North Shore · MA-06
Salem
A port that bankrolled a young republic, a city that wrote its hardest lesson into law.
Overview
Salem is a city that has had to teach itself, over and over, what justice and self-government actually require. The Naumkeag fished and farmed Salem's harbor for centuries before English settlement in 1626. By 1790, Salem was the second-richest port in the new nation, its merchants funding the first American museum of natural history. Its hardest chapter, the 1692 witch trials, became a civic memory the city has spent three hundred years answering for, in apology, in monument, and in a public school system that today serves a population one in five of whom is Latino.
The moments
The sourced timeline.
- 01
1614, first recorded English contact · Colonial · pre-1763
Naumkeag, the fishing place, before the English
Indigenous HistoryMaritimeLong before any English settler stepped ashore, the harbor the colonists would call Salem was Naumkeag, a name from the Eastern Algonquian tongue translated as the fishing place. The Naumkeag lived inside the Pawtucket confederation under the sachem Nanepashemet, whose authority reached from the Charles River north to the Merrimack.
When the English explorer John Smith mapped the New England coast in 1614, he noted Naumkeag for the size of its population relative to other harbors between Maine and Cape Cod. Within five years, the world he described was gone. A regional epidemic in 1616 to 1619, almost certainly involving smallpox, killed Nanepashemet and a large share of the Naumkeag people before any permanent English settlement was attempted.
The land English colonists later called empty was not. It had been farmed, fished, governed, and named, and the survivors of that catastrophe were still living on it when Roger Conant arrived.
Figures · Nanepashemet, Squaw Sachem of Mistick
- 02
1626, settlement; 1629, renamed Salem · Colonial · pre-1763
Roger Conant and the Old Planters move to Naumkeag
Civic FirstsIn 1626, after a failed fishing venture at Cape Ann, Roger Conant led a small group of settlers, later remembered as the Old Planters, south along the coast to Naumkeag. They built shelters, planted, and held the camp together while London argued over who held its patent.
Three years later, in 1629, the new Massachusetts Bay Company sent John Endecott to take over the settlement. Conant ceded leadership and the town was renamed Salem, from the Hebrew shalom, for peace. The choice of name was not incidental. It was a deliberate signal that the bitter dispute between the Old Planters and the new arrivals had been resolved without bloodshed.
Salem thus became the first permanent settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, predating Boston by a year, and the seedbed for the colonial government that would later draft its founding charter on these shores.
Figures · Roger Conant, John Endecott, Peter Palfrey, John Balch
- 03
February 1692 through May 1693 · Colonial · pre-1763
The 1692 witch trials, and three centuries of accounting
Civic FirstsCivil RightsBetween February 1692 and May 1693, more than 200 people in and around Salem were accused of witchcraft. The Court of Oyer and Terminer convicted thirty. Nineteen were hanged at Proctor's Ledge, on the west side of town. One, Giles Corey, was pressed to death under stones for refusing to plead. At least five more died in jail.
The first to confess was Tituba, an enslaved Indigenous woman in the household of the minister Samuel Parris. Beaten and threatened, she described a witch's covenant in language the magistrates were prepared to hear, and the accusations spread from there. She later recanted. She was never tried, and what became of her after she left the Salem jail is not known.
Salem began apologizing almost immediately and has never fully stopped. In 1697, Judge Samuel Sewall publicly recanted in the South Meeting House in Boston. In 1711, the colonial legislature reversed the attainders of most of the convicted. In 1957, the Massachusetts General Court issued a formal apology that cleared additional names. In 1992, Salem dedicated the Witch Trials Memorial on Liberty Street. In 2017, the city marked the actual execution site at Proctor's Ledge with a permanent memorial.
Read in sequence, the city's three hundred years of revision are not a brand. They are the documentary trail of a community trying, in slow motion, to repair a failure of due process.
“I was affrighted out of my Reason; my Master did beat me and otherways abuse me to make me confess.”
Tituba, on her 1692 confession Figures · Tituba, Bridget Bishop, Rebecca Nurse, Giles Corey, Judge Jonathan Corwin, Judge Samuel Sewall
- 04
February 26, 1775 · Revolution · 1763–1815
Leslie's Retreat, the standoff that nearly started the war
VeteransCivic FirstsOn the afternoon of Sunday, February 26, 1775, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Leslie of the 64th Regiment of Foot marched 240 British regulars from Marblehead into Salem under orders to seize colonial cannon hidden north of the town. He found the North Bridge raised and a crowd, including the militia officer Timothy Pickering, blocking his crossing.
