Monday, November 25, 2019

Captain John Turner


Captain John Turner was born in Salem on September 8, 1644.  His father was an indentured servant who had completed the terms of his indenture, and his mother's maiden name was Freestone.  Like many Salem men, he became involved in the maritime trade with the East Indies, and I have also found mention that he was "a successful hat and shoe merchant."  He was soon one of the wealthiest men in town.  

Around 1668 he bought some land from a widow, Anne Moore, to build a house for himself and his new bride, Elizabeth (calling her "new" may be a bit of a stretch; there seems to be no agreement on when they were married, with possible dates ranging from 1660 to 1669).  Widow Moore already had a house on the property, but Turner deemed it unsuitable and tore it down and built a new house on the site.  This new house was a typical two-over-two design, with two rooms downstairs and two rooms upstairs, build around a gigantic central chimney.  It would have had a gable end roof, and may have looked something like the Witch House.  

Growing fortunes and a growing family (the Turners had six children) meant putting an addition (and "ell") on the house, adding another gable ... and another ... and another.  The house grew into a mansion as Turner renovated, upgraded, and remodeled.  Eventually, the house would have seven gables.    




His son, John Turner II, would continue to expand the mansion.  His grandson, John Turner III, was evidently a wastrel who would lose the mansion his family had lived in for three generations.  It was bought by the Ingersoll family, who started making their own changes to the house ... like removing some of the gables.  Susanna Ingersoll lived there in the 19th century and on one of his visits, her cousin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, began to think about a novel.   

There is a lot more to write about the House of the Seven Gables (Caroline O. Emmerton deserves her own *book,* not just a measly blog post), but I want to get back to the captain.  When he died in 1680, and the young age of 36, he was laid to rest in the Charter Street Cemetery.  One source says he died at sea but offers no details.  


    

His epitaph simply reads:

Here lieth the 

Body of 
JOHN TURNER
Aged 36 years 
who departed this life 
the 9th of October 
in the year of our Lord
1680.

His box tomb is on the eastern side of the cemetery, what I always think of as the left-hand side, over by the Salem Wax Museum.

But ...

As you enter the cemetery from the gate on Charter Street, you will see a (bronze?) map mounted on a slab of granite, giving the locations of the "Graves of Greatest Historical Interest."  The map went up sometime in the early 1990s.  According to the map, the captain is in a completely different location .... 





The map places his tomb over on the right, not far from the map itself.  And there are Turners buried there, including a John Turner, but he is not *that* John Turner.  I spent a few minutes trying to parse the vagaries of Turner genealogy, and so far, I can't tell if those Turners are related to the captain.  I also briefly entertained the notion that the captain had originally been in the spot the map indicates and got relocated after the map went up, but no, the map is simply wrong.  One John Turner got confused with another. 


     
Visit the captain's tomb, and then head down Derby Street to take a tour at the House of the Seven Gables (it's a good tour, and the organization does a lot of good work).  Both things are well worth your time.

www.7gables.org 

On a personal side note: I have tried to read The House of the Seven Gables *three times* and can't finish it.  H. P. Lovecraft may have called it "the immortal tale -- New England’s greatest contribution to weird literature," but I find it a chore and a bore.  However, I did enjoy the 1940 film version, starring Vincent Price.     

2 comments:

  1. "To my aged mind, Mr. Hawthorne hath succeeded to a most exquisite degree in recording those sensations of strangeness and depression call'd up by the antient gabled house of Puritan times; and if you can escape the spell of the book after seeing Old Salem, I shall consider you no critick at all, and a mere pretender to aesthetick discernment!" (H. P. Lovecraft to Frank Belknap Long, June 1927)

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  2. "Hawthorne's 'Seven Gables' is 'prescribed reading', & all that -- but God! what a poignant chronicle of shadowy borderlands!" (H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 9 November 1933)

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