A Brief Introduction

Created in 1999-2000, the Salem Women's Heritage Trail was a collaboration between community organizations and volunteers from Salem including representatives from the Salem Chamber of Commerce, Destination Salem, Salem Maritime National Historical Site (National Park Service), The House of the Seven Gables, Peabody Essex Museum, Derby Square Tours, Historic Salem, Inc., Salem Athenæum, Salem Evening News, Salem Public Library, and Salem State College. Funds to publish the book and support special events were raised by the Caroline Emmerton Committee of the Salem Chamber of Commerce from individuals, businesses, and organizations in Salem. Since the Train was created, Bonnie Hurd Smith has led guided walks, lectured at local colleges and schools, and created lecture series in conjunction with the Salem Maritime National Historical Site.

How the Salem Women’s Heritage Trail Came to Be
by Bonnie Hurd Smith
Salem, August 31, 2000

It all started innocently enough, this project that began as an idea but is now a book, web site, trolley tour, school curriculum and who knows what else.

I had been working on a research project involving Judith Sargent Murray’s recently discovered letter books and was eventually drawn to Salem where several of Judith’s friends and family members lived during the eighteenth century. Who were these Plummers and Saunderses to whom she was writing? I wanted to know, so I headed for the Salem Public Library and the genealogies in the Salem Room at the suggestion of my dear friend and lifelong Salem resident Peg Harrington. When we met for dinner later that day, she said, “You know, there’s a plaque in the Salem Athenæum that mentions a Caroline Plummer. Is that the same family?”

I had just encountered a Caroline Plummer in my research, and I knew that a young “Miss Plummer” regularly accompanied Judith on outings with her daughter. Peg and I dashed across the street to the Athenæum, and its director, John Adams, graciously welcomed us and showed us the plaque. “Do you have any information on Caroline?” I inquired. “Was there a dedication of the building and a program printed, perhaps?” Indeed, there was, and it included a biographical sketch of Caroline written by a close friend of hers that stated, “as a little girl, Caroline was a frequent visitor in the home of Reverend and Mrs. Murray.” Eureka! She was, in fact, the same Caroline Plummer.

And there were other Salem women whose names came up in my research, including Elizabeth Elkins Saunders who lived on Chestnut Street and was Judith Sargent Murray’s cousin by marriage; Elizabeth’s daughters, Mary Elizabeth and Caroline; and Mary Turner Sargent, Judith’s aunt by marriage, who grew up in the House of the Seven Gables. When I introduced myself to the staff at The Gables to tell them about my research, I had the good fortune to meet Irene Axelrod who told me about Susannah Ingersoll and Caroline Emmerton. I had already encountered Caroline when I met Ellen DiGeronimo, the director of the Salem Chamber of Commerce, a few years ago on another women’s history project. I knew that Ellen had started a women’s committee at the chamber and named it for Caroline Emmerton. As a board member and researcher connected with the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail, I also knew about the Peabody sisters of Salem, and suddenly it all became clear: the linkages, the coincidences — the women. There was a story that needed to be told, and it was the story of the women of Salem, Massachusetts.

“Tell me what else I need to know,” I asked Peg, because we need to do something about this. “Well, you need to know Jim McAllister,” she said. “He knows everything.” So I called Jim, explained what I was interested in, and he immediately spun out at least two dozen names and sites off the top of his head. “Okay,” I said to myself, “this city is crying out for a women’s heritage trail. Enough about witchcraft, and as much as we all love the maritime and industrial history of Salem, what about the women?” So I went back to Peg, Irene, Ellen, and Jim, and gingerly asked them, “shouldn’t we put together a Salem Women’s Heritage Trail? “Yes!” was their resounding response. “And,” they said, “we’ll help.”

Well, as an outsider from Cambridge, Massachusetts, I wanted community-wide involvement and ownership of the project from the very beginning so I unabashedly called up the head of every organization in Salem that should be part of it. Thanks to my cohorts, I had a good list of who to contact, and so I met, spoke with, or wrote to Kate Fox at Destination Salem, Anne Busteed of Historic Salem, Jennifer Evans of the Peabody Essex Museum, Will La Moy of the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum, John Adams of the Salem Athenæum, Rae Emerson of the Salem Maritime National Historic Site, Annie Harris of the Salem Partnership, Pat Cloherty of the Salem Public Library, and at Salem State College I connected with Pat Gozemba of the Women’s Studies Department, Dane Morrison of the History Department, and Pat Parker of the English Department. “What do you think about this idea, and do you want to be part of it?” I asked. Again, I was told “Yes!” on all fronts.

“Great idea,” Ellen DiGeronimo said to me at some point, “but who’s going to raise the money for the book?” “I don’t know,” I responded, “what do you think makes sense?” “Well,” she said, “this might be a good project for the Caroline Emmerton Committee. Let me talk to the committee and my board, present the project, and find out if they’re interested.” And they were. The committee wanted to give the project a “home,” and the chamber’s board of directors unanimously voted on May 19, 1999, to make the Salem Women’s Heritage Trail an official project of the Chamber of Commerce and to raise the funds to support it.