The confrontation lasted hours. The minister Thomas Barnard negotiated a face-saving compromise. The bridge would be lowered, Leslie would march a token distance across, and his column would then turn around. No shot was fired. The cannon were already gone.
Seven weeks later, the same regulars marched on Concord and shooting started. Salem's encounter was the dress rehearsal, the first moment a British column moving on colonial arms was halted by organized civilian resistance. Charles Moses Endicott's 1856 narrative, drawn from surviving Salem witnesses, remains the principal documentary source.
Figures · Alexander Leslie, Timothy Pickering, Thomas Barnard
- 05
1786, Grand Turk sails for Canton · Revolution · 1763–1815
The Grand Turk opens Salem's China trade
MaritimeInnovationIn 1786, Elias Hasket Derby dispatched the Grand Turk from Salem on what would become the first New England voyage to trade directly with China. The ship reached Canton, took on tea and porcelain by way of French Mauritius, and returned to Salem harbor on May 22, 1787.
The voyage opened a new fortune. Within a generation, Salem ships were calling at Sumatra, Zanzibar, India, and Japan. By 1790, Salem was the second-richest port in the new United States. By the time Derby died in 1799, he was, by most contemporary reckonings, the country's first millionaire.
That wealth funded American civic institutions that still stand. In 1799 a group of Salem captains chartered the East India Marine Society and required members to bring back, from beyond the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn, natural and artificial curiosities. Their collection grew into the Peabody Essex Museum, the oldest continuously operating museum in the United States.
Figures · Elias Hasket Derby, Ebenezer West, William Vans
- 06
1799, East India Marine Society founded · Revolution · 1763–1815
Sea captains build America's first museum
MaritimeEducationCivic FirstsOn October 14, 1799, twenty-two Salem ship masters and supercargoes founded the East India Marine Society. Membership was restricted to men who had personally navigated a vessel as master or supercargo around the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn. They were required, by charter, to keep journals and to deposit foreign objects with the Society for public display.
Their collection, opened to visitors in 1825 in the new East India Marine Hall on Essex Street, was the first museum in the United States organized around scholarly cataloging rather than private curiosity. It is the institutional ancestor of the Peabody Essex Museum, which traces a continuous line from those 1799 deposit shelves to the present day.
The Society's logic, that men who sail the world owe an accounting to those who do not, would later shape American natural-history and ethnographic museum practice from New York to Washington.
- 07
1832, Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society founded · Industrial · 1815–1880
The Remond family and a Black-led abolitionist Salem
AbolitionWomen's RightsCivil RightsIn 1832, a group of free Black women in Salem, including Nancy Lenox Remond, founded the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society. Two years later, the organization integrated and broadened. It became, for a generation, one of the most active women-led abolitionist societies north of New York.
Nancy Remond's children carried the work forward. Her son Charles Lenox Remond was hired in 1838 by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society as the first Black full-time lecturer in the United States. He traveled the country, spoke at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, and helped recruit the 54th Massachusetts during the Civil War.
Her daughter Sarah Parker Remond would, in 1853, push the question into the courts, in a case that prefigured a century of public-accommodation law.
Figures · Nancy Lenox Remond, Charles Lenox Remond, Sarah Parker Remond, John Remond
- 08
May 4, 1853 · Industrial · 1815–1880
Sarah Parker Remond sues, and wins
AbolitionWomen's RightsCivil RightsOn May 4, 1853, Sarah Parker Remond of Salem traveled to Boston with her sister Caroline Putnam and the abolitionist William Cooper Nell. They had bought reserved tickets for a performance of Donizetti's Don Pasquale at the Howard Athenaeum. The opera company's agent refused to seat them in the family circle on account of their race. When Remond refused to move to the segregated gallery, a Boston police officer dragged her down the stairs.
She did not let it go. She filed assault charges against the agent and the officer, sued for damages, and won. The court awarded her five hundred dollars and an admission that she had been wronged.
The case was one of the earliest tests in Massachusetts of whether a private theater could segregate paying customers by race. It became a precedent abolitionists cited for the next decade and one of the early signals that public-accommodation discrimination, even where no statute compelled it, could be answered in court.
“I have suffered the injury, and I do not intend to suffer in silence.”
