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William Bentley

The Endicott Pear Tree, Still Alive in Massachusetts After Nearly 400 Years

Sometime around 1630, John Endecott planted a pear tree with the hope it would live for generations. He got his wish with the Endicott Pear Tree, believed the oldest living cultivated fruit tree in North America.

The tree survived harsh winters, hurricanes, earthquakes, grazing by cows, suburban sprawl and vandals. It was declared a national landmark in 2011. Clones from the Endicott Pear Tree have been planted in at least 17 states.

The Endicott Pear Tree was featured in a 1919 biography of trees called The Historic Trees of Massachusetts. Author James Raymond Simmons called it ‘one of the most quaint and strangely impressive of all the historic trees.’

John Endecott

John Endecott

Endecott (the name was changed later) scouted the New World with about 70 others who sailed aboard the Abigail in 1628, during the Great Migration of Puritans. He established a small settlement and called it ‘Salem,’ the Hebrew word for peace.

On July 3, 1632, the General Court of Massachusetts Bay granted Endecott 300 acres of land on “a necke of land lying about three miles from Salem” now known as Danversport, a section of Danvers.

The tree was planted sometime between 1630 and 1649. Endecott may have planted it first on his farm in Salem and then moved it to Danvers. He began cultivating a farm, with a cow barn, house and outbuildings. Endecott also owned the first sundial in America and introduced the ox-eye daisy to the colonies.

He also served as the first governor of Massachusetts until his death in 1665. A descendant, Endicott ‘Chub” Peabody, also served as governor of Massachusetts in 1963. People sometimes called the tree The Governor’s Tree.

The Endicott Pear Tree

William Endicott with the Endicott Pear Tree, 1925

John Endecott planted the tree in the presence of his children and workers and said, “I hope the tree will love the soil of the old world and no doubt when we have gone the tree will still be alive,” according to Danvers historian Harriet Tapley.

In 1809, Salem diarist William Bentley sent pears from the Endicott Pear Tree to former President John Adams. Adams planted the seeds and wrote, “I have several young Endicotts … in my garden. They are very flourishing and if I can guard them from accident I hope they will be an ornament to this farm and a comfort to some good citizens 200 years hence.”

In 1904, the Boston Globe reported the tree bore fruit during the last season, although the pears were had ‘not of too pleasant flavor.’

A Worthy Shoot

Lucy Larcom wrote a poem to commemorate the Endicott Pear Tree for Arbor Day in 1890:

Who would not be proud to say
Of the deed he does to-day,
If it be a worthy shoot
From an honorable root,
That, when centuries had passed,
Bloom an fruitage still would last,–
Still a growing, breathing thing–
Autumn, with the heart of spring.

In 1964, vandals ripped off the limbs and jumped up and down on them, leaving two trunks five to six feet high. Several weeks later, shoots appeared and the tree grew again. A chain-link fence topped with barbed wire was erected to protect the tree. Later, a more attractive fence was built.

The Endicott Pear Tree, 1920

The farm passed down through generations of Endicotts. William Endicott posed in the 1925 photo above with the tree. Ultimately Osram Sylvania bought the farm, and today the land belongs to Massachusetts General Hospital/North Shore Center for Outpatient Care.

To learn about acquiring an Endicott Pear Tree, click here. This story was updated in 2023.

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The Cold Friday of 1810

The legendary Cold Friday of 1810 brought such terrible winds and frigid temperature that people talked and wrote about it for generations.

Tales of the killer weather event made their way into town histories, journals and court records long after it happened on January 19. They told of the many people who froze to death while traveling along the highways. The wind blew down houses, barns and vast numbers of timber trees. Ships wrecked, cattle froze in their barns and old people died of hypothermia inside their homes. It was so cold pens wouldn’t write though they were right next to the fireplace.

Winter in the country: a cold morning. by Currier and Ives, courtesy Library of Congress.

What made the Cold Friday so lethal was the sudden, steep drop in temperature that caught people unaware.

Sudden Plunge

Several jourrnals claimed the mercury dropped 100 degrees in Boston in less than 24 hours, from 67 to 33 below zero, Michael R. Doyle reported in 2005. Though the ice in the harbor did freeze to Spectacle Island, that may have been an exaggeration.

