McIntire Historic District

McIntire Historic District. Essex National Heritage Area. , On the northwest corner of Essex and North Streets sits the Jonathan Corwin House ("Witch House") (1642-1675), a high style First Period house built for a late 17th c. merchant who served as a judge for the 1692 Salem Witch Trials. Nearby at 9 North Street lived Nathaniel Bowditch, an unschooled shipmate who became a renowned mathematician and astronomer. In 1802, Bowditch published The American Practical Navigator, which served mariners As an essential navigational bible for the next century and a half. , , On Essex Street, the Salem Athenaeum (inc. 1819) houses an extraordinary collection of contemporary and historical literature. This Colonial Revival building, completed in 1907, was designed by William G. Rantoul based on the mansion "Homewood” located at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University. Initially located at Plummer Hall, now the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), its first president was Dr. Edward A. Holyoke (1728–1829), who was awarded the first M.D. degree ever given by Harvard Medical School and was the first to use the small pox vaccination successfully. , , Further down Essex Street is the Salem Public Library, which opened on July 8, 1889 in a former mansion donated by the widow of Captain John Bertram (1796–1882). Bertram made his money in the maritime trade and funded numerous charitable organizations throughout the city, many of which exist in some form today, including Salem Hospital and the Plummer Home for Boys. , , Salem was the center of New England Quakerism in the 17th/18th centuries. One Quaker meeting house, built in 1688 between 275 and 277 Essex Street, was later moved behind Plummer Hall at the PEM. The Quaker Meeting House at South Pine and Warren Streets, built 1832, burned in the Great Fire of 1914. Friends Cemetery (1718), the burying ground on Essex Street next to the Quaker meeting house, still remains. , , Parallel to Essex Street is Chestnut Street, one of the most architecturally significant streets in America, which includes Hamilton Hall built by architect Samuel Mclntire (1757-1811). Here, John Remond (1785- 1874), a native of Curaçao and a prominent abolitionist and caterer, catered a banquet held for the Marquis de Lafayette, the Revolutionary War hero, in 1824. Across Chestnut Street from Hamilton Hall towered South Church, also designed by Mclntire, but lost to fire in 1904. , , Chestnut Street was also home to dozens of artists, including the painters Frank W Benson (1862–1951) and Philip Little (1857-1942). Their work, and those of many other Salem artists, may be seen at the PEM. , , ( photo caption ) , Clockwise from top left: ca. 1920 postcard of the Jonathan Corwin House ("Witch House "); painting of Nathaniel Bowditch by Charles Osgood, 1835; Salem Public Library, 1910; South Church, ca, 1890. . This historical marker was erected by National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior. It is in Salem in Essex County Massachusetts