The Custom House

The Custom House housed the offices of United States Customs Service collectors, inspectors, and other officials, where ship captains and owners paid duties on imported goods and conducted other business. Before the Federal Income Tax Act of 1913, customs duties on ship cargoes provided most of the money to run the Federal Government, and between 1789 and 1840 the duties collected here earned the Treasury more than $20 million. Salem’s Custom House, one of several in Massachusetts, was built in 1819 near the end of the height of Salem’s East Indies trade, but international cargoes continued to enter the port until the early 20th century, so the Customs Service operated in the building for more than a century. About 1820, Customs Service employees on Derby Wharf measured imported goods, with a gauger determining the liquid content of casks and a weigher loading sacks on portable scales, while the newly built Custom House stood in the background as a symbol of Federal authority. Nathaniel Hawthorne, appointed by the president as the Port of Salem’s Surveyor from 1846 to 1849, later wrote of the sea-flushed ship-master arriving just in port with his vessel’s papers under his arm in a tarnished tin box, and it was here that he conceived The Scarlet Letter while pacing the building.

Salem, Massachusetts · United States