road to Gloucester |
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SALEM |
harbor |
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the Common
the Court House
Essex Institute
Gallow's Hill
Registry of Deeds
William's Lane
"And there is antique Salem with its brooding years, and spectral Marblehead scaling its rocky precipices into past centuries! And the glory of Salem's towers and spires seen afar from Marblehead's pastures across the harbour against the setting sun." -- The Dream Quest of Unknown "...you know Pickman comes of old Salem stock, and had a witch ancestor hanged in 1692."
"There are secrets, you know, which might have come down from old Salem times, and Cotton Mather tells even stranger things." -- Pickman's Model
"...he had discovered among his maternal ancestors a certain very long-lived man named Joseph Curwen, who had come from Salem in March of 1692, and about whom a whispered series of highly peculiar and disquieting stories clustered."
"He had fled from Salem to Providence-- that universal haven of the odd, the free, and the dissenting--at the beginning of the great witchcraft panic..."
"His birth was known to be good, since the Curwens or Corwins of Salem needed no introduction in New England."
"...above all else the excitable crowd must be kept in ignorance, lest there be enacted in these already troublous times a repetition of that frightful Salem panic of less than a century before..."
"When he came across the Smith diary and archives and encountered the letter from Jedediah Orne he decided to visit Salem and look up Curwen's early activities and connexions there, which he did during the Easter vacation of 1919."
"At the Essex Institute, which was well known to him from former sojourns in the glamorous old town of crumbling Puritan gables and clustered gambrel roofs, he was very kindly received, and unearthed there a considerable amount of Curwen data. He found that his ancestor was born in Salem-Village, now Danvers, seven miles from town..."
"Curwen's only close friends had been one Edward Hutchinson of Salem-Village and one Simon Orne of Salem. With these men he was often seen in conference about the Common, and visits among them were by no means infrequent."
"Certain documents by and about all of the strange characters were available at the Essex Institute, the Court House, and the Registry of Deeds, and included both harmless commonplaces such as land titles and bills of sale, and furtive fragments of a more provocative nature."
"What do moderns know of life and the forces behind it? You call the Salem witchcraft a delusion, but I'll wager my four-times- great-grandmother could have told you things. They hanged her on Gallows Hill, with Cotton Mather looking sanctimoniously on. Mather, damn him, was afraid somebody might succeed in kicking free of this accursed cage of monotony--I wish someone had laid a spell on him or sucked his blood in the night!"
"while during the Christmas holidays he made a round of out-of-town trips including one to Salem to consult certain records at the Essex Institute." -- The Case of Charles Dexter Ward