Historic house museums don’t only preserve old structures. They’re also snapshots in time, telling personal stories that go far beyond history and architecture and giving visitors a chance to step inside someone’s home and experience a small slice of the past.
“As you’re walking through, you can kind of picture yourself living there,” says Kristen Weiss, Historic New England’s Cape Ann site manager. “I think that helps us understand what it was like to live in other times.”
Here’s a look at a few of the North Shore’s most notable house museums.
Beauport, the Sleeper-McCann House, Gloucester
Henry Davis Sleeper, one of America’s first professional interior designers, built his fabulous summer home at the edge of Gloucester Harbor as a small cottage in 1907. But he kept adding onto it, and soon, that small cottage had more than 40 rooms, each decorated with imaginative displays of art, objects, glass, and historic architectural features. “He was incredibly creative, and some might say eccentric,” says Weiss. “But he really just had an amazing eye for color and light.” The house’s next owner, Woolworth heiress Helena Woolworth McCann, kept the home almost exactly as Sleeper left it and passed it onto Historic New England after her death. A visit includes a tour of the house’s interior, as well as the beautiful Arts and Crafts-style garden, featuring outdoor “rooms,” benches, statuary, and native plants and materials.
The House of the Seven Gables, Salem
The House of the Seven Gables is a Salem icon, thanks to its dramatic black exterior, famous “secret staircase,” and of course, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s gothic novel of the same name. But the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion, as it’s also known, predates Hawthorne’s imagination by nearly two centuries. It was built in 1668 and is one of America’s oldest houses. Although it’s been open to the public as a museum since 1910, the harborside mansion was a tourist attraction even while people were still living in it, says David Moffat, visitor services specialist-research, for The House of the Seven Gables. “It’s a place with a lot of different meanings and significances that people come to see,” he says. Today, visitors can tour inside the house, which has been restored to reflect different time periods, climb the secret staircase, and explore the gardens.
Phillips House, Salem
Only one of the Federal-style mansions on Salem’s Chestnut Street is open to the public, and that’s the 1821 Phillips House. Tours take visitors inside the beautiful home, which tells the story not only of its architecture and furnishings like Federal-era furniture and artifacts collected in Hawaii and Polynesia, but also of the Phillips family and their live-in staff, who immigrated from Ireland. Visitors can also check out the Carriage House, featuring antique carriages and two Pierce-Arrow automobiles.
Spencer-Peirce-Little Farm, Newbury
The 1690 manor house located on the 230-acre Spencer-Peirce-Little Farm isn’t only important for its bucolic beauty and historical character. “It’s an extremely special property because it is one of the only 17th century homes that you can visit that was not built of timber,” says Shanna Sartori, site manager for Historic New England’s Newbury properties. Instead, the oldest part of the house was built with rare and costly brick and stone and is one of only two Jacobean-style manor houses left in the country. Visitors will see how the house’s interior is interpreted to different time periods, from the colonial era to the late 20th century. “It’s telling the preservation story as all the families would have lived there,” Sartori says. One room even contains two different wallpapers: One in an 1800s Federalist style and the other from 1986, when Historic New England acquired the house.
The Great House, Crane Estate, Ipswich
It’s hard to believe that at one time, the 59-room Stuart-style Great House on the Crane Estate overlooks the ocean atop Castle Hill, which is surrounded by opulent gardens and grounds, wasn’t considered very important. But when the wealthy Crane family bequeathed the property to The Trustees of Reservations, the land was prized. “The house itself, though, nobody wanted,” and it stood nearly empty for nearly 30 years, says Kristina Brendel, Crane Estate’s cultural programs coordinator. Today, things are very different. The mansion, designed by architect David Adler and completed in 1928 as the Cranes’ vacation home, is now a National Historic Landmark. Additionally, many of its original furnishings have been returned and restored. Visitors who explore inside the home are also “assigned” the identity of a real-life person who visited the Cranes, like artists, socialites, Amelia Earhart and a princess from the Netherlands.
Photograph Courtesy of HNE
Coffin House, Newbury
Whereas most 300-year-old houses passed through multiple families over the course of their histories, the 1678 Coffin House is different. Over the centuries, it was home to only the Coffin family, which added onto the post-medieval style home over the years to accommodate additional generations. Tours explore the family’s history and the house as it evolved, Sartori says. There’s also a special evening, lantern-lit, Halloween tour called “Cradle to Grave” that takes visitors through the Coffin House, Swett-Ilsley House, and the First Parish Burying Ground, where many of the Coffins are buried.