The more scientific minds at the American Register reported the mercury dropped from 48 degrees on Thursday to nine below zero on the cold Friday. In Portsmouth, N.H., it went from 54 on Thursday to minus 12 on Friday — and minus 13 on Saturday.

Joseph Dow, in his History of Hampton, N.H., described how the plunge in temperature surprised some local farmers:

“…[I]n Hampton, the morning was so mild, several farmers set out for Newburyport, with ox-loads of potatoes, beguiling with neighborly chat the tedium of the slow progress.

“On the return, the cold became so intense and the wind so violent, all suffered extremely, and one man who had rashly left his overcoat at home was only saved from perishing, by wrapping himself in the blankets that had covered the potatoes.”

Cold Friday Redux

So memorable was the Cold Friday that a mention of it 20 years later meant the listener understood it to mean January 19. Asked to recount a date in a New Hampshire court case, the witness simply said it happened on the “Cold Friday, 1810.”

Henry David Thoreau, one o the two loves of Louisa May Alcott

Henry David Thoreau thought of the Cold Friday during the winter of 1857, the coldest ever in New England. On Jan. 11, 1857, he wrote in his journal:

“Mother remembers the Cold Friday–very well–She lived in the house where I was born–The people in the kitchen Jack Garrison–Ester–& a Hardy girl drew up close to the fire–but the dishes which the Hardy girl was washing froze as fast as she washed them close to the fire. They managed to keep warm in the parlor by their great fires.”

Few people ventured outside. The New England Farmer reported, “very little going from place to place. Farmers piled on the wood and attended to their cattle, and that was about all for the day.” Anyone who had to go outside for an errand that could not be deferred, ‘sped over the ground like squirrels and were fortunate if they returned with no flesh from the intensity of the frost.’

One intrepid little girl named Rebecca Ramsdell braved the cold to walk a mile to school in Henniker, N.H. Her teacher, who awarded medals to his most punctual students, gave her the prize. She kept it during the term. In fact, she kept it her whole life. The Henniker Historical Society has a picture of her at age 100 with the medal. (See it here.)

Casualties

In Woburn, Mass., Joseph Brooks, a 50-year-old Revolutionary War veteran, and his cousin Benjamin, 45, had no such luck. They went into the forest to cut wood during the mild afternoon of January 18. They were found frozen to death on January 20.

The Rev. William Bentley

People even died without going outside. Salem diarist William Bentley reported in his diary.

“Several Old Persons perished within doors…Susanna Beadle, aet. 82, attempting to arise from bed was so chilled as to expire immediately.” Bentley wrote. “A woman, also a Widow, chilled, fell into the fire, on the western part of the Town, & escaped with life enough to put out the fire in her clothes but did not call assistance & perished with the cold & found dead in the morning.

“The young man from the Ship going to Beverly Shore not half a mile could not be recovered. A Soldier coming from Salem Fort only to the Farm houses on the Neck, not half a mile, was much frozen……the use of the pen was impracticable unless near to the fire, & even before the fire the water froze on the tables.”

The fierce winds blew ashore several other vessels in the harbor. Capt. James Sears and the crew of the sloop Margaret, carrying a load of plaster from Thomaston, lost their lives at sea.

In Antrim, N.H., the wind blew the roof off the home of Samuel Marshall and his family, and in Farmington, Maine, the home of James Johnson burned.

Saddest Story

The saddest tale of suffering was repeated many times. It happened in Sanbornton, N.H. According to the New Hampshire Historical Society, the wind blew down part of the home of Jeremiah Ellsworth, jeopardizing the lives of his wife and three children.

Mrs. Ellsworth dressed the youngest child and went into the cellar, leaving the other two in bed. Jeremiah Ellsworth went to the home of David Brown, a quarter mile away, seeking help. His feet had frozen, though, and the two men agreed he shouldn’t risk the danger of going back home.

Brown hitched his horse to a sleigh to rescue Mrs. Ellsworth and the children. He found her and the baby in the cellar, the other two naked in bed as the wind blew their clothes off. He covered them with a blanket and put them in the sleigh, but the wind turned the sleigh over and scattered everything.

Mrs. Ellsworth decided to walk to Brown’s house but sank into the snow, benumbed by cold. She crawled to Brown’s house, where she had changed so much her husband didn’t recognize her.

