” The surrounding area was home to drunks and vandals, and the historic wharves also suffered from years of neglect and flood damage. Pollack arranged with the City of Salem to open a temporary visitor center on the waterfront. A new group, the Friends of Salem Maritime, successfully saved the lighthouse on Derby Wharf. A community group kept watch over the waterfront. Eventually, what started as “The Salem Project” to do even more morphed into the public-private Salem Partnership comprised of leading business, community, and municipal leaders with whom Pollack worked closely to call attention to the Park Service’s role in Salem and beyond. Together, they built a regional Visitor Center, Orientation Center, and transformed Salem Maritime into the successful National Park Service site it is today.
As Cynthia Pollack explained in a 1991 interview, “What we’re trying to do is show that we have so much, that it’s nationally significant, and it’s all tied together. People need to see it’s the only way it will get preserved. People need to see that their history was really vital and alive, and it’s still alive.” A commemorative plaque in Pollack’s honor hangs in the Visitor Center auditorium that bears her name. It reads, “She was a visionary. She knew there was more to Salem Maritime National Historic Site than historic buildings and wharves. There were stories to be told, and she want-ed visitors to see, touch, smell, and feel the maritime spirit that the site embodies.”
In 2008, the second woman superintendent of Salem Maritime, Patricia Trap, appointed Emily A. Murphy as the first woman Park Historian of Salem Maritime. Murphy received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University. Her thesis topic? The Derby family of Salem, specifically, how their business and political interests intersected. Murphy is also a skilled costumed interpreter, frequently leading tours as Elizabeth Derby West or Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, whose husband, the author Nathaniel Hawthorne, worked in the Custom House.
Salem as an International Trading Port
One of the Park Service’s guided tours, “Home from the Sea,” discusses the impact on women’s lives of the goods that were brought to Salem from around the world. Spices, pepper, tea, coffee, porcelain, cotton, silk, and finished products—women were the ones who made the daily purchases that filled Salem homes with these desirable items. The Derby House provides the perfect setting to illustrate this upper class, urban lifestyle. Recent scholarship further documents the fact that Elizabeth Crowninshield Derby was centrally involved in planning the new Derby mansion in Salem that she and her husband would inhabit, along with their estate in nearby Danvers. Her role in these matters was “exceptional,” according to Park historian Emily Murphy.
Nearby, the 1675 Narbonne House shows a much more modest lifestyle, where entrepreneurial Sarah Narbonne and her sister Mary ran a “Cent Shop,” selling all kinds of hard goods to their working class neighbors and also working as seamstresses. There were other Cent Shops in Salem as well, also known as “Thread and Needle Shops” or “Button Stores,” which were traditionally run by women from an “ell” attached to their home. Caroline Emmerton recreated one at The House of the Seven Gables. At the Narbonne House, recent archaeological findings turned up sewing needles, straight pins, and thimbles.
Salem Maritime’s Friendship is a compelling reminder of Salem’s maritime history and the physicality of life at sea. While men and boys sailed to “all corners of the globe” during the Great Age of Sail, wives, mothers, and grandmothers remained at home praying for their safe return—which did not always happen. Meanwhile, women ran businesses, took care of their families, and did what needed to be done—as women always do. But in some cases, women and children were left destitute by the loss of a husband and father. In response, prominent citizens in Salem established charities to care for widows and orphans. These included the Seaman’s Bethel, Seamen’s Orphan and Children’s Friend Society, Seamen’s Widow and Orphan Association of Salem, Salem Marine Society, Salem East India Marine Society. Interestingly, one of the investors in the original Friendship’s first voyages was Abigail Williams. The Park Service is trying to find out more about her, but very little documentation remains.
African American History
Salem Maritime created a walking trail of African American history sites several years ago which features Charlotte Forten and Sarah Parker Remond. Today, Park Service staff is actively engaged in research to learn more about “Rose the slave girl” who was “owned” by Elias Hasket Derby, Richard Derby’s “servant” who is as yet unnamed, and the many connections between Salem merchants and mill owners and the slave trade that took place elsewhere in the world. As documented in the recent PBS film “Traces of the Trade,” the wealth accumulated by upper class whites in places like Salem had direct ties to the enforced labor of African Americans. While Salem was not a slave trading port, its merchants traded in cotton, leather, sugar products, and other raw materials purchased from the plantations of the American South and the Caribbean islands.
“Immigrants”
Although the former Naumkeag Mills are not part of Salem Maritime NHS, the restored mill buildings are just across the mouth of the South River from Derby Wharf. They are a reminder of the thousands of workers from Poland, Ireland, and French Canada who arrived in Salem in the late 1800s and early 1900s to work in the cotton mills. Salem Maritime’s newly restored St. Joseph Club on Derby Street, a grand, brick community center with a massive function hall, served the Polish community for generations. The Park Service is now in the process of fleshing out the building’s social history, including the women’s stories. Half a block away stands The House of the Seven Gables Settlement House, which provided a myriad of services to Salem’s immigrant communities. The histories of these two properties is inextricably linked.
Sources:
Administrative History of the Salem Maritime National Historic Site, 1993.
Emily A. Murphy interview, 10 July 2009.