At that point, we all swung into action — putting a public face on the project, determining a budget and fundraising strategy, and beginning to work on the actual content. We divided up into task-oriented groups — the Caroline Emmerton Committee spearheading the fundraising — and slowly the project developed.

We circulated around Salem a “nomination form” to encourage people to submit names of women or organizations to the project. We secured the support of the Salem Evening News and began to place articles. We produced a brochure and began to solicit donations. We began to plan our first fundraising event that was held on November 18, 1999, at the House of the Seven Gables. We all agreed that our keynote speaker had to be Nancy Harrington, president of Salem State College. As the college’s first woman president, the first alumna of the college, and the first Salem resident to achieve this distinction, she was our first choice to help launch the project. Nancy agreed to speak, and the event was a great success. The community’s support and enthusiasm was palpable. And, very importantly, we secured the commitment to the project of Salem Mayor Stanley J. Usowicz and his wife, Mary.

Fundraising continued under the guidance and skill of Ellen DiGeronimo, Zina Gerolimatos, Joan S. Peck, Linnea Rego, Pam Rochna, Betty van Iersel, and Barbara Zorzy. Meanwhile, I started meeting or speaking regularly with Irene Axelrod, Rae Emerson, and Jim McAllister, to flesh out a list of women and sites to include. I also began spending endless hours at the Phillips Library (something I highly recommend) pouring through histories of Salem, the North Shore, and Essex County, genealogies, their amazing card catalogue, and dozens of items from their collections, including organizational by-laws, publications, commemorative histories, newspapers, magazines, biographies, city directories, diaries, wills, and other family papers. “Doing” women’s history is not an easy task, but fairly quickly it became clear that there was considerable content to this project. What I thought might be a fairly simple monograph was looking more like a book. And, along the way, looking through all of this documentation, I discovered that my great-grandmother Lydia Maria Coolidge Hurd had been an incorporator of the Salem Woman’s Club in the late 1800s, and that my great aunt, Marjorie Hurd, was a member. She, in turn, was a graduate of Radcliffe College and a practicing attorney in Boston at a time when women did not do such things, and helped finance my own college education. I was struck by what a debt of gratitude I owed personally to these women and to Salem.

As the year 2000 approached, all of us involved in the project were delighted when the Salem Evening News (Salem’s newspaper) named Caroline Emmerton its “Person of the Century,” and we immediately made plans for a Women’s History Month celebration for March, 2000 at the Park Service’s Visitor Center. The event was another smash. The Caroline Emmerton Committee had already held a fashion show the previous month at the Hawthorne Hotel, and they now set to work planning a Cabaret Night with WBACH radio for May. That last event, coupled with dozens of donations from the community and the Chamber of Commerce’s board of directors, put us over our goal of $10,000. In only nine months, we had achieved our goal.

The writing and design of the book was completed in August, 2000. It was delivered from Deschamps Printing Company on August 31 in time for a celebration at the House of the Seven Gables — the site of our very first fundraising event and the first “stop” on the Salem Women’s Heritage Trail. The Salem Chamber of Commerce is now in the midst of creating a stewardship plan for the trail (including a web site), the Peabody Essex Museum is working the trail into their expansion and interpretation efforts, and there is no telling what other ideas people will bring to the project.

To say that this has been a labor of love for all of us is an understatement. We have learned so much, about so many women, about this city we thought we knew, and, I think, about ourselves. One lesson that has been reinforced time and again is how essential it is to record history, to put in writing what we know about the lives of people or histories of organizations we care about — and then give a copy of it to the Phillips Library. I think we have also been reminded by the examples of these people that selflessness, public-spiritedness, generosity, kindness, and honor are what’s important. Too often, it seems to me, in today’s “me first” climate we forget this standard.

I am enormously grateful to my early cohorts in this effort — Irene Axelrod, Rae Emerson, Peg Harrington, and Jim McAllister — for their invaluable research and writing; to all of the people from Salem’s cultural and tourism communities whose commitment and helpfulness never waned; to Ellen DiGeronimo for her ongoing encouragement and support; to the Salem Chamber of Commerce’s board of directors for agreeing to take on the project; to the Caroline Emmerton Committee, and especially Joan Peck, who made sure it would be a success; to John Grimes, Paula Richer, and Allyson Stanford of the Peabody Essex Museum who provided much-needed guidance and last-minute assistance; to the staff of the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum for their tireless retrieving of items from their collections and their good-natured interest in the project; to my colleagues on the board of the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail who are thrilled that there will be a second one in Massachusetts; and to Will La Moy of the Phillips Library, whose behind-the-scenes advice and assistance made this book much better than I could have done on my own.

Following in the tradition of the women honored in this book, what started as an idea, a mere conversation, became a community project — a movement, if you will. When we began putting together the Salem Women’s Heritage Trail, we all told ourselves that we would be changing Salem forever. We did – for the better.