Brown put the children back in the sleigh but the wind blew it over again and tore it to pieces. He could only carry two of the children, so he left the baby, who was dressed, behind on the road. When he reached his home the children were still alive, but died a few minutes later. Brown was too exhausted and frostbitten to find the baby, but later that day a search party found him dead by the side of the road.

The parents lived, but had no more children after that Cold Friday.

This story was updated in 2023.

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The Stolen Books That Launched America’s 1st Math Genius, Nathaniel Bowditch

In 1791, two Salem ministers let an 18-year-old apprentice named Nathaniel Bowditch use their private library. Maritime navigation would never be the same.

Nathaniel Bowditch, by Gilbert Stuart

It just happened to be one of the best scientific libraries in America, and Bowditch happened to have one of the best mathematical minds in the world.

The library had been captured during the American Revolution by a privateer from Beverly, Mass., right next to Salem. The ship’s owners agreed to sell the books to a group of prominent men on the North Shore of Massachusetts.

The serendipitous linking of Nathaniel Bowditch with the Salem Philosophical Society’s library proved fortunate for American science and for sailors around the world. Had it not been for that library, Bowditch might never have founded modern marine navigation, trained a generation of American astronomers, become the first insurance actuary in America or directed investment into New England’s nascent manufacturing industries.

Nathaniel Bowditch

Nathaniel Bowditch was born March 26, 1773, the fourth of seven children in a family that had lived in Salem since 1639. His father, Habakkuk, a fourth-generation shipmaster, had also learned the cooper trade. He suffered business reversals at the beginning of the Revolution and, despondent, went back to making barrels. He had so little money he received $15 or $20 a year in charity from the Salem Marine Society.

The Rev. William Bentley

Nathaniel showed an early interest in mathematics, once solving a problem so quickly that his teacher accused him of cheating. At the age of 10, his mother Mary Ingersoll died. That ended his formal schooling, and he went to work in his father’s cooper shop to help support the family.

At 12 he was apprenticed to the ship chandlery of Ropes and Hodges as a clerk. In 1790 they retired, and Bowditch went to work for Samuel Curwen Ward, another ship chandler, until he went to sea in 1795.

Salem Philosophical Society

But during all those years, Nathaniel Bowditch spent his leisure reading whatever books he could get his hands on. He especially liked mathematics.

In 1787 his brother William, also good in math, told him about a new way of figuring out problems using letters instead of numbers called algebra. Nathaniel was intrigued. He managed to borrow a book about algebra, which so excited him he couldn’t sleep that night.

Bowditch’s family belonged to the Rev. William Bentley’s East Church of Salem. Bentley and his friend the Rev. Joseph Prince, both scholars, often stopped by Bowditch’s shop to chat with the young bookworm. The two ministers belonged to the Salem Philosophical Society, which had bought a library from a privateer.

The Library

On Sept. 5, 1780, the American privateer Pilgrim seized a British frigate on a voyage from Galway to London. The ship carried the library of Richard Kirwan, a prominent Irish chemist.

Revolutionary-era privateer.

The Pilgrim returned to Beverly in 1781. The ship’s owners, John and Andrew Cabot, agreed to sell the library’s 116 scientific books at a reasonable rate. To buy them, Harvard President Joseph Willard, of Beverly, raised $435.35 from prominent local men such as Edward Augustus Holyoke and Manassah Cutler. They donated the books to the newly formed Salem Philosophical Society. The library was kept at the home of the Rev. Joseph Prince. It was considered the second-best library in America, next to the one in Philadelphia. Among its treasurers were the Transactions of the Royal Society of London.

Nathaniel Bowditch copied by hand all the papers on mathematics.

Learning French

Years later, the Salem Philosophical Society offered to give back the books to Kirwan. He refused, saying he was satisfied they had found so useful a destination.

Nathaniel Bowditch learned French from a foreigner living in Salem in exchange for English lessons. That enabled him to become the first American to learn about European breakthroughs in astronomy. He translated and updated four volumes of a treatise by the French scientist Pierre LaPlace.

In Mecanique Celeste, LaPlace summarized his predecessors’ work in mathematics, statistics, physics and astronomy. It wasn’t until 1829 that Bowditch published his translation at his own expense, the astronomical sum of $20,000. It was used as a textbook for the next generation of celestial mathematicians.

