Cent Shops and Home of Sarah Narbonne
71 Essex Street

Acquired in 1964 by the Salem Maritime National Historic Site, this was the location of one of Salem’s well-known Cent Shops, an institution for three centuries that was not only useful to its customers but one of the few business opportunities available to women. Also known as “Thread and Needle Shops” or “Button Stores,” Cent Shops were run by wives, widows, and single women often out of their homes or from an “ell” attached to the house. They sold mainly dry goods and groceries, but oftentimes stocked an enormous array of items including dolls, sleds, snuff, beads, sheet music, Valentines, gingerbread, ginger beer, sewing supplies, marbles, and candies. Proprietors were quite tied to their shops. When shop owner Sally Rhodes summoned medical help in 1883 to treat a painfully strangulated hernia, she insisted the doctor operate on her at home so she could return to work as soon as possible. Fortunately, her adjacent shop stocked everything the doctor needed from sewing supplies to a fine French cognac for disinfectant.¹⁰⁰ By tradition, Mary Holingsworth English (see S45) had a dry goods shop in an ell of her home before she was arrested for witchcraft in 1692. The John Ward House, now owned by the Peabody Essex Museum (see S45), also contained a Cent Shop, as did the House of the Seven Gables (see S1). The last such enterprise, Plummer’s Thread and Needle Shop at 248 Essex Street, closed in 1934 on the retirement of Miss Alice Gertrude Skerry.

Sarah Narbonne (1795-1895) was a life-long resident of Salem. She and her siblings were raised by their grandmother and their uncle, Jonathan Andrews Jr., after their parents, Sarah Andrews and Mathew Vincent, died. Sarah remained in her childhood home after her marriage to Nicholas Narbonne in 1823 and raised the couple’s two children here, working for herself as a “sempstress” to earn money for her young family. She inherited the house from her uncle in 1844 when she is also listed as a widow in Essex County records. Always resourceful, Sarah and her sister Mary ran a Cent Shop in the small front room of the house’s kitchen lean-to. Architectural analysis conducted by the Park Service shows that the women enlarged the Essex Street door of their shop to accommodate their customers. Many sewing needles, straight pins, and thimbles were recovered archeologically from underneath the floorboards, and the dozens of flower pot fragments and cobble borders found in the backyard during excavation testify to their love of gardening.¹⁰¹

Notes
100. George E. Percy, “Thread and Needle Shop of Old Days,” Salem Evening News, May 20, 1944.

101. Salem Maritime National Historic Site files.