The Eden-Brown House
THE EDEN-BROWN HOUSE
In 1762, Thomas Eden built a house at 40 Summer Street. In 1804 the original doorway was replaced by one designed and executed by the famous McIntire, possessing one unusual feature, the elliptical fanlight unaccompanied by other glasswork. The doorway is of simple design, showing plain Doric pilasters, over each of which appears a carved rosette or floret, with festooned drapery between. Once more, the use of modern doors lends an unpardonably discordant note to this otherwise artistic composition.
Much interesting history centers in the Eden-Brown house. Thomas Eden was the first signer of the roll of the famous Salem Marine Society, founded in 1766, membership in which was conditioned upon a man’s having sailed his ship at least around the Cape of Good Hope. The quality of Salem ship-masters is seen in the fact that eighteen charter members were thus enrolled at the first meeting. Robert Hooper, of Marblehead, was a partner of Eden in his commercial ventures, and was familiarly spoken of as ‘King’ Hooper because of his Royalist leanings.
How many vigorous and adventurous figures must have passed through the Eden-Brown doorway! ‘King’ Hooper himself, owner of a house at Marblehead and another at Danvers, the well-known ‘Lindens,’ occupied as a summer home by the Royal Governor Gage, the year before Lexington. Many a wealthy captain, perhaps, and trader to the East, who in the spirit of the bold motto on the Salem official seal, ‘Unto the utmost bounds of wealthy Ind,’ had driven his fifty-ton schooner across the mysterious ocean, returning laden with silks, rugs, and shawls, mulls and muslins, jade, crystal, spices, and if not, like the far-famed navies of Solomon, with ‘ivory, apes, and peacocks,’ at least with many a comical monkey and gaudy parrot—the latter commonly past-master in the use of a certain deep-sea vocabulary not to be repeated here.
Such cargoes made Salem owners wealthy, and paved the way for the erection of the spacious and dignified residences, with their noble pillars and pediments, so many of which are still standing to-day as a memorial of by-gone greatness.