Bowditch began to teach himself Latin in 1790 so he could read Newton’s Principia. Bentley, who had tutored at Harvard, had given one of his students a copy of the Principia. The student, Benjamin Pickman, returned it to Bentley so he could give it to Bowditch. Pickman later became a congressman and developer of Derby Square in Salem.

8000 Errors

1st edition of ‘Bowditch’

By the time he was 21, Nathaniel Bowditch was probably the best mathematician in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. In 1795, he went on the first of five voyages first as a clerk, last as a shipmaster and part owner. He found an error in a commonly used navigation manual by John Hamilton Moore, and a publisher asked him to see if he could find others. While Bowditch was at sea he pored over the book and corrected more than 8,000 errors, finally deciding to publish his own. During that voyage he taught the entire crew of 12, including the cook, to calculate lunar positions and position the ship.

‘Bowditch’

In 1802, he published The New American Practical Navigator. It is still carried on board every commissioned U.S. Naval vessel and has never been out of print. It’s called, simply, ‘Bowditch.’ According to tradition, no sailor leaves port without a Bible, a chest of clothes, a mother’s blessing and his copy of Bowditch.

After Bowditch published the Practical Navigator, he settled back in Salem, married twice and had eight children. He also amassed a valuable library of his own. During his career he played a critical role in the advancement of American astronomy.

Thomas Jefferson had sought him out to teach at the University of Virginia, and West Point wanted him too. He declined, preferring business. Bowditch went to work as the country’s first insurance actuary as president of the Essex Fire and Marine Insurance Company. He also helped found the East India Marine Society, now the Peabody Essex Museum of Salem.

Later in life he moved to Boston and managed money for people who had made their fortunes at sea and redirected it to manufacturing.

The day after Nathaniel Bowditch died in Boston on March 16, 1838, his children decided to make his library a public institution. Eventually his descendants donated it to the Boston Public Library.

Nathaniel Bowditch House

The Salem Philosophical Society merged with the Social Library and formed the Salem Athenaeum. The National Register of Historic Places also lists the restored Nathaniel Bowditch House in Salem.

With thanks to Memoir of Nathaniel Bowditch, by Nathaniel Ingersoll Bowditch. Photo of Nathaniel Bowditch House by Daderot at en.wikipedia. Own work. Transferred from en.wikipedia. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. This story about Nathaniel Bowditch was updated in 2023.

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Samuel McIntire, Ingenious Man of Salem

Samuel McIntire, who was born and died in poverty, created fine Federal style buildings in Salem, Mass., for wealthy patrons. Today, an entire historic district is named after him.

Samuel McIntire’s Peirce Nichols House today.

Samuel McIntire

He was born Jan. 16, 1757, to housewright Joseph McIntire and Sarah Ruck, people of modest means. He took up woodcarving as a trade, and showed so much skill his friend the Rev. William Bentley persuaded him to take up sculpture. He carved a bust of John Winthrop for Bentley, now in possession of the American Antiquarian Society.

In sculpture, wrote Bentley, “he had no rival in New England & I possess some specimens which I should not scruple to compare with any I ever saw.”

McIntire also had musical ability, according to Bentley. “He was among our best Judges & most able performers,” Bentley wrote. “All the Instruments we use he could understand and was the best person to be employed in correcting any defects, or repairing them.”

Samuel McIntire

Land of Promise

Salem held great promise for young men during the 18th and early 19th centuries. Maritime commerce boomed, from privateering during the American Revolution to the China trade afterward. Another protege of Bentley’s, Nathaniel Bowditch, also rose from poor beginnings in Salem to wealth, fame and a place in history.

McIntire, though, stayed on land. He spent what little spare money he had on books about art and architecture, and he studied them assiduously.

Working out of a simple home on Summer Street, he began to design houses. His first major commission was the Peirce Nichols House, now owned by the Peabody Essex Museum. (Sarah Peirce Nichols took the walking cure from this house.)

McIntire then caught the attention of Elias Haskett Derby, at one point the richest man in the United States. Derby commissioned him in 1780 to build a mansion costing $80,000 — an astonishing sum.

Gateposts of the Cook-Oliver House, finished in 1804.

Derby’s mansion cost so much no one could afford to buy it when he died. Before it was torn down, McIntire’s fine woodwork was taken from it and sold.

