East India Square
161 Essex Street
Salem, MA 01970
Phone: 978-745-9500, 866-745-1876
www.pem.org
The Peabody Essex Museum has its roots in two of the oldest museums in the nation: the East India Marine Society (founded in 1799), which later became the Peabody Museum of Salem, and the Essex Institute, founded in 1848. The museums combined as one in 1992, and the PEM has grown to a collection of 1.3 million objects and twenty-two historic buildings. Five of these are historic houses reviewed in this chapter.
Yin Yu Tang is translated as “Hall of Plentiful Shelter.” This house was built for a wealthy merchant around 1800, and for two hundred years and through eight generations it was home to the Huang family in the village of Huang Cun in the mountainous Anhui province of China. Successive generations of male descendants, their wives, and their children lived in the house. As many as three generations of the family lived here at a given time, with up to twenty or thirty people in the sixteen-bedroom house. The last family members lived in the house in 1980. Through partnership with Chinese officials in the Huizhou region, the house was meticulously dismantled, shipped to America, reassembled on this site, and opened to the public in 2003. Yin Yu Tang is the only intact antique Chinese house outside of China.
Approaching Yin Yu Tang, visitors pass through a forecourt. The house has a timber frame, masonry walls of brick and sandstone, and a tile roof. Once inside, there is a two-story central court—or “sky well”—with fish ponds. The self-guided tour covers two floors with reception halls, bedrooms, and a kitchen. The house is embellished with brick carvings, wallpaper, lattice windows, masonry paintings, furniture, and household objects.
This house was built on Prison Lane (now St. Peter Street) around 1684 and stood opposite the prison during the Salem witch trials. This is a First Period home with many post-medieval features: steeply-pitched gables, a second-story overhang, a batten door, an asymmetrical facade, diamond-paned leaded casement windows, and a large central chimney.
The house was moved three blocks to this site in 1910. It was split in two, put on rolling logs, and pulled by oxen. Preservationist and museum curator George Francis Dow (1868–1936) led the restoration effort.
When built in 1724, this was a half house. It was enlarged with additions in 1761 and again in 1794. It was home to ship captain John Crowningshield (1696–1761). A boarder in the house was the Reverend William Bentley (1759–1819), a well known Unitarian minister, writer, and journalist. His library was the second largest in the nation after that of Thomas Jefferson.
John Gardner was a Salem merchant. In 1804 he commissioned Samuel McIntire (1757–1811) to design this house, which is one of McIntire’s finest and best preserved works. In 1834 David Pingree became the owner. A century later his descendants donated the house to the Essex Institute.
This house has the dubious distinction of being the site of a well-known murder. On the night of April 6, 1830, Captain Joseph White was killed in his sleep. The prosecutor at the murderer’s trial was Daniel Webster (1782–1852). Edgar Allan Poe wrote the short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” based on the murder, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter was inspired in part by the crime.
This fifteen-room Georgian mansion was built around 1727 and was lived in by four generations of the Ropes family. The house was restored by the PEM and reopened to the public in 2015. It has many original furnishings: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century furniture, decorative objects, kitchen items, and personal items.