What is a historic house museum supposed to do? Preserve an important building? Tell the story of the people who once lived there? Re-create a particular moment in history? Most historic house museums are organized around one primary purpose with the house serving as the central artifact through which that story is told.

The House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts challenges that assumption. By the time I finished my visit, I realized that the woman who transformed the house into a museum had imagined something much larger. Caroline Emmerton, a Progressive Era reformer and preservationist, transformed a celebrated historic house into an institution that combined preservation, literary tourism, education, and social reform. More than a century later, that integrated vision still defines the site.

In 1668, Salem sea captain and merchant John Turner and his wife, Elizabeth, built the house that would become known as the House of the Seven Gables. Three generations of the Turner family lived there before the property passed to the Ingersoll family in 1782. One of its later residents, Susanna Ingersoll, welcomed frequent visits from her cousin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose experiences at the house inspired the setting and title of his 1851 novel The House of the Seven Gables. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion was already famous as both a remarkable survivor of colonial Salem and the home most closely associated with Hawthorne’s classic novel.

By the early twentieth century, however, the property’s future was uncertain. When the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion came up for sale, Emmerton purchased it in 1908. She was already deeply involved in the Progressive Era settlement house movement and saw an opportunity to accomplish far more than preserving a historic building. Working with architect Joseph Everett Chandler, she restored the house to what they believed reflected its seventeenth-century appearance while simultaneously establishing the House of the Seven Gables Settlement Association. Rather than operating the house simply as a museum, she used its popularity to support a settlement house which offered educational and social programs for Salem’s immigrant community.