Historic Houses
Quaker Meeting House
Federal Garden area
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The first Quaker Meeting House in Salem was built around 1688.
The current building, erected in 1865 to resemble a Post-Medieval or First Period structure, is a reconstruction of the Quaker Meeting House and may contain some original timber framing. It may also be one of the first historic preservation initiatives in America that is centered around a period restoration. As early as the 1850s, the members of the Essex Institute (a precursor organization of PEM) recognized this building as potentially being the first Quaker Meeting House. Convinced of its 17th-century Quaker authenticity, antiquarian Sydney Perley orchestrated its preservation. This involved moving it from the western end of Salem to its current location on the former Essex Institute campus around 1860. It was then speculatively restored to its current, imagined 17th-century meeting house configuration.
The building contains many original timbers and evidence suggests that it may in fact contain some of the bones of the original meeting house.
Photography by Bob Packert/PEM.
As the first historic property to be annexed and restored by the Essex Institute, this project kicked off a century and a half of acquiring historic buildings and amassing what is likely the largest collection of historic architecture owned by an American art museum.
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