At home on Chestnut Street: historic New England has acquired a major new property, the Stephen Phillips House in Salem, Massachusetts. As Brian Pfeiffer explains, from the outside it appears to be a classic Federal-period mansion, but its history is as intricate and unexpected as the many layers of its 200-year-old family collections

Apollo, Oct, 2006 by Brian Pfeiffer

For the past two decades in the United States, historic buildings, particularly historic interiors, have been threatened by the new common sense that it is cheaper and more predictable to replace with new than to repair the old. Consequently, the country's domestic architecture is rapidly becoming monochromatic, with houses that reflect only one moment in time--the present. Happily, there are still survivors from earlier eras to bring colour to our lives and imaginations, and even more happily there are still vigilant guardians of this legacy.

Historic New England is one such guardian. Founded in 1910 as the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, this regional museum already protects more than 100 historic properties and has just accepted a new charge--the Stephen Phillips House on Chestnut Street in Salem, Massachusetts. It contains more than 11,000 objects from at least five generations of a Salem family that sailed to the far corners of the earth as merchants in the late 18th century and returned again in the late 19th as inquisitive travellers.

Built at the height of Salem's international trade, Chestnut Street and its Federal mansions express the highest architectural aspirations of coastal merchants in the heyday of New England's maritime trade between 1790 and the 1820s. Three storeys high, cube-like in form with their low hipped roofs and set uniformly back from the broad street, the Phillips House and its neighbours create a powerful geometry and sense of order (Fig. 1). On first glance, the Phillips House's open portico, arched entryway, Palladian window and delicately decorated window caps appear to be all of a piece, but closer examination reveals a more complicated tale preserved in the building's fabric and collections, a tale that Historic New England will now begin to unravel and interpret to the public.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The house's past began at least 20 years before it arrived on its present site in 1820. The story starts with Salem's most famous merchant prince, Elias Hasket Derby (1739-99). An acute businessman, Derby took full advantage of the American Revolution by outfitting 158 privateers, which in turn captured 145 British vessels. After the war's end, Derby sent trading ships to corners of the earth--India, China, Sumatra, the Baltic, Mauritius--and became America's first millionaire from the profits. He fathered a family of eight children who shared their father's lack of the quiet modesty that New England values. Describing the Derbys as 'a very haughty family', the Reverend William Bentley, Salem's diarist at the turn of 18th century, noted multiple instances of the family's petulance and pride, concluding that they were an 'example of riches without honor'. (1)

Still, as Salem's most prominent citizen, Derby had a powerful impact upon the town commercially and artistically through the series of houses he and his children commissioned from Samuel McIntire (1757-1811), Salem's well-known woodcarver and architect. In his last grand gesture, Derby commissioned McIntire in 1795 to build him a large mansion in the centre of town. Completed only a year or two before Derby's death, the new house was intended to overawe, and it did. One traveller from Baltimore described it as being 'more like a palace than the dwelling of an American merchant', and in 1798, when the federal government assessed the value of all houses in the country, Derby's new mansion was one of the two most valuable, at $30,000. With Derby's death in 1799, the house became obsolete, as none of his children was willing to occupy the great three-storey pile. Consequently, in 1815 the mansion was dismantled and its parts sold publicly. Derby family tradition reports--and architectural evidence supports the claim--that some of this salvage eventually found its way to the Phillips House.

The direct beginnings of the house spring from Derby's first-born child, Elizabeth, and her husband, Captain Nathaniel West. According to Bentley, when the two met, Elizabeth Derby 'fell in love with this man wonderfully'. A respectable seaman of Salem family with business ties to Elias Hasket Derby, West seems to have fallen short of the Derbys' social ambitions, and Bentley reports that 'contrary to the will of her father and friends [Elizabeth] persisted in marrying West' in 1783. For 20 years the couple lived a peaceful enough married life in Salem with six children. In 1799, Elizabeth Derby West inherited her father's country seat at Danvers, several miles distant from Salem. Known as 'the farm', this property became known as 'Oak Hill' following the Wests' construction of a lavish country seat designed by McIntire in 1799. Three rooms from this house were installed as period rooms at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in the 1920s and continue to provide a view of the opulent household at its height. (2)

In 1803, the couple separated and embarked on a contentious divorce that became the talk of Salem. By 1806, Bentley recorded that the battle had turned to 'desperate attempts to ruin the reputation of Mr West'. When the divorce came to trial Salem turned out en masse to watch as Elizabeth Derby West 'displayed in open court, to prove the incontinency of Capt. W[est], all the sweepings of the Brothels of Boston, & all the vile wretches of Salem, Marblehead, Cape Ann, & c, & c.'. Although public sympathy went to West, she was successful in obtaining a divorce, and in a final act of vengeance instructed her heirs in her will in 1814: 'it is my express will that in no case they transfer the sd. [said] estate to their Father Capt. Nath. 1 West or to any person he may employ to purchase the same.' Despite this proscription, the death of the Wests' daughter Sarah in 1819 conferred upon her father a one-third interest in Oak Hill; eventually, he would acquire it in its entirety.