The House of the Seven Gables

     The House of the Seven Gables was not actually owned by the Pyncheon family, but it was built by Captain John Turner in 1668. When John Turner III lost the family fortune, the Ingersoll family bought the house. It's also known as the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion. Nathaniel Hawthorne used to visit his cousin, Susannah Ingersoll, who lived in the house. By Hawthorne's time, the house only had three gables. He was told stories of the old house, which originally did have seven gables, so those stories are what inspired his novels. Hawthorne's relatives were some of the first Puritan settlers in New England, and his great grandfather, John Hathorne, was a judge in the infamous witch trials. He had a sense of guilt for this, which gave a theme for many of his stories, like The House of the Seven Gables.
     The town of Salem itself was founded in 1629 on the site of an ancient Native American village by Puritan settlers, who had separated from the Church of England and seeked religious freedom. Most of the people involved in the Witch Trials lived in nearby Salem Village, which is now called Danvers, not in present day Salem. The Puritans followed a strict Christian lifestyle, but they still valued education. They founded the first college in America, and offered free education for kids for the first time in history. Certain Puritan qualities, like self-reliance, frugality, industry, and energy, gave them economic success and influenced modern social and economic life.