Salem Maritime National Historic Site

Visited: August 2018

Duration: 2 hours

Accommodations: Salem Waterfront Hotel and Suites, Salem, MA

Our next National Park Service Site visit on this trip was Salem Maritime National Historic Site.  Boy did we have a “Merry time”! This nine acre park has a few things to offer and won’t take up much of your day.  We headed to the Visitor Center to grab our Junior Rangers, this time it was a back pack full of activities to look at while visiting the park.

We set off to look at the harbor. Salem was a bustling wharf of trade ships exchanging goods such as cod, wine, sugarcane, cotton, textiles, tea and several other items from all over the world. During the Revolution, Salem was the most active American privateering port, capturing nearly 500 British vessels.  Here we learned all about the different kind of boats used and we learned how these boats came to learn how to gauge their speed.  If that does “knot” impress you, I don’t know what will.

The next hot spots we visited were the local merchants and their homes.

The Hawkes House- Benjamin Hawkes was a ship builder and dates back to 1780.

The Derby House – Capt. Richard Derby presented this house to his son as a wedding present. Hasket Derby became one of Salem’s wealthiest merchants.

The Custom House – here you can find artifacts relating to Salem’s history. This is where the US Customs Service held their operations for Salem.

That wraps up our time here. We headed back to the Visitor Center, also known as The Waite & Peirce store. Handed back the back pack and received our Junior Ranger badges. Got all of our cancellations and we had the rest of the day to go enjoy this awesome town.  Check for that on the Massachusetts blog in the next few days. We really enjoyed our time in Salem.

Until our next adventure….