Traveling to History: One
Nathaniel Hawthorne Takes a Walk
By James F. Lee
Nathaniel Hawthorne as a young man.
On November 11, 1837, Nathaniel Hawthorne took a short walk - and it changed his life.
Hawthorne’s sister received an invitation to call on Elizabeth Peabody at her family’s home on Charter Street, where she lived with her sisters Sophia and Mary. She asked Nathaniel to accompany her there.
With the shutdown due to the coronavirus, walks are one of the outdoor activities available to us, so I imagined this walk tracing Hawthorne’s steps.
Hawthorne was no stranger to epidemics. He survived the cholera epidemic of 1832, and his father died at sea from yellow fever.
And he could give a few tips on quarantining. He was reclusive by nature, and during a 12-year period from 1825 to 1837 he lived a life of isolation at his mother’s home on Herbert Street. He called his sanctuary Castle Dismal. He was known in Salem for his standoffishness, practicing his own form of social distancing, often barely acknowledging the presence of others.
At the Herbert Street house, Hawthorne kept to himself. He ate his meals alone and generally avoided his family, spending much time alone in the attic, reading, writing, and thinking. His family thought he was wasting his Bowdoin education, and thought he should get out and get a job.
Ultimately, it was a lady, Sophia Peabody, that got Hawthorne out of his lengthy funk.
I can imagine a likely route that Hawthorne and his sister Elizabeth could have taken on their way to the Peabody home on Charter Street. Many of the buildings along the way are still there, and several have Hawthorne connections. It is a short walk, about 10 minutes, unless you linger at these beautiful houses. I picture them leaving their home at 10 ½ Herbert Street and walking towards Essex Street.
At the corner of Essex and Herbert, look across Essex Street today and you’ll see a parking lot for the Hawthorne Hotel. Hawthorne and his sister would have seen the Crowninshield-Bentley House (c. 1727) flush with the curb, its gambrel roof notable for the three projecting dormers. The symmetrical, Georgian Colonial clapboard house was once the residence of the Rev. William Bentley, minister of the East Church, diarist, and scholar, one of Salem’s most prominent citizens, whom Hawthorne undoubtably would have seen as a child. In fact, Bentley mentioned the death of Hawthorne’s father in his famous diary. Twenty-first-century walkers will see this lovely house further up Essex Street (No. 126), moved there from its original site at 106 Essex in 1959.
Turning left at Essex, the Hawthorne siblings would pass a huge three-story, hipped-roof structure at the corner of Union Street, the Brown building, one of the first commercial buildings built in Salem (1808-09). When I was a kid, my grandmother lived in an apartment on the second floor. Today, it houses Bella Verona restaurant on the Essex Street side and other commercial spaces as well as apartments.
Hawthorne lived at 14 Mall Street while writing The Scarlet Letter. When I was a kid, my family lived on the second floor.
Continuing on Essex Street, the brother and sister would cross Walnut Street and then Elm, today’s Hawthorne Boulevard, where the Hawthorne statue now sits. This part of Essex Street featured large homes of wealthy Salemites, such as the Gardner-Pingree House at 128 Essex, one of the most beautiful federal-style townhouses in Salem. Its rectangular balanced front with five windows across each story is offset with a semi-circular portico with Corinthian columns. Hawthorne would have known this building well because only seven years earlier Captain Joseph Smith was brutally murdered there as he slept in his bed. The subsequent murder trials were a national sensation, even bringing such luminaries as Daniel Webster to Salem arguing for the prosecution.
At 129 Essex, easily overlooked today among the witch kitsch, psychic reading parlors, and gift shops, they would pass the three-story home of Gideon Tucker (1808-09), a Salem merchant. Tucker and his wife Martha lived in this Samuel McIntire-designed house at the time of Hawthorne’s walk. Renovations over the years, including the addition of Palladian windows on the third floor, have altered the appearance of the house, still Hawthorne would recognize the building today.
Next door, at 131 Essex, a restaurant and shops obliterate the view of the Moses Little House, once a fine federalist mansion, much in the style of the Tucker House. Little was a prominent Salem physician. During Hawthorne’s walk, it was inhabited by Gideon and Nancy Forrester Barstow. Nancy’s father, Simon Forrester, once sailed with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s grandfather, and briefly lived with the Hawthorne’s at the author’s Union Street birthplace.
Eventually, they would have approached Liberty Street on their left. This street no longer exists, but just before you get to the Peabody-Essex Museum a pedestrian walkway now runs south to Charter Street. Entering Charter, they would have seen the Samuel Pickman House at the corner of Liberty, one of the oldest houses in Salem. A large central chimney dominates the house and diamond-pane windows give it an Elizabethan appearance.
Their destination was up ahead at 53 Charter Street just on the other side of the Burying Point Cemetery. Hawthorne’s ancestor, Judge John Hathorne, who presided at the Witch Trials, is buried there. The wood clapboard house built in 1837 represented a fine example of federalist architecture, dominated by two massive chimneys, no longer there.
Elizabeth Peabody greeted them at the door. Her sister Sophia was upstairs nursing a headache.
Hawthorne’s reputation preceded him. “He came to see us last Saturday evening and we were quite delighted by him,” wrote Mary Peabody. “He has lived the life of a perfect recluse till very lately— so diffident that he suffered inexpressibly in the presence of his fellow mortals…”
Hawthorne promised a return visit, and that is when he met Sophia.
Historian Louise Hale Tharp describes Hawthorne’s reaction when Sophia entered the room: “Hawthorne leaped to his feet – then stood speechless…”
They were secretly engaged the following year, marrying in 1842. The recluse came out of his shell.
Hawthorne’s Salem world was a small one, easily walked today. You can make up your own walk, visiting his houses. His birth house (originally on Union Street) is now on the grounds of the House of the Seven Gables on Turner Street. The Herbert Street house (today number 10 ½) is still there. And the Custom House, where he worked from 1846 to 1850 is just three blocks from Herbert Street. He also lived briefly on Chestnut Street. His last-known Salem address is 14 Mall Street, between the Common and Bridge Street, where he wrote the Scarlet Letter. And where I lived as a kid on the second floor.
You can follow Hawthorne's likely walk on this map. Map by Harry McIntyre, 1851. Boston Public Library Digital Collection.
