Home of Elizabeth Reardon
35 Chestnut Street

Showing that a little knowledge can go a long way, Salem is grateful that Elizabeth Keats Butler Reardon took a course on colonial architecture in the 1960s offered by the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA). Armed with facts on seventeenth-century New England dwellings, “Libby Reardon visited a small Victorian cottage at the corner of Liberty and Charter Streets that had caught her eye years earlier,” according to Salem historian Jim McAllister.⁶⁵ Despite the house’s Victorian “improvements,” Libby was convinced of its earlier history and asked SPNEA assistant director Abbott Lowell Cummings to confirm her suspicions. He told her, “Young lady, if you have found a seventeenth-century house in Salem that I don’t know about, I shall be very surprised.”⁶⁶ Indeed, Libby was correct. The house dates back to the 1660s and has since been restored by Historic Salem, Inc. and named for its original owner, Samuel Pickman. Libby found another such hidden treasure a few years later on High Street — the Eleazer Gedney House — that SPNEA was able to purchase and now uses as a study house on seventeenth-century construction techniques and architecture.

Notes
65. McAllister, From Naumkeag to Witch City, 123.

66. Ibid.