Widow's Walk Suite
Nathaniel's 1794 wing, with a sitting room and a private stair to the roof.
See the suiteA merchant's room
Josiah Crane was twenty-six when he built this house, already master of a seventy-ton schooner in the West Indies trade: salt fish and lumber south to the sugar islands, molasses and sugar back north to the distilleries. He took the front chamber on the second floor for himself, the best room in the house, and he paid for it. The fireplace wall is covered floor to ceiling in raised-field paneling, the most expensive interior finish a Salem joiner could offer in the 1740s, and when the Fairweathers stripped it during the restoration they found the original color underneath eleven later coats: a deep blue-green that we now call, without much imagination, Crane blue. It is back on the walls.
The two front windows are twelve-over-twelve sash, with the thick muntins of the period and their original folding interior shutters still working in the window jambs. From the left-hand window, if you stand close and look slightly downhill between two rooftops on Mercy Lane, you can see a slice of Salem Harbor. It is a glimpse, not a view, and we describe it that way on purpose. Josiah, who spent most of his life looking at the sea, may have liked it better as a glimpse too.
His probate inventory, taken after he died in this house in 1789, survives in a copy in our Library. It lists, among the pewter and the chairs, "one spy glass," "one sea chest, much worn," and "a bed & furniture in the front chamber." We have tried to honor the list. The sea chest at the foot of the bed is a period piece of the right kind (not his; his has never turned up), and a brass telescope sits on the window seat. You are welcome to use it. Most guests aim it at the harbor; a few aim it at the widow's walk on the roof of the wing behind, which is a separate matter and a separate room.
