Salem Common

Salem Common began as a nine-acre swampy tract used for grazing livestock and drilling the local militia. In 1637, the East Regiment, the first regiment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony militia to muster, gathered there in the spring, beginning a tradition that later developed into today's National Guard, and in 2013 Salem received federal designation as the Birthplace of the U.S. National Guard. In 1801, Elias Hasket Derby Jr. led improvements to the Common that reshaped the land, added walkways, and enclosed it with a wooden fence with ornamental gates, including one bearing a carved wooden medallion of George Washington by Samuel McIntire. A smaller replica of that gate, the Washington Arch, was installed at the southwest corner of the Common in 1976 during America's bicentennial and moved to its present location in 2016. The wooden fence gave way to a cast iron fence in 1850, and in 1926 Phillip Horton Smith's Neo-classical bandstand was built for the Salem Tercentenary Celebration and dedicated to band leader Jean Missud. In 1802, the surrounding streets were renamed Washington Square North, South, East, and West, while wealthy merchant families built mansions overlooking the Common and displaced older shops, tanneries, and rope-walks. Nearby stood the Webb-Briggs-Whipple House, dating from by 1770 and possibly the oldest house on the Common; the Captain Francis Boardman House, from about 1785, briefly occupied by Nathaniel Bowditch after Boardman had been captured during the Revolutionary War and escaped from a British ship; the Clifford-Crowninshield House of 1806, one of the few documented Salem houses designed by Samuel McIntire; and on Winter Street the 1811 Federal-period home of Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, founder of Harvard Law School, whose ruling for a group of slaves who mutinied aboard the Amistad placed the house on the National Park Service's Underground Railroad Network to Freedom in 2012. President James Monroe visited that home in 1817, and the Marquis de Lafayette stopped there in 1824. When the Colonial Revival Hawthorne Hotel rose in 1925, it replaced the headquarters of the Salem Marine Society, a charitable group that cared for widows and children of seamen, and the hotel provided a special top-floor meeting room for the Society designed as a replica of a ship captain's headquarters.

Salem, Massachusetts · United States