Recycling

Capt. Samuel Cook later hired McIntire to build a house while he took on a voyage. The trip, though, didn’t succeed and he returned before McIntire had finished the house. He didn’t think he could afford to finish it. McIntire said his men needed work and they could finish it slowly, with Cook paying along the way. He then persuaded Cook to buy some of the Derby woodwork, such as the gateposts in front of the Cook-Oliver House.

Stephen Phillips House, Salem, Mass.

Similarly, four rooms of the Stephen Phillips House were taken from Elias Haskett Derby’s farm in Danvers by his heir, Capt. Nathaniel West. McIntire then designed a new house for West in Salem incorporating those rooms. Then Stephen Phillips bought the house in 1911 and lived there with five generations of family furniture until 1955. Historic New England now owns it.

John Cabot House, completed 1781 in Beverly. Now owned by the Beverly Historical Society and open to the public. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

McIntire established a reputation for building elegant homes. With his two brothers, son and nephew he built many of the 407 houses in Salem that now comprise the McIntire Historical District established in 1981. The district includes the grand old homes that line Chestnut Street — called one of the most beautiful streets in America. It also includes the Federal Street Area Historic District, along with 249 structures nearby. The McIntire District is considered the greatest concentration of 17th and 18th century domestic structures anywhere in America.

Sudden Death

McIntire also built homes in communities nearby, such as the John Cabot House in Beverly, Mass.

Hamilton Hall

McIntire completed Hamilton Hall in 1807, a social gathering place for Salem’s leading Federalist families. Considered one of his finest works, it is still in use today.

By 1811, he had supervised nearly “all the improvements of Salem,” according to Bentley. Those included the courthouse and the North and South meeting houses.

He died suddenly and intestate on Feb. 6, 1811, only 54 years old.

The Rev. William Bentley then wrote of the passing of Samuel McIntire in his diary.

This day Salem was deprived of one of the most ingenious men it had in it. Samuel McIntire, age 54, in Summer street…

He had a fine person, a majestic appearance, calm countenance, great self command & amiable temper. He was welcome but never intruded.

His death, wrote Bentley, left a vacuum. “The late increase of workmen in wood has been from the demand for exportation & this has added nothing to the character and reputation of the workmen so that upon the death of Mr. McIntire no man is left to be consulted upon a new plan of execution beyond his bare practice,” he wrote.

This story updated in 2022.

Images: Peirce-Nichols House By Fletcher6 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11752606. Hamilton Hall By Fletcher6 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9963923. Stephen Phillips House By Fletcher6 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9022657.

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The Rev. William Bentley, on the Alert for Salem Fires in January

At the turn of the 19^th century, the Rev. William Bentley was constantly on the alert for Salem fires. But unlike many townspeople he didn’t rush to condemn the victims.

Salem fire fears were exacerbated by calamitous, well-known fires in New York City and elsewhere.

Fighting a Fire – (Painting by William Chappel, 1770s, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Edward W. C. Arnold Collection of New York Prints, Maps, and Pictures, Bequest of Edward W. C. Arnold, 1954)

New Englanders who lived in densely populated towns like Boston and Salem always had anxiety about the threat of fire, especially on very cold days.

Local officials passed all sorts of laws to prevent fires. They put arsonists to death. When Joshua Lamb’s home in Roxbury, Mass., burned down in 1681, his black servant Maria took the blame. She was found guilty and burned to ashes on Boston Common.

Salem Fires

William Bentley took a kindlier view. He was the beloved Unitarian minister of the East Church in Salem, Mass., from 1783 to his death in 1819. Bentley gave half his salary to the poor, lived modestly and emphasized good works over harsh doctrine. He was interested in everything. Little escaped his attention, and he wrote it all down in his diary. He chose Salem fires as a frequent topic.

On Jan. 18, 1806, William Bentley noted in his diary that two fires were wrongly blamed on arson:

We have news of a House burnt in Bradford & a Barn in Haverhill. As is usual, blame is not fixed upon neglect but incendiary purposes. These fires are kindled by great carelessness.

Bad Master

William Bentley, always on the lookout for Salem fires.

The open hearth was the center of New England domestic life and the center of New England’s homes. Nathaniel Hawthorne made the central hearth a major feature in The House of the Seven Gables.

