Historic Homes of New England

by Mary Harrod Northend

In 1909 the house was repaired and fitted up for settlement work, and while it was under repair, many of the original features, or traces of them, were discovered. During its two hundred and forty years of existence some of its gables and its lean-to had been taken off, the overhang closed in, and the secret staircase taken down. A careful restoration was made of all these missing features, a matter of great interest to architects and antiquarians and even to the casual visitor.

Leaving the little shop, the visitor enters directly the old kitchen. This is a small room sheathed with pine boards put on perpendicularly, after the fashion of the earliest times, so as to form a simple pattern. This special pattern is peculiar to the House of the Seven Gables.

An immense fireplace occupies nearly the whole of one side of the room. It is filled with old-fashioned cooking utensils and illustrates the evolution which has taken place along this line. The pots and kettles are swung from a long iron bar placed well up in the chimney. (The crane with which we are all familiar is simply a later development of this primitive bar.) There is a brick oven built into the fireplace, also a Dutch oven, which is a pot with a rim around the cover to hold the hot coals; and, the last step in evolution before the cook-stove, we find the tin kitchen standing in its place before the andirons.

The most precious of all the furnishings of the fireplace is an old-fashioned toaster from which Hawthorne has had many a slice of toast. Close to the fireplace is a panelled oak chest as old as, if not older, than the house. Flanking the chest is the top of a highboy, which once belonged to Miss Ingersoll and may have been bought of the Turners with the house. As Miss Ingersoll was a conservative person, it was probably not until after her day that the highboy was divided, and the top part set on the floor with feet of its own.

Copyright, 1910, by C. O. Emmerton.

Copyright, 1910, by C. O. Emmerton.
Plate VII.—Dining Room, House of the Seven Gables; Parlor, House of the Seven Gables.

Opposite the highboy is an old-fashioned kitchen dresser, part of which was found in the house, and the rest designed to match. Its shelves now contain samples of crockery and old salt glaze, with specimens of Bennington and tortoise-shell ware. If the visitor is up on such matters, he will have noticed that certain articles in the room are of much later date than others. He is then told that the idea in furnishing the house is to make it look as an old, conservative Salem house would have looked in 1840, the period of the story. That is to say, there is practically no furniture later than 1840, and most of the pieces are much earlier—survivors, so to speak, of the many periods through which the house has passed. The later and more elegant pieces of furniture (generally speaking, mahogany of about 1800) are to be found in the parlor and dining-room, while the earlier pieces of walnut, cherry, pine, and oak have been relegated to the kitchen and attic; the same is to be said of the china—Lowestoft and lustre supplanting the earlier wares in the parlor and dining-room.