Again, apologies for the blogging hiatus. I’ve been busy! Not only have I been reading through a backlog of Godey’s Lady’s Books, I’ve been crunning around like crazy getting ready to move to a new home in lovely Salem, MA.
When I tell people about our impending move, reactions fall into two camps. In the first camp are people who say something supportive (I am pretty sure) through nearly unintelligible Boston accents (hi father-in-law, Doug!). In the second camp is everyone else, who say something supportive in standard American English and then unfailingly mention witches or Halloween.
It’s no surprise that people, especially those who aren’t from the area, associate Salem with spookiness. The city has gone in hard on the hags. Take, for example, the witch on the Salem city police badge, or the fact that Mike roots against his high school rivals the
Salem Witches every year in the big Beverly/Salem Thanksgiving day football game.
But Halloween is when Salem really goes for it. More than 400,000 tourists visit this city of 42,500 residents every October. You name it, Halloween in Salem has got it. Annual Psychic Fair and Witchcraft Expo? Check. Little Pumpkin Duathlon, whatever that is? Yes. A “night of magic, music, and powerful rituals” at The Official Annual Salem Witches’ Halloween Ball? Sure.
A 1908 newspaper article out of Washington, DC, suggests that Salem has been up to this shtick for quite some time. It describes Salem going nuts with the holiday spirit- the streets full of “peanut stands, cow bells, tin horns, and all other imaginable instruments of bedlam” and throngs of “Bostonians, Harvard students, and would-be bohemians,” jostling along “slowly but good-naturedly, blowing horns in our ears” as they join in the one celebration in the country “parallel to New York City’s Election Night festivities.” As crazy as the NY State comptroller election?! No wonder the crowd was “charged with suppressed excitement” for…wait for it…the big Fourth of July bonfire.
That’s right- if Salem was known for any holiday festivities in 1908, it was for the Fourth of July. It appears that Salemites didn’t hang a bunch of people in 1693 and then jump right into their scary hockey masks in 1694. So, you may ask, at what point did Salem go from a Standard Quaint New England Town to a Quaint New England Witch Town (or as I like to call it, QNEWT)? Great question- I’ve been wondering, too. Let’s get down to some edutainment, my friends.
By the 18th century, Salem (which had actually played host to only some of the events of the hysteria, along with the neighboring town now known as Danvers- I mention this only because I don’t want to receive your emails) had put that lil’ dustup behind them and moved on to become of the country’s wealthiest ports. Then, when the local shipping industry began to decline in the early 19th century, the area morphed into a manufacturing epicenter. In the early 19th century, Salem and the surrounding area were making more than half of America’s leather shoes.
It was around that time that tourism started to become a small part of the local economy. In the 1880’s, roughly 30,000 tourists, mostly daytrippers from Boston, were visiting Salem for leisure each year. Some were drawn by the witch history, but that wasn’t an overwhelming focus. The Salem “Witch House” is a good example. The former home of Jonathan Corwin, a judge in the Salem Witch Trials, this is one the few local attractions that actually has a concrete connection to the 17th century trials (believe it or not, Count Orlok’s Nightmare Gallery didn’t open until much later). But for much of the 19th century, the house’s claim to fame was not its witch-trial connection, but that founder of Rhode Island Roger Williams had supposedly lived there. This is actually is not even historically accurate- Williams never lived in the house- but the fact that the founder of RI was once considered a sexier marketing angle than anything witch-related is telling. Visiting a house once lived in by Roger Williams sounds boring even to me. The site didn’t rebrand as the “Witch House” until the 1850’s, when an entrepreneurial new owner named George Farrington bought the home, attached a pharmacy to it, and sold medications in witch-emblazoned bottles. You can read more about the house’s transformation here at Salem State professor Donna Seger’s awesome blog, Streets of Salem. Below, a historical advertisement, courtesy of Historic New England.
Farrington was ahead of the curve. In the late 1860s, state representative Charles W. Upham of MA published some works that revived popular interest in Salem’s history, such as Salem Witchcraft, With an Account of Salem Village and a History of Opinions on Witchcraft and Kindred Subjects and Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather: A Reply. Check out the Amazon reviews for the latter:
Good info about history that is fine?! Sounds like this page-turner is going to make a comeback as this summer’s Gone Girl.
Next in Salem’s march towards witchiness was the bicentennial of the trials in 1892, which Salem department store Daniel Low & Co. capitalized on with the release of a highly collectible “witch spoon.” The spoon marked the beginning of a small but growing witchy souvenir business. Incidentally, I plan to find these spoons,throw away all my other silverware, and use them exclusively in our new home (we will be moving towards a soup, cereal, and blended steak diet).
In the early 20th century, Salem hit hard times. In 1914, an explosion at a leather factory caused a fire that left more than 3,000 people homeless and destroyed over 1,000 of Salem’s buildings- including job-providing factories. Between the devastation of that infrastructure and the double-whammy of leather rationing for WWI, the local shoe-making industry declined rapidly. When the Great Depression hit, things got even worse.
