SALEM — The House of the Seven Gables Settlement Association recently launched a fundraising effort for the transformation of the house where Nathaniel Hawthorne was born into a new interactive museum telling stories from the author’s life and reflecting on the impact of his work.
In an announcement last month, The House of the Seven Gables executive director Dakota Russell unveiled plans for the Hawthorne Museum, with the organization launching a $1 million fundraising campaign for the project.
Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, in a Georgian-style house on Salem’s Union Street. To save the historic home from destruction, it was moved to The Bales’ campus in 1958, where it has been staged with period furnishings and open to visitors as a self-guided experience.
Russell said that the new museum aims to allow visitors a deeper understanding of Hawthorne and why his story is important for modern audiences.
“We recognize that we’re the first exposure that a lot of people get to Hawthorne’s story when they come to Salem,” Russell said. “It’s key to not only understanding this American author, but also understanding the Salem experience, because he popularized his hometown for the world. We wanted to come up with a way to take his birthplace, which has been more of a furnished historic house, and really emphasize the artifacts in our collection to tell his story as both an author and a person.”
The museum exhibits are being developed in cooperation with Boston-based firm Amaze Design, known for their work at the Concord Museum in Massachusetts and the American Writers Museum in Chicago. The design phase of the projects was funded by grants from the Nancy Foss Heath and Richard B. Heath Educational, Cultural, and Environmental Foundation and the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism, as well as private donations.
In order to make the best use of the small space, the design includes the standard labels and exhibits that one would expect from a museum, but also a variety of multimedia and hands-on features. While The Gables is still working on the full schematic design of the museum, current plans include multimedia features such as touch-screen bookshelves allowing visitors to explore Hawthorne’s short stories, and a digital hearth where visitors can sit down and hear excerpts from Hawthorne’s story read allowed, with the scene acted out in the flickers of the “flames” of the hearth.
Russell said that the museum also serves as an opportunity for The Gables to exhibit more of the artifacts belonging to Hawthorne that have previously been in storage. Artifacts in possession of the Gables include things like original stencils from when Hawthorne worked at the Custom House, the desk on which he wrote much of “The Scarlet Letter”, and a checkerboard that he would play with his kids, which Russell said will share a side of Hawthorne as a person that many don’t think about — his role as a father and the joy that his children brought him.
“I think (his love for his children) is really important because one of the things we want to touch on is his impact on American children’s literature,” Russell said. “He wrote two great books — ‘Wonder Book for Boys and Girls’ and ‘Tanglewood Tales’ — which were rewritings of the Greek myths for children. We think of that as normal today (with franchises like) ‘Percy Jackson’, but this was the first time he had cast the stories as stories for kids. He was writing for young audiences as well as adult audiences, and I don’t think people realize that.”
In choosing which aspects of Hawthorne’s life should be most emphasized with the museum, The Gables current design focuses on the author’s feelings about his hometown of Salem, which is tied into how he felt about his ancestors, as well as the huge social changes he saw in the city during his time.
“Hawthorne thought a lot about his great uncle’s role in the witch trials as a judge, and his family’s role in the persecution of Quakers,” Russell said. “He felt quite a bit of responsibility for that, which inspired the themes of guilt that you see in both ‘The Scarlet Letter’ and ‘House of the Seven Gables.’”
“And we also wanted to talk about the changes he saw in the city. When he was working at the Custom House as a young writer, he was seeing Salem’s time as this rich shipping port start to decline, and saw the rise of Salem as an industrial city. Something he was really interested in was how society reacts to change. Technology was hugely changing at the time, and that’s something that speaks to us right now, because we’re also living in a time of great change, and we see a lot of the friction that it causes. So I think it makes Hawthorne really relevant to modern readers.”
Russell said that the museum will not only be important for daily visitors to Salem, but also to be used as an educational resource for local students. The Gables is planning a companion website for the museum to include classroom activities, lesson plans, and original readings.
It is estimated that the next phase of work, the fabrication and installation of the exhibits, will cost approximately $1 million. José Nieto, president of The Gables’ Board of Trustees, said raising these funds could be a challenge.
“The federal grants we would typically seek for this project have become scarcer and there is more competition for the ones that remain,” he said.
This in turn has led The Gables to turn more toward private donors, according to Russell.
“One of the things that’s great about the House of the Seven Gables is we also have a lot of successful grassroots donors,” Russell said. “Those small donations make a huge difference, and we have a lot of people who really care about this place and care about the stories. And I’m hoping that they will rise to answer this call so that we can realize this museum.”
Limited opportunities for gallery sponsorship and donor recognition within the Hawthorne Museum are available. More information on supporting the effort can be found on The Gables’ website at 7gables.org or by calling director of development Pamela Feltus at (978) 306-7014.
Michael McHugh can be contacted at mmchugh@northofboston.com or at 781-799-5202