Sarah Parker Remond, on bringing suit, 1853 Figures · Sarah Parker Remond, Caroline Remond Putnam, William Cooper Nell
- 09
1856, Charlotte Forten teaches at Epes Grammar School · Industrial · 1815–1880
Charlotte Forten and the integrated classroom
EducationAbolitionCivil RightsCharlotte Forten arrived in Salem in 1853, sent by her Philadelphia family to study in Massachusetts because Pennsylvania's schools were still segregated. She lived with the Remonds, finished at Higginson Grammar School, and graduated from the Salem Normal School in 1856.
That same year, she was hired by Epes Grammar School in Salem, becoming the first Black teacher hired to instruct white students in a Salem public school. Her diaries, kept from 1854 onward and later published, are among the most detailed surviving first-person accounts of a young Black woman's life in antebellum New England.
Forten left Salem in 1862 to teach formerly enslaved children on the Sea Islands of South Carolina, part of the Port Royal Experiment. Her Atlantic Monthly essays from that mission helped shape Northern public opinion on Black education and citizenship during the war.
Figures · Charlotte Forten Grimké, John Greenleaf Whittier
- 10
1850, The Scarlet Letter published · Industrial · 1815–1880
Hawthorne, the Custom House, and a literature of conscience
MaritimeNathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem in 1804, the great-great-grandson of John Hathorne, one of the magistrates of the 1692 trials. He spent much of his adult life trying to make literary sense of that inheritance.
Appointed Surveyor of the Salem Custom House in 1846, Hawthorne worked among the last of the city's deep-water merchants. After he lost the post in a political shake-up in 1849, he sat down at 14 Mall Street and wrote The Scarlet Letter, prefaced by a long essay on the Custom House itself. The novel reckoned with a Puritan New England capable of both moral seriousness and moral catastrophe.
The follow-up, The House of the Seven Gables in 1851, was set in a gabled mansion based on the Turner-Ingersoll house on Turner Street, today the most-visited literary landmark in Salem. Hawthorne's Salem fiction, more than any other body of nineteenth-century American writing, taught the country to read its own founding as a moral problem.
Figures · Nathaniel Hawthorne, Susanna Ingersoll
- 11
June 25, 1914 · Progressive Era · 1880–1920
The Great Salem Fire and the Franco-American Point
LaborImmigrationAt 1:37 in the afternoon on Thursday, June 25, 1914, an explosion at the Korn Leather Factory on Boston Street touched off the fire that destroyed half of Salem. Driven by a southwest wind, flames raced from the Blubber Hollow tannery district through the densely settled Point neighborhood toward the harbor. The fire burned for nearly fifteen hours.
When the smoke cleared, 1,376 buildings were gone and 18,000 people were homeless or jobless. The Point, the heart of Salem's Franco-American community since the textile-mill recruiting drives of the 1870s, was almost entirely destroyed, including the recently built St. Joseph's Church. Salem's French-Canadian population fell from roughly 15,000 to about 5,000 in the months that followed.
The response set a template. Fire companies from more than twenty surrounding communities and 1,700 state militiamen arrived within hours. The city appointed a Rebuilding Commission that drafted Salem's first modern building code, widened streets, and rebuilt the Point in brick. Many of the apartment blocks that now define the Latino Point were laid out by that 1914 commission.
- 12
1883, George S. Parker prints his first game · Progressive Era · 1880–1920
Parker Brothers makes Salem the capital of American games
InnovationLaborGeorge S. Parker was sixteen years old in 1883 when he designed a card game called Banking, printed five hundred copies in Salem, and sold them through Boston retailers at a profit of eighty dollars. His brothers Charles and Edward joined him later in the decade, and the family business became Parker Brothers.
From its Salem headquarters, the company built the dominant American board-game industry of the twentieth century. In 1935, in the depths of the Depression, Parker Brothers bought a real-estate trading game from an out-of-work salesman named Charles Darrow, renamed it Monopoly, and printed it on Salem presses. The royalties saved the company.
More than 1,800 titles were issued under the Parker Brothers imprint before the firm was absorbed by Hasbro in 1991. For the better part of a century, Salem was the city where Americans learned to play with money on a printed board.
Figures · George S. Parker, Charles H. Parker, Edward H. Parker
- 13
March 17, 1938 · Modern · 1920–1965
Derby Wharf becomes the first National Historic Site
MaritimeCivic FirstsOn March 17, 1938, the Secretary of the Interior designated Salem Maritime the first National Historic Site in the United States. The designation covered nine waterfront acres including Derby Wharf, the Custom House where Hawthorne worked, and a cluster of merchant houses dating to the China-trade boom.
