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Beyond the Fiction: Exploring the Real House of the Seven Gables in Salem

At 115 Derby Street in Salem, facing the harbor, stands the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion, better known as the House of the Seven Gables. The house was built in 1668 for John Turner I, a wealthy merchant and ship-owner involved in Salem’s maritime trade. It was later expanded by the Turner family, including a major addition in 1677, making it one of the most ambitious surviving seventeenth-century houses in New England.

Three generations of Turners lived there before the family fortune faded. In 1782, the house was sold to Samuel Ingersoll. It later passed to his daughter, Susanna Ingersoll, who was visited there by her younger cousin, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne published The House of the Seven Gables in 1851, and while the novel is not a literal history of the building, the association stuck. By the late nineteenth century, the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion had become inseparable from Hawthorne’s fictional house.

The building’s present appearance owes much to Caroline O. Emmerton, who purchased the property in the early twentieth century. In 1908, she founded the House of Seven Gables Settlement Association to support immigrant families living in the Derby Street neighborhood. She then hired restoration architect Joseph Everett Chandler to restore the mansion and prepare it as a public museum. Chandler preserved early architectural features, but he also restored missing gables and leaned into the Hawthorne connection. Historic preservation and marketing shook hands, then immediately started arguing.

The mansion opened to the public in 1910, with admission helping fund the settlement work. Over time, the site grew into a historic campus, including Nathaniel Hawthorne’s birthplace, which was moved there from Union Street. The House of the Seven Gables Historic District was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 and designated a National Historic Landmark District in 2007.

Today, the House of the Seven Gables is one of Salem’s best-known historic sites. It is old, altered, literary, commercial, and deeply tied to the city’s maritime past. Beneath the novel branding is a rare surviving seventeenth-century mansion, a Progressive Era preservation project, and a reminder that Salem’s history is usually more complicated than the gift shops let on.

Matt Lambros May 02, 2026 Salem MA Architecture History Museums

Location: 115 Derby St, Salem, MA 01970

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