Adapting the House of the Seven Gables for tourists

Salem, Massachusetts is a smallish coastal town about 15 miles north of Boston. Until the start of the nineteenth century it rivalled Boston in international trade and whaling but when ships got bigger and needed more depth of water, Salem lost out while Boston, whose harbour happened to be deeper, continued to grow.

Today Salem is pleasantly reminiscent of its past, with the old Customs House where Nathaniel Hawthorne worked for a while still overlooking the wharfs. Plenty of original clapboard houses line the old streets, some with notices marking the residences of whaling captains who used to occupy them.

Nathaniel Hawthorne statue on Hawthorne Blvd.,
just south of the Hawthorne Hotel, Salem

Apart from being the site of the infamous witch trials of the late seventeenth century, Salem mostly celebrates its past through Hawthorne. He was born here and lived in the town at several important points in his life, including when writing his most famous novel, The Scarlet Letter, which itself harks back to Salem's Puritan past.

For today's tourist, there's a more direct link to Hawthorne's next novel, The House of the Seven Gables - because you can visit the very house he was thinking about when he wrote it. It stands where it always stood, on the waterfront, and tours leave every 15 minutes.

Most tours of old houses tell you what happened in the past and do their best to ignore how the house got from then to its present incarnation as a tourist site. Here, the tour is interestingly honest about how the house became a tourist attraction.

Alexa, our well-informed guide sits us first in a room which has a timeline on the wall, showing how the ownership of the house has changed over the years, starting in 1668 with the first of three generations of the Turner family. It was next sold to Captain Samuel Ingersoll in 1782. Ingersoll died on a voyage and the house was inherited by his daughter Susanna, a second cousin of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Hawthorne visited the house and used parts of it to visualise his novel. So, for instance, the captain's office, with a view down to his ships moored below, corresponds closely to the novel.

The Captain's office

When the book was published in 1851, readers began knocking on the door and asking to look round. The owners were obliging, Alexa told us, but also realised they could earn some money from visitors. One of those visitors was Caroline Emmerton, a wealthy local philanthropist, who bought the house in 1908. Emmerton also ran a charity for local immigrant factory workers and wanted to use the income from visitors to the house to support her charity. 

But first, she wanted to make some changes to the house so that it would correspond more closely to Hawthorne's novel. So she added a room made up as Hepzibah Pyncheon's cent shop - which all readers would expect to see.

Hepzibah Pyncheon's shop

One of the highlights of our tour is a secret staircase from the ground floor up to the attic, built alongside the chimney. We are invited to squeeze up to the third floor, to a room that might have been that of Clifford, Hepzibah's brother. 

Our guide reveals that the staircase was another creation of Caroline Emmerton - added in the early twentieth century to help deal with a small inconsistency in the novel which could be explained by the existence of such a staircase. She also tells us that until not so long ago, the staircase was presented to visitors as part of the original house - as Emerton intended it to be. 

Indeed, this 1990 video tour of the house, once sold at its gift shop, follows that line, with Vincent Price, no less, telling viewers that the staircase "was discovered in the nineteenth century" and that "its real purpose we do not know". Today's guides are more open, admitting that "its real purpose" is to provide tourists with a more entertaining visit.  

Even if today's tourist ethics require the truth to be told about the staircase, the rest of the house is satisfyingly evocative of the novel. 

One other illusion was shattered: the house only acquired its full quota of seven gables after Hawthorne saw it.