The choice was not casual. By 1938, the New Deal's National Park Service was looking for a place that could carry the documentary weight of the early American republic. Salem's surviving wharves and counting houses, more intact than anything comparable in New York or Philadelphia, met the standard.
Salem Maritime was redesignated a National Historical Park in 2025 in honor of the city's 400th maritime anniversary. Its founding role, as the first place the federal government chose to preserve as American history, is still the precedent that every subsequent site cites.
- 14
Early 21st century · Contemporary · 1965–today
The Latino Point and a new chapter of Salem self-government
ImmigrationCivic FirstsCivil RightsThe Point neighborhood that burned in 1914 and was rebuilt by Franco-American mill workers was settled in successive waves through the twentieth century by Dominican, Salvadoran, Mexican, and other Latin American families. By the 2020 census, roughly one in five Salem residents identified as Hispanic or Latino.
That demographic shift has produced a quieter civic shift, visible in the city's elected positions. Manny Cruz, an Afro-Latino of Dominican heritage, served on the Salem School Committee and was later elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Domingo J. Dominguez, born in the Dominican Republic, sits on the City Council. Yamily Byas, profiled on the Point's El Mundo Mural in 2023, was sworn in to the School Committee in January 2026.
The pattern is familiar in Salem's longer history. An immigrant working-class neighborhood, two or three generations in, begins electing its own to the bodies that govern it. The Irish did it after 1850, the Franco-Americans after 1900, the Poles after 1920. The Latino Point is the next chapter in that sequence.
Figures · Manny Cruz, Domingo J. Dominguez, Yamily Byas
Did you know
Surprising facts about Salem.
- Maritime
By 1790, Salem was the second-richest port in the new United States. Its ships were the first American vessels to reach Sumatra, Zanzibar, and Japan.
Elias Hasket Derby, who built that fleet, was likely the country's first millionaire by the time he died in 1799.
Source · Smithsonian Magazine, Salem Sets Sail - Civic Firsts
Salem's Derby Wharf was the first place the federal government ever designated a National Historic Site, on March 17, 1938.
Source · National Park Service, Salem Maritime - Education
The Peabody Essex Museum traces its founding to 1799, when Salem sea captains chartered the East India Marine Society. It is the oldest continuously operating museum in the United States.
Source · Peabody Essex Museum - Innovation
Monopoly was printed in Salem. Parker Brothers, founded in town in 1883, bought the rights in 1935, and the royalties saved the company through the Depression.
Source · Mass Moments, Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities - Veterans
The first armed standoff between British regulars and organized colonial resistance happened in Salem on February 26, 1775, seven weeks before Lexington and Concord.
Colonel Leslie's 240 soldiers were turned back at the North Bridge without a shot fired. The hidden cannon were already gone.
Source · Smithsonian Magazine - Abolition
Charles Lenox Remond, born in Salem in 1810, was hired in 1838 as the first full-time Black lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.
Source · BlackPast - Education
In 1856, Charlotte Forten became the first Black teacher hired to instruct white students in a Salem public school.
Source · National Park Service - Civil Rights
Massachusetts formally apologized for the 1692 witch trials in 1957 and cleared additional names. A final memorial at the execution site at Proctor's Ledge opened in 2017.
Source · Salem Witch Trials, historical record
The people
Figures from Salem.
Roger Conant
Colonial · pre-1763
Old Planter who led the small group that resettled at Naumkeag in 1626, holding the camp together until the Massachusetts Bay Colony arrived.
Tituba
Colonial · pre-1763
Indigenous woman enslaved in the household of the Salem Village minister Samuel Parris. Her coerced 1692 confession set off the witch trials. She later recanted and was never tried.
Elias Hasket Derby
Revolution · 1763–1815
Salem merchant whose Grand Turk made the first New England voyage to Canton in 1786 and 1787. Likely the first American millionaire.
Charles Lenox Remond
Industrial · 1815–1880
Salem-born orator, the first Black full-time lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Spoke at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London.
Sarah Parker Remond
Industrial · 1815–1880
Salem abolitionist who in 1853 sued the Howard Athenaeum after being forcibly ejected from a white-only opera section, winning a public-accommodation precedent in Massachusetts.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Industrial · 1815–1880
Salem-born novelist, descendant of a 1692 trial judge, who wrote The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables out of his Custom House years on Derby Wharf.