Salem, Massachusetts must be one of the towns best known to almost all American schoolchildren as the site of the Salem Witch Trials in 1692-93 during which twenty people were executed. That was, of course, a rather short episode in the town's long history and not a particularly important one overall in the town’s development, but kids love the idea of witches because it reminds them of Halloween and adults love witches and the idea of witch trials because they can use accuse their political opponents of "witch hunts". And indeed, Salem got even greater notoriety after the fictionalized account of the events were depicted in Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible” in 1953 drawing parallels to the McCarthy hearings of era. Salem still has a legitimate Witch House, the home of one of the presiding judges during the trials that can be visited, along with at least a half dozen tourist trap witch museums, witch dungeons, ghost tours, and witch you-name-its capitalizing on the creepy event in the town’s history. In Salem it’s Halloween all year round!

My recollections of it are honestly somewhat vague, but I believe we stopped in Salem to visit one or more such witch-related tourist traps on a family road trip to the Canadian Maritime Provinces and eastern New England in 1984 .

Anyway, though, although I went to see “The Witch House”, really just a historic late-17^th century colonial home, witches were not my reason for coming to Salem this time. Salem has a very rich history as the center of American maritime trade, especially with the Orient, during the 18^th and early 19^th centuries, a time when it was briefly in sixth most populous town in the United States. A bit of that history is preserved as Salem Maritime National Historic Park, but as I’ve found with other urban park units in New England like Lowell and New Bedford, the NHP primarily consists of several scattered preserved buildings and sites around town, mostly near the waterfront, including one of the oldest Custom Houses in the country. I suspect they’ve been made into small national park units as opposed to state historic sites or preserved in other manners mostly to increase tourism and support economic development.

A second historic home to visit in Salem is The House of Seven Gables, a large dark shingled house of which the first part was constructed in 1668 which went on to inspire author Nathaniel Hawthorne to write his novel of the same name . The house tour was mostly interesting to me for its examples of period rooms and décor from different eras in coastal New England since different rooms date from different eras. And on a weekday in early May the small house museum was not very crowded!

Probably Salem’s biggest attraction is the Peabody Essex Museum, part art museum and part history museum. I had read about the Peabody Essex so wanted to see it but didn’t really know what to expect. I’d characterize it mostly as a museum of art and decorative arts, but it focuses solely on art forms related to Salem’s history from paintings of maritime scenes, ships, and New England coastal residents to model ships to scrimshaw carvings by whalers to Native American art to the arts of China and Japan. The concentration is on the latter and especially on Chinese decorative items made for the American export market, of which the Peabody Essex Museum claims to have the world’s largest collection. Making the kind of trinkets Americans and other westerners want isn’t something that began in Japan and Taiwan after WWII and moved on to China toward the turn of the 21^st Century . The Chinese have been modifying their art forms to appeal to more to western tastes for well over 250 years, especially in porcelain and ceramics. Much of what we know in the west as Chinoiserie has little to do with traditional Chinese art forms, but the Chinese long ago learned how to give 'em what they want, and the merchants of Salem were at the forefront in distributing those arts around the world. What impressed me about the Peabody Essex was how large, focused, and comprehensive the collection was on the arts related to Salem’s history, and the temporary exhibition on “Asia in Amsterdam: The Culture of Luxury in the Golden Age” was superb.