The Distracted Wanderer

Not that I don't wander around to so many places that I never have time to write about all of them to begin with, but I really wouldn't be much of a distracted wanderer if I wasn't continuously looking for new places to go! As such, recently I found myself clicking through the website of The Trustees of Reservations , a non-profit organization with the goal to "... preserve, for public use and enjoyment, properties of exceptional scenic, historic, and ecological value in Massachusetts." As a conservation group that can date its history back to March 5th, 1890 when Charles Eliot, a young landscape architect practicing in Boston, proposed the establishment of the first private nonprofit conservation organization of its kind in the country, it became their mission to "protect the distinct character of our communities and inspire a commitment to our special places." Since 1891 when the Massachusetts Legislature voted to establish The Trustees of (Public...

"Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm." - Chapter One, The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851   House of the Seven Gables, circa 1915 Photo credit Whether he meant it to or not, the dwelling that took on the life of the "rusty wooden house" in Hawthorne's second novel, and which became popularly known as The House of the Seven Gables , began its story in 1668 as the house of a prominent Salem resident before almost 240 years later taking on the role of a social reform-based settlement house and museum.  John Turner, the son of an English-born shoemaker and hat merchant of...