But as New Englanders used to say, “Fire is a good servant, but a bad master.”

After Boston’s first 70 years, Cotton Mather complained “ten times has the fire made notable ruins among us.”

Congregationalist ministers like Mather viewed fires as evidence of God’s displeasure with mankind.

But William Bentley, a product of the Enlightenment, tried to avert calamitous fires through prevention and prompt intervention. He also belonged to one of Salem’s fire clubs.

Fire Clubs

Fire clubs existed in Salem since 1744, according to Cyrus Mason Tracy in his 1878 book, Standard History of Essex County, Massachusetts, Embracing a History of the County from Its First Settlement to the Present Time: With a History and Description of Its Towns and Cities. The Most Historic County of America.

Each member was required to have two substantial leather buckets, and they were usually painted with the name and device of the club. Many of these buckets may still be found hanging in the front or rear hall-ways of the old houses of Salem, usually under the stairs or on some projections or cornice.

The owner kept the buckets handy, and when a fire alarm went off, he took his buckets and repaired to the scene of the fire. Or at least he was supposed to.

He then helped passing water from the cisterns to the tubs of the engines, or threw it onto the fire directly. Tracy also wrote each fire club member had a bag to take property from buildings, and a bed-key to take down the old-fashioned bedsteads. Most of the clubs had ladders at convenient places about the town, he wrote.

In 1805, Bentley’s club tried to prevent fires by discouraging the “smoaking” of “segars” (cigars).

On December 12, 1805, he wrote:

Our Fire Club dinner. Great consent of parties. The measure most urged was to unite our efforts with other clubs to prevent the smoaking segars along the streets & in shops & outhouses. Many distressing fires are imputed to this careless practice.

Cold Januaries

Bentley was constantly on the alert for fire, not just in Salem. On Jan. 29, 1806, he wrote, “We had some apprehensions, from the ringing of the bell this evening, of a fire at Marblehead, but we found it was the First Night Lecture…

January was an especially bad month for fires.

On Jan. 5, 1804, he wrote,

The uncommon severity of the season has called for great caution in our wooden towns. Several fires have been arrested at their first appearance as at Col. Lee’s & Dr. Oliver’s, the one from firing a chimney & the other from a beam under a hearth as in the old construction.

On the morning of Jan. 18, 1804 another day of sudden cold, there was a slight earthquake. Wrote Bentley, “The people in general ran to their windows to see what heavy carriage was passing, & thence to their chimneys to see whether they were on fire.”

Horse Out of the Barn

Leather fire buckets

The day after a Salem fire, people inevitably drew up proposals to prevent another one. On the cold night of Jan. 16, 1806, a fire burned down three new houses in Carpenter Street. It started among shavings by children feeding the fire while their parents attended a lecture. Most of the men in the neighborhood were at the same lecture, and the fire spread to two other wooden houses. The next day, Bentley wrote,

it was proposed to make it an obligation to rebuild in brick. We see the great danger to which we are exposed from the very great number of Wooden buildings.

Twelve days later, the cry of “fire” awakened the town. The Cushing & Co. printing company burned down.

The next day, Bentley wrote:

…the town officers gathered this day to take some precautions respecting stoves used in Shops & Offices, & prevention the spread of fires.

With thanks to The Encyclopedia of New England.

This story last updated in 2023.

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The Scandalous 1806 Divorce of Elizabeth Derby West

Heiress Elizabeth Derby West caused a sensation in 1806 when she paraded a series of prostitutes through a Salem, Mass., courtroom to prove her ship captain husband cheated on her.

Elizabeth Derby West

A change in Massachusetts law inspired her to divorce Nathaniel West. She had long been unhappy in the marriage, but didn’t act until the Legislature passed a bill that gave women more property rights in cases of adultery.

Divorce was rare back then. Even rarer was a wife airing the lurid details of her unfaithful husband’s affairs in court.

By the second day of the trial, wrote a Salem diarist, “The public mind begins to be disquiet.”

Elizabeth Derby West

Elizabeth Derby West was the eldest of the seven children of Elias Hasket Derby, one of the wealthiest Salem merchants and owner of the first vessel to trade directly with China.