As the local economy tanked, Salem increasingly looked to tourism, witch-related and not, as a potential lifebroom. In the 1920’s, the city chamber of commerce started branding Salem as “The Witch City.” In the 30’s, the Pioneer Village (a 17th century living history museum, still in business) and the “The Old Witch Jail and Dungeon” (not in in fact a jail or dungeon, but instead a display of a single beam that may have come from a cell used during the trials- also still around for some reason) opened for business. The National Park Service also founded the Salem Maritime National Historic Park. In the 40’s, Historic Salem Incorporated saved the “Witch House” from destruction, and the high school adopted the witches as their mascot.
Popular culture started to pay Salem and its “witches” a bit more attention during these years. The Maid of Salem was released in 1937 (imdb summary: “When a young woman named Barbara Clarke has an affair with adventurer Roger Coverman, it causes a scandal in the Puritanical town of Salem, Massachusetts. After a meddling girl arouses their suspicions, the town’s elders accuse Barbara of being a witch”), and 1942 brought I Married a Witch (in which Veronica Lake plays “a beautiful 17th-century witch returns to life to plague politician Wallace Wooley, descendant of her persecutor”). The Crucible was published in 1953. These cultural nods and the push to develop a tourism economy helped the decline a bit, but the area still struggled through the 50’s and 60’s. Tourism was still not drawing huge crowds, and blue-collar jobs were growing scarcer by the day.
And then in 1970, Samantha arrived. A studio fire had forced Bewitched to find somewhere to shoot off-site, and the show’s producers approached Salem. City officials jumped at the chance to be involved with the show, which shot 8 episodes in the city. Between the resulting publicity and the increasing trendiness of paranormal stuff in general in the 1970’s (see the Exorcist and Ouija boards), Salem’s tourism industry really took off. In 1974, Salem played host to a million visitors and, for the first time, made more money from tourism than from manufacturing. A Wiccan community started to take root in the city, too.
In 1982, Salem founded Haunted Happenings- at the time, a one-day Halloween celebration that has now grown into a full month of events. The 90’s blessed us with Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Hocus Pocus, both set in Salem. In 2005, a hotly debated statue of Samantha was donated by TV Land and installed in the heart of the city. A witch-based tourism industry now brings in more than $100 million to the city every year, although the local government has been trying to de-emphasize the witchcraft angle in recent years and get people to focus on Salem’s maritime history.
The Salem witch trials, as a historical event, are neither particularly spooky (except in an existential “what hath man wrought” kinda way, I guess) nor Halloweeny. The victims of the trials weren’t actually witches- that’s the whole point. But witchcraft has certainly been economic magic for Salem. See you this August in my QNEWT.
Works Referenced
“Advertisement 28 — no Title.” The Youth’s Companion (1827-1929) Nov 03 1892: 592. ProQuest. Web. 30 May 2016 .
Evening star. (Washington, D.C.), 28 June 1908. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1908-06-28/ed-1/seq-39/>
Destination Salam. “2014 was a good year for tourism. Destination Salem Releases 2015 Guide and provides an industry update at Annual Meeting.” http://salem.org/uploads/documents/150220_annual_meeting.pdf
Derosa, Robin. Selling the Story From Salem Village to Witch City. The Revelator. http://revelatormagazine.com/nonfiction/selling-the-story-from-salem-village-to-witch-city/
Mahoney, JC. “The Fourth in Old Salem. ” Evening Star, Washington DC. June 28, 1908.
Musick, John R. The Witch of Salem or Credulity Run Mad. New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1893. https://archive.org/details/witchofsalemorcr00musiiala
Newhall, James R. A lecture on the occult sciences: embracing some account of the New England witchcraft, with an attempt to exhibit the philosophy of spectre seeing, disease charming, &c. https://archive.org/details/lectureonoccults00newh
Perley, Martin Van Buren. A short history of the Salem village witchcraft trials, illustrated by a verbatim report of the trial of Mrs. Elizabeth Howe; a memorial of her .. Map and half tone illustrations. https://archive.org/details/shorthistoryofsa00perlrich
Salem witchcraft; with an account of Salem village, a history of opinions on witchcraft and kindred subjects. by Upham, Charles Wentworth, 1802-1875. [from old catalog] Boston: Wiggins and Lunt, 1867. https://archive.org/details/salemwitchcraft09uphagoog
“Salem Fun Makers Ride Brooms to Bewitch Legion.” Daily Boston Globe (1928-1960): 6. Sep 28 1939. ProQuest. Web. 30 May 2016 .
Schiffoct, Stacy. “First, Kill the Witches. Then, Celebrate Them.” New York Times. Oct 24, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/opinion/sunday/first-kill-the-witches-then-celebrate-them.html?_r=0
Seger Donna. October 1, 2015. The Making of Witch City. https://streetsofsalem.com/2015/10/01/the-making-of-witch-city/
“Selling Idea Section: “Salem Witch” Advertises New England City.” Women’s Wear. Sep 03 1921: 29. ProQuest. Web. 30 May 2016 .
Smith-Dalton, Maggi. A History of Spiritualism and the Occult in Salem: The Rise of Witch City. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00XQZBOOC/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Wazer, Caroline. “We Built Witch City- Should We Tear it Down?” http://historybuff.com/we-built-witch-city-YW4rql6RAl83. Oct 30, 2015
Weir, Robert. “Bewitched and Bewildered: Salem Witches, Empty Factories, and Tourist Dollars.” Historical Journal of Massachusetts. Summer 2012. http://www.wsc.mass.edu/mhj/pdfs/bewitched%20and%20bewildered.pdf
A List of Surprises 