Hi I'm Holly Frey.
And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
And we are standing on the grounds of the House of the Seven Gables, which is a large
enough piece of property, that it is it's own national historic district.
Yes, there are multiple other historic buildings that all been moved here to preserve them
and to add to the site including, behind us, the actual House of the Seven Gables.
And we have lined up an expert to tell us all about this property and also to show us
around, so let's get right on it.
I'm David Moffat, and I'm a lead interpreter and researcher at the House of the Seven Gables.
So the House of the Seven Gables is also called the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion, can you tell
us a little about those families?
Yeah, the Turner and Ingersoll families were both merchant families in the history of Salem.
The Turners were the ones who built the house in 1668.
John Turner was a mariner who would trade the commodities from Salem - cod fish and
lumber - down in the Caribbean for sugar and molasses, and over in England for the manufactured
goods and textiles.
And so he made a good fortune and built a huge mansion on the Salem Harbor and then
passed it down to his son who made and even larger fortune.
And his grandson ended up losing the family fortune.
So near the end of the Revolution, the house was sold to the Ingersoll family.
And Samuel Ingersoll was a merchant trading around the world in the period that follows
the Revolution, the Great Age of Sail as we call it, when Salem merchants start trading
across the entire globe.
Samuel Ingersoll made a huge fortune at that.
And then his daughter Susanna inherited the house and ended up living in it longer than
anyone else in the houses history.
So there's a rich history of several generations of 2 very interesting Salem families.
Also on this property is the house that Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in.
Can you talk a little bit about the decision to move the house to be with the rest of the property
and then how that was accomplished.
Yeah, in 1958 the house was about a half mile away on a side street called Union St.
The House of the Seven Gables, our parking lot sits on Derby, so it was just a straight shot down
Derby St. And the house had been in private hands, one family had owned it since the 1880s
and when they passed away in the 1950s there was concern that the house was going to be
torn down, there'd been some preservation concerns about it earlier on in the 20th century.
And so working with the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, or Historical
New England as it's called now, the House of the Seven Gables purchased the Hawthorn
birthplace and moved it down the street and then restored it to look as it would have
when it was being lived in.
Can you tell us about how the House of the Seven Gables is simultaneously a historical
site with historical accuracy, but also the recreation of a fictional world.
Yeah, I like to call it the first post-modern house.
That it's a house based on a book that had been based on a house, so in it's very structure
it's got this intertextual nature between the written word and the actual structure
itself, that Nathaniel Hawthorne had gotten the inspiration
for his work visiting his cousin.
His cousin was Susanna Ingersoll, who lived in the house longer than anyone else, who
owned it from the early 1800s til her death in 1858 and so he was visiting an actual house
and hearing stories about it's history and his family in Salem.
And he writes this great novel in 1851
and then the fame of the novel helps to save the house.
There wasn't a great interest in old houses in New England in the 1860s or 70s,
it started to grow around that time.
But the House of the Seven Gables started to attract interest, people started taking
photographs of it, they were selling postcards, it starts to appear in early visitor guides
to Salem in the late 1800s.
And the family that moved in after Susanna Ingersoll moved out had so many people coming
and knocking on their door asking to see the inside of the house that they started to charge
admission and sell souvenirs.
And so the fame of the novel made the house the sort of tourist destination even before
it became a museum.
So Caroline Emmerton chose to take some of the elements of the work and put them into
the house to make it something even more familiar to the visitors who were coming.
What do you think surprises visitors the most when they come to visit
the House of the Seven Gables?
I think they're surprised by how much history there is here.
That a typical tour, we can direct a lot of the time towards peoples' interests.
That wether someone's interested in immigrant history in early industrial America, or the
17th century and puritanism, or decorative arts, or the maritime trade - there's so much
that is covered by the buildings on our property
and the history of the people who lived within them.
That there's so many different stories to tell that people come away really surprised
by just how much there is here.