Elias Hasket Derby by James Frothingham

She was born in 1762 in Salem, Mass. Her mother, Elizabeth Crowninshield Derby, a social lioness, oversaw the construction of a grand family home in the town. Elizabeth inherited her mother’s good taste, and a parlor she later designed is now exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Nathaniel West, a master mariner, commanded one of her father’s ships.

The Grand Turk, one of Derby’s ships

Elizabeth Derby fell in love with Nathaniel West, though socially he was her inferior. They then eloped in the spring of 1783 when she was 21. Her father disapproved of the match, but eventually softened. He gave Nathaniel West more responsibility in the family business and made him one of his heirs.

The couple set up their own household and had six children.

Elizabeth Derby West soon discovered the cost of marrying down: a loss in social status. When her father died in 1799, she didn’t inherit the family mansion, as she had hoped.

But she and Nathaniel did inherit a farm in nearby Danvers, which she set about renovating and expanding.

Their marital quarrels grew fiercer and more frequent. Her brothers also fought with him over family business issues. In 1800, Nathaniel West and Hasket Derby had a public fistfight on the docks of Salem.

Slem waterfront ca 1770-1780

Then after 20 years of marriage, the couple separated in 1803.

West v. West

Though divorce was rare in 17^thand 18th Massachusetts, it wasn’t illegal. Puritans believed marriage was a civil matter and could therefore be reversed. Between 1692 and 1774 only 82 Massachusetts couples – one a year — were granted annulment, divorce or separation.

Until 1806, women could lose their own land and their own money in a divorce. A divorced woman only got a third of her husband’s estate, known as the ‘widow’s thirds.’

The change in the law gave a woman her widow’s share, plus the land her husband held in her name and much of her own inheritance — but only if she proved adultery.

Childhood home of Elizabeth Derby West

Elizabeth Derby West pounced when the commonwealth’s divorce law changed in March 1806.

On Nov. 11, 1806, the divorce trial of West v. West began in Supreme Judicial Court in Salem. The Rev. William Bentley, pastor of the East Church, attended the trial. He had already formed a low opinion of the couple. Nathaniel West wasn’t anything special, and Elizabeth Derby West was irascible and vain, Bentley wrote in his diary.

The woman became all that is execrable in women from vanity, caprice, folly, & malignity…

He was an enterprising seaman with no uncommon advantages of education or nature, but his ambition led him to address the eldest daughter of the late E.H. Derby…The mother of Elizabeth was a Crowninshield and well known for vanity which she exposed to constant & deserved ridicule. E. possessed the rigid temper of her father, with all the weakness of her mother.

Brothel Sweepings

The feud between the Derbys and Nathaniel West reached a nadir when Elizabeth brought prostitutes into court, wrote Bentley:

…after every quarrel with all her relatives she waged open war against her husband & this day, aided by the unfeeling perseverance of her malignant Br[other] Gen. E.H. D[erby] who has a private quarrel to avenge, she displayed in open court, to prove the incontinence of Capt. W[est], all the sweepings of the Brothels of Boston, & all the vile wretches of Salem, Marblehead, Cape Ann.

Elizabeth Derby West submitted a statement by a woman claiming Nathaniel West fathered her two children. She also produced a letter in which West made financial arrangements for a child, though the child shouldn’t have the name of ‘West.’

The Rev. William Bentley

But then Nathaniel West produced evidence his wife offered local women money to claim he fathered their children.

Since the judges dined with Elizabeth West’s brother after she presented her evidence, Bentley correctly assumed they would rule against the husband.

The court gave her the Danvers estate, called Oak Hill, and alimony of $3,000 a year.

After the divorce was granted, Elizabeth Derby West moved with her children to Oak Hill. Nathaniel West remarried and remained close to his children and grandchildren.

Aftermath

Salem society shunned Elizabeth Derby West after her divorce.

A charitable group dropped her from its membership list. Parishioners walked out of church when she went to take communion at church, and she was ‘unwelcome to any private family or boardinghouse.’

Nathaniel West remarried, prospered and remained a leading member of society.

Elizabeth Derby West died only seven years after her divorce. She left her property to her three daughters, and forbade them from giving any of it to their father.

The house Elizabeth Derby West grew up in now belongs to the Salem Maritime National Historic Site.

With thanks to Commerce and Culture: Nineteenth-Century Business Elites by Robert Lee. This story was updated in 20223

Images: Derby House By Daderot at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18002977.

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