The Nathaniel Hawthorne Birthplace is the birthplace of American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is located at 27 Hardy Street but accessible through 54 Turner Street, Salem, Massachusetts. The house is now a nonprofit museum along with the House of the Seven Gables immediately adjacent; an admission fee is charged.
The house was built sometime between 1730–1745, and located at 27 Union Street until moved to its current location in 1958. According to architectural historian Abbott Lowell Cummings, the house was probably built for Benjamin Pickman on land deeded him by his father-in-law Joseph Hardy, and may have recycled structural timbers from a 17th century Pickman house that earlier stood on its site. It reflects typical architecture for the period: a central chimney, gambrel roof, front and back stairways, and a post-and-lintel doorway. The ground floor is laid out with kitchen to the right and main room to the left. The second floor has front and back rooms on each side.
Hawthorne's grandfather purchased the building in 1772. Hawthorne was born in the house on July 4, 1804, and lived in the house until age 4. Most of the interior has been preserved intact.
Famous quotes containing the words nathaniel hawthorne, nathaniel, hawthorne and/or birthplace:
“It is a good lesson—though it may often be a hard one—for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world’s dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of all significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864)
“The American, who up to the present day, has evinced, in Literature, the largest brain with the largest heart, that man is Nathaniel Hawthorne.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864)
“In most nineteenth-century cities, both large and small, more than 50 percent—and often up to 75 percent—of the residents in any given year were no longer there ten years later. People born in the twentieth century are much more likely to live near their birthplace than were people born in the nineteenth century.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)