Historic Salem

 Hi everyone. Happy Sunday. I hope you're having a wonderful weekend.   In case you didn't read this note before, I'm off for a week with my husband on a travel adventure, so if I am slow getting by you blog, that's why. Please don't think I am ignoring you.

Back a few weeks ago on Halloween I shared some photos of Salem, Massachusetts with you. A friend and I had taken a roadtrip down to this North Shore city one gorgeous day in early October.

Here's my link to my other post from that Sunday (in case you are interested): Welcome to Salem.

I thought today I would share a few more photos with you.  All of these were taken outside since we didn't go into many places or couldn't get tickets to go.  Instead we enjoyed the beautiful day and walked around taking in  view.

These photos are also my link to Leah's  Art Every Day Month Day 14 challenge.

This above photo is the original town hall which was built in 1816-1817.  I read there is a museum on the first floor, and many events like weddings and private parties are held in this building. I even read that it is haunted.  They call the style of this building the Federal style since it was a common look during the early years of the US as a country.

The National Park Service runs a historical park in Salem, in fact they say it is the oldest historical park in the US. Unfortunately, the buildings were closed because of Covid, but you could still walk around the grounds and read the placards there.

One of the parts of the park was this example of a sailing ship. The park is set up to represent Salem at its heyday, when it was one of the busiest port in the 13 colonies, or what later became the original 13 states in the US.  The port remained one of the largest and busiest into the 1800's as well.

  

This building in the photo  below is the Custom House. It is where author Nathaniel Hawthorne worked for awhile and also based his short story of the same name. I didn't know that story caused a political dissent among newspapers  depending on their political stance.  The Whig newspapers thought Hawthorne was really making a mockery of the men who worked there.  This fuss over this story, according to what I read, actually caused Hawthorne's most famous novel, The Scarlet Letter, to get less publicity when it was published in 1850. (I think it is time to find the story and reread it since I haven't read it since college.)

If you hoped to see the most famous house in Salem where Hawthorne lived, the  House of 7 Gables, (which is also the title another Hawthorne book), so did we. Unfortunately we didn't sign up quick enough to be able to get tickets for a tour. One of these days I'll go back. There was also a great  exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum ( a highly recommended museum if you are ever in this city) on the Salem witch trials, but it was just too nice of a day to go inside.

 

This custom house i(n the above photo) was built in 1819, but there had always been a custom house in Salem since 1649. 

The carved eagle on the top is a replacement of the 1826 wooden one. The original is inside, but with the park closed, we were not able to go inside and see it.

Here's a few more views of the National Historic Park.

And I spied these coffee/tea mugs through a second floor window.

They also have a historic  garden behind this  house. Unfortunately, being October, most the blooms were over, but the garden still had some interesting views.

Here's some views in this historic distract around the National Historic Park. 

We had to laugh at this sign, not that it was funny, but because we were wondering if they meant we could live there. 

And I'll finish off this post with a few other random photos, starting with this Puritan statue. I wasn't sure at the time if this was the Puritan statue made by St. Gaudens  (I wrote about him in a couple of T day posts recently), but it was not. (The St. Gaudens statue is in Springfield, Massachusetts.)

Although the names of all of these people mentioned  in the sign below don't mean anything to me, I liked this sign, especially the way the face was drawn on it.

And finally, this well preserved home of the 1600's, now owned by the Peabody Essex Museum. It is called First Period Architecture because much of the construction began in 1684, which was very early in the European settlement part of US history. (But I know, not that early in many other places.)

Originally this house was much smaller with one room on each floor and a fireplace at the end.  You can see  the fireplace is now in the middle, and the house has been expanded in size. This was also the first house in the US to offer tours, even before the Museum owned it. Tours began in parts of the house in 1911.

I hope you enjoyed today's armchair travel post. Enjoy the rest of your weekend and the start of the new week!